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1. Introduction
Edinburgh University’s Sociology Unit of Assessment consists of:
a) six clusters of researchers in the Sociology Subject Area of the School of Social and Political Studies;
b) the Centre for African Studies;
c) four research centres in Science and Technology Studies (the Science Studies Unit, Research Centre for Social Sciences, Innogen and the Genomics Forum).
Since 2001, levels of investment have increased dramatically. Twelve entirely new lectureships have been created. The process of filling the Established Chair of Sociology led to two appointments: Stanley and Yearley, who contribute to African Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) respectively as well as to the Subject Area. Another entirely new professorial appointment is Wield, a leading development-studies scholar, who will join us in January 2007 and link African Studies and STS.
Research student FTEs (58.46 in July 2007; 63.90 in October) have doubled from their level (30.25) at the time of RAE 2001. Research income has more than quadrupled, from an annual average of £323K in 1995-2000 to a total of £9.3 million (annual average of £1.4 million) in 2001-7.
The result of growth is a submission of twice the size of 2001, 51% of whom are new entrants to the profession since then (and 31% entrants in last three years). The research activity of even our newest recruits is such that we are able to include in the submission all eligible staff in the unit of assessment.
2. Sociology Subject Area
Our work is situated at the crossroads of professional, critical, public and user-oriented policy sociology, and focuses on the interweaving of individual lives, social processes and historical change. This focus is expressed, e.g., in our critical interest in ‘identity’: in how actors define themselves; how they attribute identity to others; how, in turn, they think others attribute identity to them; and in the consequences of those processes, for instance for structured patterns of inequality.
Sociology subject-area research consists of the following six clusters, plus contributions to the interdisciplinary work detailed in sections 3 and 4 below.
2.1 National Identity
Edinburgh is one of the world’s leading centres of the empirical study and theorisation of the complex matrices of the negotiation, attribution and mobilisation of identity’s ‘national’ aspects (Bechhofer, Bond, Hearn, Kennedy, McCrone, MacInnes, Rosie).
Two large Leverhulme projects, initiated primarily by Bechhofer and McCrone (1999-2005, £1.1 million; 2006-10, £795K), explore this theme in the ‘natural laboratory’ formed by the part-fragmented multinational state that is the United Kingdom. These projects integrate large-scale surveys (2003, 2005, 2006, 2008), in-depth interviews, ethnography and experimental work by psychologists.
This combination of methods allows the Leverhulme and related projects to investigate the significance of national identity at three levels:
a. Public opinion and voting behaviour. In respect to Scotland, the Leverhulme surveys are complemented by a series of Scottish Social Attitudes surveys, and by election studies conducted by McCrone and colleagues in association with the National Centre for Social Research (most recently of the crucial 2007 election). This work has led to three books not listed in RA2: New Scotland, New Politics? (2001); New Scotland, New Society? (2002); Has Devolution Delivered? (2006).
b. Specific settings, e.g. workplaces, such as the Anglo-Scottish Halifax/Bank of Scotland group (Hearn); arts elites and landowners (Bechhofer, McCrone); and academia (Bond and our long-standing collaborator Lindsay Paterson, UoA 45).
c. Key mediating structures, such as mass media (Kennedy, MacInnes, Rosie) and economic agencies (Bond, McCrone).
The ensemble of this work has shown, e.g., that ‘national identity talk’ is engaged in readily and easily in Scotland, but is more coded and implicit in England, where local identity seems stronger.
National identity work also involves comparative and historical sociology, investigating e.g.: Québec and Scotland as comparator cases of liberal nationalism (Kennedy); neo-nationalisms such as that of Catalonia (MacInnes); the articulations between national and religious identity (Rosie). The work is developing to include, e.g., Bond and Rosie’s work on how conceptions of national identity may facilitate or inhibit the inclusion of minority groups, and Kennedy’s study (with Riga, Strathclyde) of the influence of American understandings of race and ethnicity on the twentieth-century’s post-war ‘settlements’ in East Central Europe.
Our research challenges theoretical orthodoxy in several respects. The much-revised 2001 edition of McCrone’s Understanding Scotland (not included in RA2) shows that the cultural, political and social dimensions of ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘society’ cannot be aligned in the way many sociologists (e.g. Urry) assume. Hearn’s Rethinking Nationalism urges a move beyond the dichotomy between ‘primordialist’ and ‘modernist’ approaches to nationalism, arguing for a culture-centred and societal, rather than state-centric view of power. MacInnes links his criticism of the notion of ‘identity’ in the field of gender to critiques of the ‘banal’ reproduction of received understandings of national identity by sociologists such as Castells and Burawoy.
Essentialist views of national identity can feed xenophobia, so this cluster plays an important ‘public sociology’ role in demonstrating that identities are plural, constructed, interpretative and subject to deliberate mobilisation. The Leverhulme research has been covered extensively on television, radio and in the press, and McCrone’s public sociology involves him being a frequent interviewee/contributor to the mass media in the UK and internationally. He has briefed bodies ranging from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet to a delegation from Sudan.
In Kosovo, for instance, the UK Ambassador and British Council have been acting as ‘honest broker’ between hostile ethnic groups and parties, and in 2006 McCrone was the external participant in a roundtable involving representatives of the Kosovan government and the main political parties and ethnic groups. MacInnes’s work on Catalonia has become prominent there (e.g. via his reports to the Generalitat, Diputació de Barcelona and Collegi d'Economistas de Catalunya). Media interest in Sectarianism in Scotland (Rosie’s book with Bruce, Glendinning and Iain Paterson) ranged from BBC radio and television news to the Sunday Times and Daily Mail.
At the core of this cluster’s extensive relations to research users is the interdisciplinary Institute of Governance, co-directed by McCrone, was set up to provide a single point of entry for the Scottish Parliament to Edinburgh’s university-wide expertise. It publishes Scottish Affairs, the most prominent platform linking academic work and public-affairs commentary in Scotland (editor: Lindsay Paterson, UoA 45; associate editors include Bond, McCrone and Rosie), and is a magnet for journalists, researchers and politicians, e.g. hosting since 2001 delegations from 22 countries in Africa, North and South America, Asia, Australasia and Europe. Political scientist Alice Brown, co-founder of the Institute with McCrone, is now Scottish Public Services Ombudsman.
McCrone was involved in the project of Scottish devolution from the start, serving, e.g., on the Expert Panel on Standing Orders and Procedures for the Scottish Parliament. Bechhofer helped reshape ESRC policy post-devolution, and Edinburgh sociology has been central to the growing links between ESRC, the Scottish Executive and the wider policy-making community. For instance, Bond’s research with Charsley on graduate migration (jointly funded by ESRC and the Executive) led to him being invited to address both the Economic Development Association (Scotland) and the Scottish Policy Innovation Forum.
2.2 Narrative, Auto/Biography and the Sociology of Culture
The recruitment of Stanley brings to Edinburgh a central figure in the ‘narrative turn’ in modern sociology. In work such as Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman and Mourning Becomes … Stanley has pioneered the sociological investigation of the narratives – written, visual and other – through which lives and character are represented. She has re-theorised ideas about ‘memory’ in relation to cultural politics and political processes such as nationalism.
Others contributing to this cluster include Faulkner, Gorringe, Hearn, Jamieson, Kennedy, Parry, Webb (all discussed in other sections) and Orton-Johnson, who studies ‘life writing’, using technologies both as her field-sites and methodological tools. She examines how the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ are drawn on in the construction of student identity, an interest she is expanding into research on Blogging and Vlogging as sites of the narrative conjunction between travel and identity.
Another cluster member is Prior, whose Museums and Modernity has become a touchstone for Bourdieu-inspired developments in museum studies. It shows how professional bourgeois groups established their elite credentials in Europe partly as a result of interventions in the organisation of institutions of collection and display. Prior has gone on to show that present-day museums are complex ‘allotropic’ entities that contain contradictory impulses towards commodification and connoisseurship, not the ‘postmodern theme parks’ they are often thought to be. He is developing new work on the sociology of music, which explores issues of mediation, complexity and production by investigating how digital technologies are transforming practices of ‘musicking’.
A key vehicle for this cluster’s work is the Centre for Narrative & Auto/Biographical Studies (NABS), directed by Stanley. It helped establish the Scottish and Northern Narratives Network (currently with 503 members), and runs around seven interdisciplinary workshops annually, including an ESRC Seminar Series on narrative studies, with over 20 fully-funded places at each seminar for research students from across the UK. The workshops are enormously popular: numbers have to be capped at 70, but around 200 people typically apply to attend each. NABS’s international outreach work includes Stanley’s extensive contributions to the development of postgraduate research and supervision capacity in sociology in South Africa.
2.3 Personal Life, Intimacy and Marginalisation
Closely linked to our work on national identity and auto/biography is a cluster (Bancroft, Jamieson, MacInnes) emphasising intimate relations, reproduction and processes of marginalisation. Its focus is the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR, co-founded and co-directed by Jamieson), which has generated £3.1 million of funded research on the family, relationship and gendered aspects of the life-course, health, well-being and government services, recently including, e.g., a £289K ESRC grant to Jamieson and CRFR co-director Wasoff (UoA 40) to research solo living. CRFR hosts a large variety of meetings, including two ESRC Seminar Series: ‘non-familial intimacy’ (co-ordinated by Jamieson) and ‘young people affected by parental substance use’ (Bancroft and Wilson, now at Stirling).
Jamieson addresses debates about the changing nature of intimacy in ‘western’ societies and the claimed shift in balance from ‘living for others’ to ‘living for the self’. Her work probes the limits to individualised reworking of personal life (articles on ‘Boundaries of Intimacy’ and ‘Negotiated Non-monogamy’) and challenges exaggerated claims concerning the corrosive effect of individualisation (‘Cohabitation and Commitment’). The directly user-oriented aspects of her work include research with Glasgow’s Burman for the Scottish Executive on the use of evidence in sexual offence trials (an area where the law was changed as a result of their research with Beverley Brown in the 1980s).
MacInnes’s work includes evidence-based interventions in debates as diverse as work-life balance, time stress, Scottish fertility trends and states’ construction of identity categories in censuses. He is finishing a book with Pérez Díaz on the role of changes in mortality rates (increasing longevity, especially sharp declines in women’s deaths in fertile years) in the scope and pace of contemporary gender change.
Bancroft has focused on the marginalisation of Roma and Gypsy-Travellers, and on everyday practices enacted in response to disadvantageous circumstances (children with parents with drug and alcohol problems, families parenting in poverty). He is developing new work on the ‘sociology of intoxication’, connecting psychic life and the practices of the self to wider processes such as group dynamics.
2.4 Social Studies of Finance
Social studies of finance (cluster members: MacKenzie, Preda, Webb) is a new field, in which Edinburgh’s leading role has been recognised e.g. by the award of a £380K ESRC Professorial Fellowship to MacKenzie. The field differs from more traditional economic sociology – even ‘new’ economic sociology – in directly tackling the technicality of financial markets: their bases in the ‘material sociology’ of bodies and of technological systems; the systematic forms of knowledge deployed in them; etc.
Thus the AJS article by MacKenzie and PhD researcher Millo, and MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera contain the first in-depth empirical examination of the ‘performativity’ of economics: the way in which economics sometimes brings into being the phenomena (including the quantitative patterns of prices) it analyses and predicts.
At Bielefeld and Konstanz, Preda co-organised two of the early international meetings of social studies of finance, and he is co-editor with Knorr Cetina of its first edited collection: The Sociology of Financial Markets (Oxford). He is the leading proponent of historical sociology in the new field (he demonstrates how technical devices such as the stock ticker and theories such as ‘chartism’ fundamentally changed how ‘the market’ is perceived), but has also begun ethnographic research on ‘day traders’.
Webb shows how changes in market structure of the kind analysed by MacKenzie, Millo and Preda feed through to corporate strategies and personal experience. Organisations, Identities and the Self examines the constitution of subjects as individually accountable and responsible. While unquestionably a ‘technology of control’, this also makes consent to authority partial and reversible, and thus creates ‘space’, even in a rationalised world, for oppositional stances. Her intellectual commitments inform her active role in public life: she serves as a Non-Executive Director of NHS Health Scotland, as a member of the Health Improvement Stakeholders Group (which reports to NHS Scotland’s Ministerial Steering Group) and as Vice-Chair of the Scottish Low Pay Unit.
International outreach has included, e.g., workshops originally intended to encompass UK postgraduates only, but actually attended, at their own expense, by faculty and PhD researchers from France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the US.
2.5 Critical Sociology
‘Critical sociology’ – in Burawoy’s sense of the re-examination of the foundations of the discipline – is a theme of much of our work (e.g. that of Jamieson, Prior, Stanley, Yearley and others), and is a predominant concern of Raffel and Kemp. The area is an increasing focus both of regular events, such as our annual Goffman Lecture, and of ad hoc ones such as a lively symposium (with speakers such as Urry) in which the claims of complexity theory were subject to critical scrutiny.
Raffel’s work on ‘self-reflection’ (an approach he helped to found along with Blum and McHugh) seeks to conceive a sociology that is attuned to morally-guided as well as to rule-guided action. His consequent attention to principles of justice involves a sharply critical engagement with postmodernism’s failure to address issues of virtue. His recent research includes examinations of self-reflection (a) in relation to its roots in ethnomethodology, (b) as a method with goals different from those of ‘description’, and (c) as an actual social practice as distinct from an abstract theory.