{"id":272,"date":"2015-01-14T11:12:17","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T11:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/management\/?p=272"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:21:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:21:11","slug":"should-social-scientific-debate-occur-outside-academic-journals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/2015\/01\/14\/should-social-scientific-debate-occur-outside-academic-journals\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Social Scientific Debate occur outside Academic Journals?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lecturer in Social Theory and Consumption at the School, <\/em>Stephen Dunne<\/a>, attempts to renew a recent academic argument through a more accessible medium<\/em><\/p>\n

Social scientists engage in debates which matter to people other than themselves. Very often, however, those potentially publicly meaningful debates\u00a0preside within\u00a0academic journals<\/a> which regularly assume a lot of terminological familiarity and\u00a0 disposable income on the part of their readers. The open access movement<\/a>,\u00a0initiatives such as The Conversation<\/a> <\/em>and, on a much smaller scale, blog-sites like this one,\u00a0redress\u00a0such deficiencies in traditional\u00a0publishing models by attempting to make\u00a0academic debate more linguistically and economically inclusive. I\u2019d like to try to continue this trend by inviting somebody I\u2019ve recently had a debate\/argument with to continue\u00a0the interaction here. I\u2019ll outline the context before getting there: hopefully\u00a0this will whet your dialectical appetite and,\u00a0better still, encourage you to contribute. Let’s see.<\/p>\n

It is, perhaps ominously, over 13 years since I first heard the name Norbert Elias, one of (Leicester) Social Science\u2019s most celebrated figures<\/a>. During the later stages of my undergraduate studies, in Dublin, the sociologist Paddy Dolan<\/a> suggested to me that Elias\u2019s great work, The Civilising Process, <\/em>could be productively studied alongside Michel Foucault\u2019s History of Sexuality, <\/em>an earlier reading recommendation of his I\u2019d also gladly accepted. I spent the best part of the following three years making my way through Elias\u2019s historical sociological work, attempting to formulate a workable research problem as I imagined he might have done. When I joined Leicester\u2019s School of Management, just over a decade ago, I was advised by Campbell Jones<\/a>, Stefano Harney<\/a>, Gerard Hanlon<\/a>, Ruud Kaulingfreks<\/a>\u00a0and colleagues at the University\u2019s Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE)<\/a>, to pose a series of critical questions<\/a> concerning what is sometimes called Elias\u2019s figurational approach to sociology. So began the development of my respectful ambivalence<\/em> towards the work of both Elias and his followers.<\/p>\n

Publishing these early reservations upon a recognised scholarly platform seemed an intellectually worthwhile exercise. If, on the one hand, I had any useful points to make, these could have been acknowledged as such and subsequently taken up by the representatives of the figurational school of sociology. If, on the other hand, my analysis was essentially misinformed then I could have been quite easily refuted by those better in the know. What in fact transpired was a little bit of both, with the emphasis, unfortunately for me at least, very much on the term little. On the plus side, Matt Clement<\/a>, Andrew Linklater<\/a>, Stephen Mennell<\/a>, and, more recently, Andr\u00e9 Saramago<\/a>, have commended my line of questioning, both through email communications and also at academic conferences. On the minus side, however, Eric Dunning<\/a> and Jason Hughes<\/a>, respectively Emeritus Professor and Professorial Departmental Head\u00a0at Elias\u2019s former institution, opposed my critique within their Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> I have\u00a0discussed this matter with Eric, on an occasional basis, and with Jason, on a regular basis. We\u2019re presently considering how \u2013 and even whether \u2013 this particular debate might be pursued outside the walls of the University\u2019s library caf\u00e9. Beyond these individual instances of reception, however, the figurational community hasn\u2019t seen fit to engage with the questions I raised within that article, at least not to my knowledge.<\/p>\n

Last year, perhaps presumptuously, I published<\/a>* another challenge\u00a0 to Elias\u2019s work\u2019s advocates. This paper placed less emphasis on the political consequences of figurational sociology, drawing attention instead towards what I alleged to be some of its chief philosophical deficiencies. The second piece takes Elias\u2019s later work to task for disingenuously propagating an entirely misleading representation of philosophy, one which many of his most notable followers have been only too happy to endorse, with neither qualification nor caveat. Contemporary figurational sociology\u2019s persistently collective dismissal of philosophy, I argued, is entirely counter-productive: it does the cause of encouraging a wider engagement with Elias\u2019s work much more harm than good. Respectful ambivalence<\/em>, like I said.<\/p>\n

The article very quickly elicited a dismissive\u00a0response<\/a># from Richard Kilminster<\/a>, the loudest proclaimer of figurational sociology\u2019s post-philosophical<\/a> pretensions: I’d include even Elias\u00a0in that superlative proposition. I was offered the opportunity to provide a counter-response by the History of Human Science<\/em><\/a>\u2019s then outgoing editor James Good<\/a>, which I took<\/a>*,\u00a0 primarily for the sake of rebutting Kilminster\u2019s primarily personal attacks upon me. As I put it in my counter-response:<\/p>\n

My apparently provocative piece simply asked figurational sociologists to concede a characteristic weakness of their adopted framework for the sake of making improvements towards it. Assuming Richard Kilminster doesn\u2019t speak on their behalf, the effort will not have been wasted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The journal\u2019s editorial policy prohibits debates from extending beyond the response: counter-response format. The tone of both of these pieces suggests there\u2019s quite a bit of unfinished business to be undertaken, however. So that is why, to return to this post\u2019s opening sentiments, I\u2019m inviting anybody who has a view on the role philosophy should or should not play within the contemporary social sciences \u2013 Richard Kilminster in particular, of course – to contribute towards this ongoing debate, on the correct side of both the pay-wall and the jargon.<\/p>\n

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* These pieces are in the process of\u00a0being lodged in Leicester’s Research Archive. As soon as they are available I will update the links.\u00a0In the interim, please email\u00a0me if you\u00a0cannot access\u00a0the final submission of either, or both, of the articles in question.<\/p>\n

# I have invited Richard\u00a0Kilminster to share an Open Access version of his published response.\u00a0I will update the links, and\/or this\u00a0footnote, if he responds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lecturer in Social Theory and Consumption at the School, Stephen Dunne, attempts to renew a recent academic argument through a more accessible medium Social scientists engage in debates which matter to people other than themselves. Very often, however, those potentially publicly meaningful debates\u00a0preside within\u00a0academic journals which regularly assume a lot of terminological familiarity and\u00a0 disposable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[504,294,690,396,34,202,452,682,686,685,236,689,393,688,683,450,581,391,687,201,577,684],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-academic-freedom","tag-academic-journals","tag-blogging","tag-centre-for-philosophy-and-political-economy-cppe","tag-critique","tag-debate","tag-jargon","tag-leicester-sociology","tag-michel-foucault","tag-norbert-elias","tag-open-access","tag-open-access-publishing","tag-pay-wall","tag-philosophy","tag-political-philosophy","tag-public-debate","tag-publishing","tag-rhetoric","tag-social-science","tag-sociology","tag-the-civilising-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}