Politics of engagement in an age of differing voices

1. Research communities in the neoliberal university

This special issue on Politics of Engagement in an Age of Differing Voices is the result of a joint effort by the 16 authors whose texts create this selection, the authors of this introduction, and the three additional editors, Risto Alapuro, Markku Lonkila, and Tuomas Ylä-Anttila, who have greatly helped us in all the various steps that constructing such a publication requires. However, this compilation also has a prehistory that dates far further back and includes people who are not among the authors, but without whom this issue would not have seen the light of day.

On numerous occasions during the past ten years – from keynote sessions at large conferences to the smallest summer-cottage seminar meetings – a (somewhat varying) group of scholars has met to discuss theoretical questions concerning the practices of composing and communicating the common, and the conceptual, empirical, and political dimensions of engagement. During these meetings and events, the emphasis has been on the collective development of these theoretical tools in order to enable a better understanding of how people can live and act together, while not erasing differences in and between different cultural contexts, political environments, and fields of action. Such a collective effort is probably not quite everyday bread and butter in today's academia. Although cumulative and fruitful in their participants’ research progress, the meetings did not produce instant published output. In spite of their international scope (colleagues came from places including, among others, Belgium, Finland, France, Russia, the United States …) and their sequence, meetings were not the subject of an integrated multi-annual programme bringing together a consortium of formally identified partners. Other features were unfashionable, too: the theoretical developments have not been coined by ‘ownership’ of one person or another; there has been little, therefore, to ‘compete’ over, and a lot to share instead.¹

This collection of articles naturally does not represent the process as a whole. It is the first collective publication to emerge from the years of cooperation, but it is also a stand-alone, peer-reviewed compilation of texts. Nevertheless, it remains firmly anchored to the larger collective work, in several ways. Firstly, it was initiated by our core group in the form of a public call for papers. In order to build up the special issue, we first held a colloquium with selected abstracts and initial versions of the papers to be. Not all of the papers from the colloquium made it to the present issue, but all the authors took part, in important ways, in laying the foundations of this issue. The colloquium participants served as first-round peer critics, including a significant contribution by the initiator of our theoretical approach, the second author of this introduction. At the colloquium, however, the emphasis was on open, collective, and collaborative discussion on converging and differing understandings of this sociological approach and its consequences and repercussions for various empirical contexts. After this phase, each article was sent to anonymous peer review.

Why go into such detail about the foundations of this issue? We want to highlight them to share our initial idea – and furthermore, the experience that we had in realising that idea – of how to make a special issue that it makes sense to make. There are plenty of troublesome issues plaguing academic publishing practices today that could be discussed at great length, but we are content to mention this one here. As beneficial as the anonymous peer-review system is, in the case of building a special issue that has a programmatic ambition, and that strives to be an entity in which the parts actually connect and communicate with one another, blindly following the standard practice may obstruct creative avenues of thinking and new knowledge, instead of providing tools thereto. By guaranteeing the standardised review process exclusively, and refraining from employing the specialist editing ‘eye’ and capacity for reflection, we may leave authors’ fates to chance, at worst. Each of the articles in the present special issue has gone through a rigorous peer-review process – and yet we have also tended them all with special reflection, starting from the first colloquium versions, and ending with the final editing phase. Thus, alongside the standards intended to guarantee the quality of academic work, we have worked to support it further through a process of mutually shared expertise, both between the authors and the editors and between the authors of different texts, and thus to render the process of writing and publishing a cooperative one. With this special issue, we want to promote a collective, collaborative sociology attentive to its devices. In sum, we believe that how we publish has echoes in the sociology we do, and vice versa.

There are obvious connections, we believe, between the theoretical project this special issue discusses and develops, and the ways of working adapted to produce this special issue. In common, in difference: these phrases reflect the key values of a community of knowledge threatened everywhere by current research and university politics, and our values are intertwined in the theoretical programme and ways of working that lie behind this special issue.

In our publication-oriented phase as in the previous meetings, our organisational design has sought to accommodate a plurality of ways participants became involved, depending on places and situations. The public space required for academic discussion was systematically supplemented by other communication modes that foster closer commitments. These communications – in the sense of making issues common – were no longer based mainly on discourse and arguments but on familiarisation with places, things, and people that were initially foreign, from experimental cooking together (the flagship recipe combined savuporokeitto (smoked reindeer soup), US East Coast oyster chowder and huitres pochées de Cancale (poached oysters from Brittany)) to the sauna experience (followed by the simultaneous Russian, Finnish and French singing of one and the same folk song, Podmoskovnie vechera (Russian), Unohtumaton ilta (Finnish), and Le temps du muguet (French), which carry very different meanings in each language). Shifting involvements to closer ones like these is of the utmost importance in avoiding the agonistic, competitive confrontation that limits communication in international conferences, for instance. The strangenesses and even estrangements that were initially encountered when searching for and crafting common-places in which to communicate personal attachments also offer the opportunity for reflexive feedback on our respective blindness to our own familiar worlds, and the misunderstandings to which this gives rise. The sociology we do looks like who, where, and how we are.

2. Landscapes of inquiry: Questions of domination, critique, and engagement

The title chosen to illustrate the overall theme of this special issue is Politics of Engagement in an Age of Differing Voices. With this title, we wanted to address a set of questions that are simultaneously empirical and theoretical. Human communities today struggle with old and new problems: disputes and dissonances over political projects, environmental crises, and even over everyday habits and routines are reaching unforeseen dimensions on multiple levels of social organisation. The resulting tendencies to radicalisation, polarisation, and tensions within and between nations and localities invite us to pose anew the question ‘how to build commonality’. In other words: how can we solve conflicts and adjust to different ways of relating to the world and to fellow humans in order to create and maintain mutual understanding? How can we build common ground while simultaneously acknowledging and reserving space for differing voices? These questions, we believe, open avenues for analysing key cultural trends in today's societies, including processes of politicisation, participation, or marginalisation. Pragmatic sociology provides promising tools for addressing these issues both as empirical puzzles and as conceptual problems.

These general questions also invite deeper scrutiny of certain theoretical directions, many of which have been on social theorists’ desks for a long time. Before presenting the contents of the special issue in more detail, we shall take a short detour in three such directions, which also form connections between the articles in this issue.

The model of orders of worth (Boltanski & Thevenot, 1987, 1991) was constructed at a deliberate distance from explanations that are based directly on the notion of power and that ‘treat power as a general equivalent’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Avoiding the short circuit of recourse to such an explanatory category, the model sought to be more precise about mechanisms that contribute to both empowerment and domination. It thus continued along the orientation in which, from Max Weber to Georg Simmel, the fact that the members of a society recognise authority is a significant part of the analysis of the mechanisms of power. Starting from the initial analysis of ‘investment in forms’ (Thévenot, 1984) which provide coordination powers (codes, methods, standards, rules, equipment, and so forth), empowering power (to), and subjecting power (on) have been treated jointly, following Michel Foucault. Apart from direct physical or internalised constraint, the focus has been on indirect mechanisms that rely on form-giving investments which entail coordination.

Dealing with qualifications that aim at public legitimacy by resting on conceptions of the common good, the orders of worth do not put forward a normative model endorsed by the authors, like those promoted by John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas. Nor do they claim to describe an economic, social, or political order that would be constantly subject to justification. They expand on a sense of justification grounded in principles and practices found in the ways people actually address injustice. Individuals have good reason to be suspicious of these qualifications because a higher state of worth offers a higher capacity to coordinate others’ actions. This coordination is further strengthened by claims to legitimacy; thus this power becomes the main vehicle of domination and is strategically used as such (see, for example, Albert, Gajdoš & Rapošová, Salminen, and Qamar & Brandl in this issue). Hence, a purely verbal reference to orders of worth, without probing evidence for it, leads one to suspect a merely rhetorical strategy. In another configuration, engaging in justification based on qualified evidence may be inserted into a plan that makes up a strategic sequence in which justification serves another project. Two later extensions of the model allow us to specify and extend the analysis of mechanisms of domination – understood as the power to have things done by others without directly subjugating them – that operate by way of the forms and markers with which people engage.

Firstly, below the level of conventional forms of coordination that claim public legitimacy for the common good, coordination can take place, from one situation to another, through engaging with more personal cues, markers, or indices that the person invests in so as to guarantee some good of a lesser scope. Because others can act ‘upon’ these forms, this indirectly affects the person, oppressing her without direct subordination. This oppression results from the tyranny exercised by one regime upon another, when the quest for a guarantee of one kind stifles engagement directed at obtaining another kind of guarantee. Contemporary insistence on ‘autonomy’, ‘project’, ‘contract’, ‘choice’, and ‘enlightened consent’ – all of which presuppose that the person engages in a plan or project – puts a high degree of pressure on both the upper and the lower levels or scopes of engagements (see, for instance, Shachar et al. and Meriluoto in this issue). Not only does this tendency eclipse modes of engaging in justification by reference to some specification of the common good, it also oppresses the level of engaging in familiarity with localised and personalised attachments. To be sure, the opposite – that is, the tyranny of familiar engagement – also threatens engagement for the common good.

The second extension is based on the conceptualisation and identification of other grammars of commonality according to which actors agree and disagree when looking for legitimacy. Instead of conflicting qualifications for rival conceptions of the common good, individual ‘interest’– or ‘preference’ or ‘opinion’ – appears to be the proper format of a liberal public. It consists of individuals choosing between options accessible to all and formatted in terms of possible plans to engage in, communicating their disagreements and composing a balanced agreement by negotiation among such ‘interests’ (see Eranti and Meilvang, Carlsen & Blok in this issue). A third grammar is more hospitable than the previous ones to personal attachments. In this grammar, communicating is based on intimately engaging in familiarity, and it is thus made particularly difficult since personal familiarities are hard to make mutually commensurate (Centemeri, 2015). It is to be achieved through personally and emotionally investing in a plurality of common-places whose reduction to superficial clichés entails the failure of this communication.

In recent scholarship, all the above themes – domination, critique, and engagement – have a firm and multiple standing, and the directions for exploring them outlined here are proving fruitful. They are all related to age-old debates on structure and agency, among others, but instead of confining itself to this type of dichotomy, this approach aims at taking into account both, and, moreover, exploring the intertwinement of the two with material features, dependencies, and the composed and collective nature of ‘agency’. Thus, in addressing complex issues, such as the triumphs of populist politics, or different disparities in ‘global’ cultures that fail isomorphic explanations, or how people understand the common ground forged in social movements, often too broadly and imprecisely labelled as ‘collective identity’, and many others (see Luhtakallio & Tavory, 2018; Ylä-Anttila, 2017), an emphasis on grammars of commonality, people's engagements in coordinating situations within them, and the path-dependencies of situations in which commonalities are forged will provide sociological studies with new analytical strength to make sense of creatures and creations of the social world. These elements are intertwined in different ways in the articles in this special issue too and form one set of connection-points in this collection.

3. Contents of the issue

The articles in this issue can be thought of in three principal blocks, connected respectively by empirical avenues they open and explore. The first block includes three articles that all take the theory of engagements in new directions, starting from urban planning and participation-related empirical research.

Drawing on extensive prescriptive materials which attest to recent shifts in the methods and formats of civic participation that contemporary Danish urban planning is developing, Marie Leth Meilvang, Hjalmar Bang Carlsen and Anders Blok contrast various ‘participation formats’: hearing, dialogue meeting, and workshop. Each works as a ‘composition device’ which offers disparate possibilities for inhabitants to attest how they dwell in and co-inhabit the city and its localities and to contest projects through civic criticism. The article brings a grounded contribution to the ongoing critical debate on the rise of the ‘certified city’ (Breviglieri, 2013; Pattaroni, 2015). Originating from a mode of governing through standards that have gained world extension (Cheyns, 2014; Ponte, Gibbon, & Vestergaard, 2011), this concept might well result in controlling and taming ‘diversity’ in urban planning. The authors show that the ‘workshop format’ is set up to achieve the transformation of familiarity attested by personal routes and attachments into a planned engagement which might better fit a liberal public. The paper also addresses and debates another issue, the way pragmatic sociology deals with historical change, with new insights into three distinct, intertwined temporalities.

Veikko Eranti focuses on the way ‘interests’ can be made legitimate in public debate and suggests reformulating the liberal grammar of commonality and naming it the ‘grammar of individual interests’. While Thévenot has avoided designating it by a term currently used by political and social scientists in ways that naturalise a public format into an inner force driving individuals’ actions, Eranti underlines the distinction to be made between concern for one's own property or backyard and a ‘generalisable interest’ understood as a legitimate public format on par with the other grammars. Thévenot would agree with Eranti's accent on the overall common good of the community – and thus legitimacy – aimed at by this grammar as by the others. He would nonetheless insist upon the distinction between personalities engaging with their surroundings through observable trying and testing moments, and the composition of commonality in the plural in which communities integrate discordant voices through mediating entities (qualifications for worth, options made public, common-places). For his part, Eranti is more ready to conflate the dual conceptual approaches and characterise distinct ‘natures of the community’ as ‘defined by the State’, ‘situationally constructed’, ‘sharing and exclusive’.

Finally, Jarkko Salminen's article suggests a fascinating expansion to the justification scheme by introducing the idea of spatial logics, following the theory of image schemas by Lakoff and Johnson. Empirically, the text explores a classical conflict between car-driving and public transport in a case of web-forum argument pro and contra a plan for a car-free main street in Tampere, Finland. Salminen argues that the justifications presented by participants in the debate carry spatial and image-schema-related meanings that direct the debate. The urban space thus becomes a representation of either inward-oriented (domestic) or outward-oriented (renown) justifications, divided between arguments that follow the spatial logics of means-to-an-end (industry), end-in-itself (inspiration), shared public forum (civic), or arena for competition (market). Salminen suggests that this extension can help us to understand disputes over city space and can also bring up spatiality in contexts where it is not an intuitively obvious element.

The second group of articles has in common the interest in different forms of (lay) expertise, and how domination and fragility connect with the creation of experts and their responsibilities.

Itamar Shachar, Lesley Hustinx, Lonneke Roza and Lucas Meijs examine the field of corporate volunteering: concrete collaborations between non-profits and commercial companies, a hitherto relatively under-explored theme, even if Corporate Social Responsibility and the concrete devices emerging from its practices have become a marked feature of civil society-market hybrid organisations in today's societies. The authors analyse the encounters between actors that issue from very different institutional logics and strive to understand the justification work required and carried out in collaboration across institutional boundaries. The article shows the prevalence of project logic in encounters related to the former type of collaboration, and, furthermore, it shows that the actors learn to rely on this common discursive terrain in order to coordinate their collaboration smoothly. Thus, the form of corporate volunteering studied here joins the previous analyses of plug-in volunteering and empowerment project styles governing effort, driven primarily by the market and industrial logics, rather than the civic-oriented, long-term collective engagements of traditional volunteering.

Taina Meriluoto's article focuses on a topic right at the heart of the question how experts are created by studying a case of participatory social policy in the Finnish context. In post-welfare governance, an innovation called ‘experts-by-experience’ has quickly gained popularity: it concerns inviting former beneficiaries of certain social services – usually fragile populations, such as substance abusers – into the social welfare organisations to volunteer as, for instance, peer support and coaches to others in similar positions. Meriluoto shows that whereas the mission statements and explicit objectives of projects involving experts-by-experience stress the rehabilitation, co-production, and civic rights of the participants, the processes in which these experts are trained and asked to work follow a logic of domination within the project logic. The participants’ expertise is evaluated by criteria of flexibility and conformity with the project. The article thus presents valuable new insights for the debate on ‘good participation’.

In the third article in this ‘block’, Qamar Ali and Julia Brandl explore an illuminating case of the ‘plurality of conventions’ in the academic job market. If several sets of rules are potentially available – as is often the case in complex processes such as hiring experts – the defining questions are which ones of these sets are deployed, how they are interpreted, and who has a say in putting these choices and interpretations into practice. Using a case example from a Pakistani university, the authors analyse these asymmetries and the relations of influence and resistance enabled in the hiring processes in question. They stress that coordinating the hiring process involves several sets of convention, as well as modes of engagement from the apparently most public-industrial to the most nepotistic-familiar in the participants’ positions. The article addresses the question what brings the actors concerned to subscribe to a prevailing set of conventions, and what kinds of limits the asymmetric coordination may encounter.

Finally, the third theme connecting the two remaining articles in the issue can be entitled the politics of rights in an age of differing voices.

Adam Gajdoš and Ivana Rapošová contribute to an issue that is both currently topical – anti-liberal populist waves – and of major analytical importance: the entry into public dispute of strong personal concerns, among them religious convictions. After Jürgen Habermas’ post-secular positioning, and among numerous subsequent discussions, Stavo-Debauge published The wolf in sheep's clothing (Le loup dans la bergerie 2012), a careful pragmatist enquiry into the indirect influence of Creationists on academic debate. Gajdoš and Rapošová scrutinise the debate preceding the 2015 Slovak referendum on same-sex rights, to see how personal religious attachments are formatted for public dispute and how different grammars are employed and frequently combined in strategic ‘grammar switches’. Through a highly sensitive examination of shifting engagements, the authors demonstrate the specificities of the arena of a TV show. Its timing and dramaturgy weigh on argumentations and the ways they are tested in debate. As for common-place communication, its ‘translation’ into public discourse entails a significant transformation – possibly strategic, in rhetorical or political speech – into simply ‘shared’ affectivity or sentiment, blurring the fact that common-places host different personal affinities at the same time and leading to more exclusive types of communication.

Based on documents, interviews with participants and participant observation, Victor Albert and Maria Davidenko's article deals with a major social movement in contemporary Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento de TrabalhadoresSem-Teto, MTST), which applies to urban regions the land-occupation strategies used by the Landless Peasants’ Movement (MST). The authors shed new light on social-movement analysis by addressing the following question: what is the relation between the justificatory work and ‘rise in generality’ accomplished for the whole movement by its leader Guilherme Boulos in his writings, and the trying or testing moments that participants go through when they question the movement's ability to make good on its plan to provide formal housing? In spite of differences, Albert and Davidenko observe that in both voices, the reality test that supports engagement in terms of relevant evidence is not a one-off event – as exemplified by ‘peak moments’ – but is revealed over time; it has a temporal dimension. The ‘principle of equivalence’ on which market exchanges and ownership are based is broken down by the leader's writing through outlining the long history of land seizures by elites and by showing how differently the privileged are treated for similar legal infractions. For participants, the test is also achieved over time, in ongoing engagements. Yet individual actors’ plans become entangled with social collectivities that may espouse different aims.

What we have wanted to promote among the authors of the issue, and hope to communicate to our readers too, is that this is not an auto-celebrated community but a theoretical project, accompanied by its translations into methodological tools, which permits us to disagree, and to conserve differences, constantly testing ourselves both internally and externally with regard to the principle of plurality that allows cooperation and a continuous creation of commonality without excluding or muting differences. We are confident that the reader will notice that the texts in this special issue do not follow an imposed ‘line of thinking’, while they still create a strongly recognisable common ground for intellectual exchange.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Two other collective accumulations of research sharing the same spirit and orientation but involving South America and Russia recently led to special issues of journals in French: Breviglieri, Diaz, and Nardacchione (2017); Daucé and Thévenot (2018).