The articles in this collection embrace the conjunction between cultural and political sociology in gripping but contrasting ways. Thus we begin the issue, and this new volume, with a compelling, even a magisterial analysis of the concept of the ‘formal’ in organisation studies, by Paul du Gay and Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth. They argue that we are in the process of radically misunderstanding organisations – which are among the most significant features of modern societies. This is a very serious claim, since what organisations are and how they work must be central to any Zeitdiagnose, any effort to understand the specificities of the social world we currently inhabit. Are grave errors being made here? Du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth point out that the idea of formality as such used simply to be treated as the defining feature of organisations, what makes them what they are rather than mere collections of variegated behavioural forms. But it is exactly this feature that has gradually become conflated with the vices that organisations were held to have. In a fascinating genealogy, the authors trace how, especially from the 1960s onwards, ‘the formal’ as such came to be blamed for repressive or inhumane features of organisations. This is not just an analytical mistake, significant though that would be; it is a surreptitiously anti-political stance, making room for the view that some version of ‘spontaneity’ or ‘creativity’ can transform internal and external features of organisations without the need for proper analysis of what may be wrong. Some of these interpretations of ‘creativity’ may be more sinister than the features originally found wanting. Thus du Gay and Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth argue that the anti-formal stance is itself a source of ‘pathologies’ in organisations.
Implicitly but forcefully, this is a call to responsibility for sociologists; the way they see things can have an impact on the world they are examining – not necessarily for the good. This is also true, du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth show, of so-called agency theory, which conflates the supposed pursuit of economic self-interest by members of organisations with the very nature of the organisations themselves – conceptualising organisations as behaving like rational agents. This too is not just an analytical mistake but also a political one. Indeed, du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth contend, ‘the market, as well as related modes of spontaneous organization, has … seeped into other theoretical accounts as a superior and preferable alternative to formal organization’. As a consequence, this trend has infected terms such as ‘culture’, ‘self-organisation’ and ‘ecosystems’. Objecting to the formal does not automatically lead to the assertion of humane values and behaviours; in some versions at least, it merely co-opts ‘informality’ into the service of business.
In other words, hard questions of politics, culture and justice cannot be evaded by merely objecting to the fact of organisations themselves. Formality as such is neither good nor bad, and anyone who thinks that formalities such as the rule of law are merely dull should try living in Afghanistan or Syria, to name only two examples. Many objections may be made to what particular organisations do, and many of these will be justified, but their causes will need properly rigorous exploration – perhaps more rigorous than hitherto.
All the contributions in this issue highlight, in different ways, the need to hone methods and instruments with special attention, and the fact that this work is both theoretically interesting and vital. The article by Sebastian Büttner and Lucia Leopold charts a significant feature of the organisation of policy and research on policy in the EU, its ‘projectification’. It charts the way in which policy-related knowledge in the EU is set up and organised: it is characteristically goal-oriented, is centred on quantification, and involves insecurity of employment for many of those involved in producing it. This is not, of course, to blame it for being formal, it is to analyse the type and to some degree the results of the kind of formality involved: the ‘cultural logics’ of the ‘distinctive “project world” of EU funding’, the ‘expertisation, privatisation and marketisation’ of European policy-making, and some unintendedly exclusionary effects of the way this is all set up.
The authors trace the historical development and the structure of this world, with the ‘new conceptions of control’ and the ‘logics of quantification’ it involves. They invoke a type of ‘governmentality’ that has been explored before in this journal (and will be explored again). Like du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth, Büttner and Leopold refrain from taking organisational features such as intended flexibility at face value. Instead, they conclude that ‘project management’ is such a strongly controlling form of organisation that it is not the ‘new spirit’ it was hoped to be. It does not visibly improve on the ‘command-and-control’ structures familiar from older forms of bureaucracy. Yet it penetrates far into the life of European publics. ‘Most EU policies in almost all areas of EU policymaking are implemented, one way or another, via project funding;’ this entails the ‘increasing specification and codification of knowledge’, with a ‘new industry of evaluators, auditors and controllers’, whose ‘expert practices’ are strongly linked with the development of management studies. These characteristics and their consequences, we assume, may ring familiar too to those of us who work in university faculties, facing increasing demands for the immediate profitability of academic research.
Justin Cruickshank’s contribution analyses the methods used by social and political scientists from a different point of view. He wants to know if there are social-scientific conventions that can help us combat the traction that ideas retain in and of themselves, in addition to the effects of cultural and political forces. Sociologists use terms such as ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ to refer to the results of social construction – how the very being of a schoolchild, say, or a politician, is constituted in terms of social interaction; but Cruickshank reverts in this piece to the philosophical usages of these terms, to refer to being and knowing as such. He explores Karl Popper’s rejection of the traditional account of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ on the grounds that this would entail knowing what is or is not justified, predefining the world to fit the type of justification expected. Empiricism, for example, wants to accept only sense-data reports as leading to justified knowledge, but – ironically – this path leads unintentionally to idealism, since what causes sense-data is different from the sense-data themselves, which do not give direct access to the world. For Popper, we should abandon attempts to produce justified knowledge altogether; ‘our epistemic condition’ itself is that knowledge is fallible. The human condition demands, therefore, that we should be happy to change mistaken ideas for better ones as quickly as possible. Yet, for Cruickshank, such good intentions notwithstanding, ‘speedy dialogue’ is a misleading aim. He builds instead on the work of Lakatos to urge a more ‘sustained’ form of critical dialogue ‘that could take a considerable time’.
For Cruickshank it follows that we should reject the ‘speedy dialogue’ embraced too, he contends, by accepted forms of critical realism. He argues that standard approaches in critical realism are used to safeguard its own ontology and epistemology rather than being genuinely open to change. To explore an alternative, he uses the work of Colin Hay, who seeks to improve on Kuhn by identifying criteria that can criticise paradigms from outside them. Hay takes as an example the way in which ideas and evidence are currently forced in Procrustean manner to fit the ‘Anglo-liberal growth model’ in the UK, while politicians fail to seek a new paradigm. Hay also criticises Putnam’s approach to falling voter turnout as tautological, to the extent that it identifies apathy as caused by apathy. Instead, for Hay, the problem is ‘a lack of “supply” of meaningful political goods’ – another deleterious effect of neoliberalism. In order for us to make real progress in understanding the social world in ways such as this, Cruickshank argues, it is urgent that we develop our capacity for ‘sustained critical dialogue’.
The final article in this issue makes very explicit both the intersection of culture and politics and the need to be self-conscious about methods of exploring cases of this conjunction. Jesús Casquete returns to a question on which there has been much speculation: how the German public at large felt about the Nazi regime and how these feelings may have fluctuated in response to political and military developments over time. Casquete needs to explore novel social-scientific instruments for pursuing this question, given that more direct means (including surveys or opinion polls) were ruled out by the circumstances of dictatorship. Here he explores what he calls ‘the political opportunity structure of taste’, in this case as applied to the naming of infants. Casquete builds on the view that choosing names for children is a practice that is not only socially constructed, but constructed in a way that affords us some indication of social temperature; as when, for instance, names with specifically Christian references decline or rise. (One might think, for example, of names such as Concepta or Annunciata in Ireland, now distinctly on the decline.)
Under the Nazis, names of a Germanic nature were encouraged, but the forename of Horst Wessel was a special case. He was a young Nazi who had been killed in a political brawl in 1930 and became a hero of the movement, popularised in the Horst Wessel Song (iconic for the SS) and lovingly recalled in public acts of commemoration. Casquete, in exploring these details, offers us some access to the meaning that ‘Horst’ had during the Nazi era; at the same time he is able to trace increases and decreases in choice of this name, as the fortunes of the Nazi state progressed. The ‘Horst curve’, he argues, allows us to take the temperature of rises and declines in public approval of the Nazis, in a way that individual-scale data such as diary records cannot do, however significant they may be in other ways. Casquete’s approach is methodologically intriguing. His argument could be justified by the method of the critical case: in the absence of particular family traditions of using the name, choosing ‘Horst’ evinces enthusiasm for the regime. (This was quite explicit in many cases, as in that of Horst von Wächter, for example, the son of a high Nazi official.) Casquete’s argument implies that if even the most enthusiastic members of the society do not choose Horst, then (by the classical topos of ‘the more and the less’) we can assume that enthusiasm is dropping. In other words, if even people predisposed to enthusiasm don’t feel it, then people less predisposed won’t feel it either. At the same time he broadens this logical structure through the reference to taste, stressing that we are dealing with a social phenomenon: even though we should not expect taste to be shared to an equal extent by everyone, it is not simply a personal matter either. Casquete is not, therefore, taking increases in numbers of ‘Horst’ to licence crude generalisation to feelings shared among a whole population, but is interpreting uses of the name as an instrument indicating rises and falls in the regime’s popularity.
The reviews in this issue take up a number of the arguments broached in these articles or in our previous volumes. Clayton Fordahl’s review of three works on religion in Europe questions whether the liberal rationality and ‘abiding secularity’ of the Union make it incapable of dealing with issues involving ‘community, purpose and belonging’. Gregory Feldman’s We are all Migrants, according to Edward Wilcox’s review, ‘argues that politics must proceed from a position of solidarity’, especially since neoliberalism, Feldman argues, makes us all migrants in a sense, instrumentalised and atomised. Influenced strongly by Arendt among others, he argues for ‘speaking with’ migrants rather than ‘for’ them.
Tom Frost’s review of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos joins all the articles in this issue that deal with contemporary affairs in its harsh words for neoliberal theory, and for the related enthusiasms evinced by practitioners of management studies. Brown’s ‘critique of neoliberalism and its impact upon democracy’, Frost says, interrogates ‘neoliberal reason’ as ‘a distinct form of rationality’ that constructs human beings, people, in terms of financialised human capital, with the effect of ‘eroding democratic institutions and eviscerating the democratic imaginary’. Frost argues that Brown moves beyond Foucault, for instance in contending that economics has now become the science of government, with impacts on gender relations as well as depoliticising effects that hollow out the institutions of civil society. Lastly, also exploring aspects of national memory, though with a very different topic from that treated by Casquete, Ross Wilson reviews Christina Simko’s work, to argue that the United States in particular evokes ‘the politics of consolation’ when it tries to commemorate the victims of 9/11 within a national narrative of renewal: one that recalls a shared, traumatic past as part of shoring up national ideals within a discourse of power.
The contributors to this issue are, in sum, remarkable for their efforts to combine trying to understand the world we live in with both political and methodological responsibility. These are features which will, we hope, continue to be characteristic of this journal. The articles raise, too, significant cultural and political questions. There is currently much anxiety in Europe about the fragility attributed to forms of culture that are held dear, for explicit or inexplicit reasons; much of this anxiety is associated with the advent of refugees and migrants. In fact, the impacts of new inhabitants on local beliefs and conventions is complex and may be highly positive according to circumstance (we would welcome analyses of migration and cultural change in future issues). But, in any case, according to writers such as those in this issue, there is a pressing danger to cultural habits and values that we ought to defend. This danger derives, not from migration, but from neoliberal schemata of interpretation and enforced practices that transform human beings and their behaviour into mere financialised packets, rendering humane forms of community simply worthless. This certainly ought to be worrying us and, we are sure, worries our readership – not least because it is hard to perceive on a day-to-day level. In order to reform institutions that are rightly revered for their support for European co-operation, we need to be able to make cultural and political interventions that ensure they protect the values we want to preserve. We invite contributions that continue the debate on these phenomena, and hope that some will offer further suggestions about what to do about it.