ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change CRESCNews ISSUE 10 FEBRUARY 2010 Financial Reform or Business as Usual? CRESC Assesses the Evidence n October, CRESC’s ‘Alternative Report on the global financial markets. Drawing on about the social value of finance which have UK Banking Reform’ made waves in the research produced by a 12 strong working been re-used since 2008 to deflect any re- Idebate about the extent to which the group of CRESC researchers and outside regulation which threatens to harm the government should increase regulation in the practitioners, CRESC’s public interest Report competitive position of the City of London financial sector following the 2008 crash in challenged the old City of London arguments [continued on Page 2]

In this issue: New CRESC Director: CRESC’s Alternative Report on Banking Reform p2 Welcome to John Law Researching Transformative Events: Witness Seminars as Method p3 Researching the City p4 London Olympic Legacy p5 New Research p6 The challenge of the digital p7 Picturing Rank p7 Anish Kapoor p8 Welcome to John Law p9 Q & A: Meral Özbek p10

ohn Law is joining CRESC in April. Following the departure of one of CRESC’s founding CRESC Conferences p11 directors Tony Bennett, John is moving from Lancaster to the Chair of Sociology at the JOpen University. He’ll be working closely with OU colleagues Marie Gillespie and New Working Papers p12 Sophie Watson as a CRESC Centre Director, and will be convening the new Social Life of Method (SLOM) research theme with Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage. John’s background is interdisciplinary. [continued on page 9] www.cresc.ac.uk CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 THEME 1: REMAKING CAPITALISM CRESC’s Alternative Report on Banking Reform

Adam Leaver and Karel Williams

[continued from p1] It was thus unsurprising Exhibit 1: An analysis of the Bischoff Report to CRESC researchers that in December’s Pre- Public Sector Budget Report the government announced a 60 Years (9%) tax on banking bonuses and the New Year’s Media honours list then pointedly omitted bankers, 71 Years (11%) including the outgoing Lord Mayor. These changes marked the end of the cosy deferential relation between British political Para-Finance Industry City 205 Years classes and London’s financial elites .The 36 Years 495 years (31%) bonus tax proposal predictably sparked a (5%) 75% hostile reaction from the City. As Angela Knight of the British Bankers Association warned, the tax was ‘populist, political and Fund penal’. Management 66 Years It is likely that CRESC’s ‘Alternative Report on (10%) UK Banking Reform’* contributed to the shift Non-City in opinion in the preceding months. Earlier in 167 years 2009, the Treasury White Paper Reforming 25% Financial Markets accepted the Bischof and Financial Wigley reports’ narrative about the benefits Infrastructure of financial services to the British economy. 38 Years (6%) Banking The Alternative Report was taken up in the 186 Years (28%) Observer and the Guardian whose first leader (16 October 2009) praised CRESC’s "excellent corrective" to the finance lobby’s "fairy story" about taxes paid and jobs created. Number of panelists: 21 Subsequent coverage in the Guardian and Total number of years experience: 662 Average number of years experience: 32 Financial Times focused on the Report’s political analysis of excessive "insider" Source: Publicly available information on the members of the Bischoff Working Group influence. (i.e. jobs in consultancy, accounting and law been made, the answer is that finance sector The tax revenues from the finance sector are dependent on finance) added another insiders and lobbyists had undue influence now offset by the immediate cost of bank 500,000 workers. According to these figures over the Bischof and Wigley reports. As CRESC bail-out. In the five years up to 2006/7, the the finance sector (directly and indirectly) calculated, the Bischoff committee members finance sector paid and collected £203 billion employs less people than British had 75% of their 662 years of work in taxes in the UK, but the immediate, manufacturing. experience in the City or City-related services. upfront cost of the UK bail-out was £289 Another Guardian first leader (26 November billion, and this could rise potentially to Finally, finance concentrates rather than 2009) used these results to lambast official £1,183 billion. This is a pro cyclical sector diffuses prosperity because of the reports, like the Walker Report on bank which socialises its losses so that the tax geographical clustering of wholesale governance, as "chaps talking to chaps and payer is largely responsible when the bubble employment in East London. Highly paid coming up with a few limp proposals that bursts. investment banking jobs are heavily clustered need not inconvenience anyone too much". within the City Mile and Canary Wharf, whilst In finance, rising profitability on the upswing So CRESC helped make the financial crisis into retail banks do not create jobs as they must does not translate into new jobs. By 2007 the a democratic issue. control high street and back office head count finance sector directly employed around 1 as they attempt to deliver shareholder value. * downloadable from the home page of our million workers (mainly in retail), which was web site at www.cresc.ac.uk. no more than in 1991. Indirect employment If we ask why these points had not previously

2 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 THEME 2: REFRAMING THE NATION Researching Transformative Events: Witness Seminars as Method

Francis Dodsworth

ver the course of the last year work in participants stimulate one another’s Theme 2 has taken a new memories, or react to discoveries about Omethodological direction with the use others’ perspectives or motivations that were of the witness seminar as a research format. unknown to them at the time the events took In research carried out in concert with place. This approach prevents the discussion CRESC’s affiliated ‘Tuning In’ project, and of the subject from being dominated by the along with researchers in Theme 3, two perspective and concerns of the researchers witness seminars were held on a) the involved, giving a good sense of what the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, which participants considered important and the saw the establishment of Bangladesh as an extent to which they agreed about this. We independent state, and b) the fall of the found it also gave significant insights into the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked the end of operation of the BBC World Service which the post-war settlement in Eastern Europe might not have been evident from individual and the beginning of the fall of communism. interviews. These two witness seminars drew together The witness seminars were important events members of the BBC World Service who in themselves, both for the researchers and reported on these seminal events at the time, hopefully for the participants, providing a many of whom had not seen one another form of commemoration and camaraderie as since the events took place, along with other well as a source of information for further agents involved in the processes they study. However, we did not want to make the reported on. witness seminars the end of our research, A witness seminar is essentially a form of rather we sought to use them as a way of group interview in which participants in the stimulating a new research trajectory. events under discussion can meet together to Therefore we used the information and debate their role in and perception of the perspective we gained from these seminars issues. The format was devised in the 1980s to frame a new set of questions or an array of as a means of studying the recent past by the traditional oral history interviews that Institute for Contemporary British History allowed us to follow up the issues raised in (now the Centre for Contemporary British the seminars in more depth and to offer History) at the Institute of Historical critical engagement with some of the Research. Unlike traditional oral history, comments made. which relies on individual interviews carried out by a researcher, the witness seminar allows the participants to interact with one another, taking the conversation in different directions as new details or perspectives are A witness seminar is essentially a form of group uncovered. Although usually mediated by an academic chair with a set of issues they ask interview in which participants in the events under the panel to address, this gives much more “discussion can meet together to debate their role in freedom to the participants to engage with one another and may draw out issues that and perception of the issues. would otherwise have remained buried as ”3 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 THEME 3: GOVERNING CULTURES: CITIES, POLICIES AND HERITAGE Researching the City

Sophie Watson

esearching the City is a significant new research initiative in Theme 3 to Rcomplement those research areas that were already thriving - notably an engagement with the relationship between governance and culture, in particular museums and the heritage sector. This initiative takes forward the notion of the city as a tool of government and pushes it into an exploration on how the materiality of urban space intersects with urban cultures. The notion of materiality encompasses the importance of economic processes in understanding cities as well as the idea of the city as a built environment which ‘solidifies’ social and cultural processes in visible and material ways. Buildings and built environments are thus read as texts which reveal embedded social and cultural processes. Visual signs, symbols and artefacts Shanghai Skyline are key here. So too are the ways in which governmental policies act to embed social involved in a program of work arguing for a social practice, infrastructure and and cultural relations in particular urban conceptualization of the making of urban institutional organisation in the government spaces and forms. policy through both its territorial and of the modern city. relational geographies. This considers how There are a diversity of projects commencing Questions of the transnational and global cities are assembled by the situated practices or in progress on the topic of ‘The City’ taking have been exercising urban theorists over the and imaginations of actors who are up a number of different themes. Francis last couple of decades, and this area is continually attracting, managing, promoting, Dodsworth and Sophie Watson are exploring explored by Nina Glick Schiller in her research and resisting global flows of policies and the ways in which different faiths have been on the relationship between the migrant and programs. Eric Swyngedouw’s research made visible, tangible and legible in East the city. This represents a development of explores the transformation of urban London through their inscription in places, migration theory which contests the democracy over the past two decades. Here, texts, images and public practices. Simon methodological nationalism of most the objective is to reassess 'the polis' as a Carter’s project takes tuberculosis as a case migration studies that remain fixed within democratic space in an age of study to analyse the ways in which the the comparative framework of individual depoliticisation. This project is framed science of epidemiology came to be deployed nation-states and state policies. Other through the lens of changing forms of urban as a key resource in policy making and research looks at the materiality of the city governance, particularly with respect to government practices concerning public through the genealogy of objects such as urban development strategies on the one health in the mid twentieth century, in street bollards (Evelyn Ruppert) - to hand and urban environmental practices on particular focusing on how it was crucial in investigate how social change is congealed in the other in a variety of European urban demarcating urban/rural boundaries. the design, operation and presence of urban geographical settings. Bringing a more objects - and blue plaques (Sophie Watson) - Several projects focus on questions of urban historical focus to such questions, Francis to explore shifts in the cultural and material governance. For example, Allan Cochrane’s Dodsworth is exploring the establishment of practices of incorporating figures into the research reconsiders regional and urban a wide range of governmental institutions national memory. politics and power, questioning scalar and practices instituted between 1780-1835, approaches and looking for other ways the aim of which was to reform both the understanding governance spaces, structure of the city and social practice within theoretically drawing on notions of it. This project explores the intersection of assemblage and topology. Kevin Ward is

4 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 THEME 4: TOPOLOGIES OF SOCIAL CHANGE The 2012 London Olympic Legacy

Gillian Evans

he organisation of a series of public and this is the first Olympic Games lectures marked a turning point in to ever make legacy promises. TTheme 4 researcher Gillian Evans’ Everyone in the East End of London ethnographic research about London’s can allude to the precedent of Olympic legacy. Embedded within the nearby Canary Wharf. A massive communications and marketing team of the regeneration project that is still Growing a New Piece of City: designing Olympic Park Legacy Company, Gillian’s growing, Canary Wharf is a financial a legacy for 21st Century London challenge, as a participant observer, was to district first developed in the 1980s under a events each of which reflected the specific prove that she too could engage the public in laissez-faire Conservative government with a focus of interest of each urban studies centre events designed to communicate key legacy trickle down model of socio-economic change and debated one of four timely legacy messages, raise the profile of the Legacy for surrounding neighbourhoods. themes. The universities Gillian worked with Company and contribute, thereby, to the task Unfortunately that model delivered little in were the London School of Economics and of realising the Olympic legacy. Learning in- the way of local benefit and even as the area Political Science, University College London, depth about how the legacy is being planned now boasts the creation of 90,000 jobs in a Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary. and focusing on the processes through which service economy associated with the world of Respective urban studies centres were The a complex material entity – a new piece of finance and could claim (at least before the Cities Programme , The Urban Lab , the city - is to be brought into being, Gillian’s recession) to be creating significant wealth at Centre for Urban and Community Research personal challenge for the public lecture the city-wide and national level, it has done and The City Centre . series was to create the opportunity for little to ameliorate the devastating effects of Titles of the four events which took place in critical debate. post-industrialisation on the ex-docking November 2009 were as follows: The 246 hectares of Olympic Park land was communities of the East End. This has meant • The First Legacy Games: the physical and assembled via compulsory purchase order out that the spotlight is on the Olympic Park socio-economic development of the East of mostly post-industrial brown-field sites in Legacy Company to prove that the lessons of End of London. the lower Lea Valley. It will play host, in the Canary Wharf have been learned in terms of summer of 2012, to four weeks of world class urban planning and design, that everyone • Growing a New Piece of City: designing a sporting events and after this, the hope is now understands that it is essential to legacy for 21st Century London. that the billions of pounds of public money integrate the new development into the • The Art of Regeneration: creating an artistic spent on transforming contaminated surrounding areas rather than creating an and community legacy for London 2012. island of middle class prosperity in a sea of industrial land and waterways into usable • The People’s Legacy: community deprivation; to come up with a model of parkland, development platforms and participation in the shaping of East London development that has socio-economic sporting venues will begin to reap dividends. 2012 and beyond. As one of the largest regeneration projects in transformation of local areas at its heart and The success of Gillian’s events has led to the Europe takes shape over the next forty years, to engage local working class residents who extension of her ethnographic research the aspiration is for the growth of a new are proud of their history and their locality placement with the Olympic Park Legacy metropolitan district of London. Change and and who need to feel ownership of the Company and she now has the opportunity to development within the park is to be development as opposed to being excluded observe legacy planning until 2012. For more integrated with transformation in the areas from it. information about the Gillian’s research around the fringes of the park which are Working on behalf of the Olympic Park Legacy project 2013 and Beyond see: some of the most deprived boroughs in the Company and liaising with some of the http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/ whole of England. The Olympic Games are foremost urban studies centres in central disciplines/socialanthropology/about/staff/e billed as a once in a lifetime opportunity to London universities, Gillian designed events vans/ bring change to the lives of everyone living in aimed primarily at postgraduate students, the East End of London and it was on this but that attracted a much wider audience For more details of the Olympic legacy and promise that the bid to host the Games was including local and central government each Lecture Series event showing the list of won. stakeholders and which generated significant speakers for each lecture and podcasts see www.legacy-now.co.uk/education/lecture- Regeneration projects are, however, press interest including BBC Radio 4 You and series/ notoriously difficult developments to deliver Yours. 1200 people in total attended the

5 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 THEME 5: TRAJECTORIES OF PARTICIPATION AND INEQUALITY New research: on how parents’ encouragement affects children’s cultural activity and prospects

Mike Savage

RESC is launching a new theme of one index. This shows that parents from socialisation into cultural activities has a research entitled ‘trajectories of different social classes have very different clearly significant effect over and above that Cparticipation’, convened by Mike proclivities to encourage their children. The of education. After the inclusion of the Savage, which focuses on how individuals children of higher professional fathers score additive index of parental socialisation, the move into, and out of, various kinds of social systematically higher than any other class. explanatory power of the model rises slightly, engagements and cultural activity during This is a very sharp contrast to those in and the effects of educational achievement their lives. This will also contextualise these routine occupations where only three per become slightly weaker. Being taken to arts patterns through a series of historical cent score so highly. By contrast, 40 per cent events or to the library, and being encouraged analyses of cultural engagement in post war of the children of routine workers are in to be active in the arts, in sport or in reading Britain. households with very low scores of 4 or less enhances the chances of being upwardly points. Lower professionals are closer to mobile and makes a difference within the An important early paper on these issues by higher professionals, with the higher lower and intermediate classes. Part of the Simone Scherger and Mike Savage managers and large employers rather further effect of education on mobility chances can demonstrates the importance of parental behind and closer to the intermediate classes be traced back to differences in cultural encouragement for affecting the educational than to the higher professionals. socialisation. Gender, ethnicity and exact attainment, social mobility prospects, and class of origin do not cultural participation of Britons today. They Figure 1: Overall-index parental socialisation for different parental classes have any significant analysed the wide ranging evidence on 100% effects. parental encouragement for cultural and 90% artistic activity when children were growing This research suggests 80% up contained in the Department of Culture, that cultural capital is Media and Sports Taking Part-Survey (2005 70% a significant feature in and 2006). Slightly more than 50% of Britons 60% the shaping of had never, as children been taken to dance or 50% people’s life chances classical music performances, and only 12 per 40% and builds on the cent had been taken at least three times a 30% arguments developed year. Museums or art galleries have a quite 20% in CRESC’s influential similar distribution, though at a slightly 10% Cultural Capital and

higher level. Children were most likely to have 0% Social Exclusion large higher lower intermediate small lower semi- routine visited historic sites, though still around 35 employers, professional professional (incl. lower employers, supervisory, routine project. The book higher managerial) own account technical per cent had never been taken. There are managerial workers resulting from this

striking findings regarding libraries, where 0 1-4 5-8 9-12 13-16 study, by Tony there was a strong polarisation between Bennett, Mike Savage, Weighted percentages. Unweighted n=10,568 those who never went there with their Elizabeth Silva, Alan parents or other adults (around 43 per cent) Savage and Scherger go on to show that Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright, and those who went there at least three parental encouragement affects how well Culture, Class, Distinction was published as times a year (46 per cent). Around half of the children do in the educational system, even part of the Routledge CRESC book series in respondents were encouraged to read a lot by controlling for social factors such as social 2009 and has alreafy been hailed as a their parents. Only one third were class which are known to be important. In a ‘landmark text’ by a reviewer in the British encouraged a lot to play musical final model examining the determinants of Journal of Sociology Cultural Transmission, instrument(s), act, dance, sing, draw, paint, upward mobility, they show that, as Educational Attainment, and social mobility by write stories, poems, plays or music. expected, the experience of higher education Simone Scherger and Mike Savage, CRESC boosts the odds of being upwardly mobile. Working Paper No 70, is available from CRESC Scherger and Savage grouped together all However, the intensity of parental website. these different kinds of encouragement into 6 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 SOCIAL LIFE OF METHODS The challenge of the digital Mike Savage

n 2009-10 CRESC researchers, organized Savage and Roger Burrows ‘The coming these interests through focused case in a centre-wide integrating theme on crisis of empirical sociology’ in the journal studies of how conceptions of ‘population’ IThe Social Life of Methods are pursuing a Sociology (2007) which claims that the and ‘social relations’ are being re- range of projects exploring the challenge of sample survey and the qualitative constructed. Our projects include interests the digital to conventional social science interview are losing ground to the in the deployment of digital data in census research methods. This strand, organized by widespread deployment of transactional and population metrics; in archival sources, Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage picks up on data in business, government and and as a complement to survey sources. the much discussed arguments of Mike administration. These projects will develop

Picturing Rank The broad remit of ‘Rank’ was to collect together Andrew Hill REVIEW “and scrutinise how rank - a term deliberately chosen n July CRESC organised a visit to the ‘Rank: questioning of this relationship was Nina picturing the social order 1516-2009’ Beier and Marie Lund’s ‘Most outstanding’ for the breadth of its Iexhibition at the Grundy Gallery, (2006), with its images of groups asked to Blackpool. (The exhibition also appeared at arrange themselves in hierarchies. connotations - has been Leeds Art Gallery and Sunderland’s Northern At the same time ‘Rank’ showcased the Gallery for Contemporary Art). This was depicted visually. myriad techniques of visualisation deployed followed by a seminar at which the exhibition in the attempt to render visible and make curator Alistair Robinson and Gordon Fyfe of sense of rank, demonstrating the capacity of the University of Keele, who contributed an these techniques to overshadow and take on works of art, but finds its way into more essay to the excellent catalogue, spoke about a life beyond what they seek to depict. These unlikely places as well, including Charles the show. processes were particularly evident in the Booth’s famous maps of London poverty” from The broad remit of ‘Rank’ was to collect charts and diagrams used to plot 1898-9, which continue to draw the spectator together and scrutinise how rank - a term distributions of inequality, and the in with their colour-coded depictions of a deliberately chosen for the breadth of its suggestion they contain that the world can fragmented, divided city that seems at once connotations - has been depicted visually. be known in this way and might be acted distant and close to that which we encounter This was something the show accomplished upon and altered. These processes were today. wonderfully well, in juxtaposing a profusion evident, in a rather different sense, in In bringing together these themes the of very different material - including historical works as well, such as Frith’s exhibition served to raise a rather different photographs, video, painting, frontispieces, persistently beguiling Derby Day (1856-8) and conception of change - a focal point of posters, maps, cartoons and diagrams - the cast of long departed figures it continues CRESC’s work - to those usually encountered gleaned from a sweeping five century time to make visible from mid-Victorian society. in the social sciences. ‘Rank’ emphasised the period. In so doing ‘Rank’ raised questions about the way in which imagery offers not only an ‘Rank’ resonated with a series of CRESC’s visual as a source of knowledge and how this alternative and never simply commensurable concerns. The politics of rank and the shifts in knowledge differs from that generated by account of change to that provided by textual inequalities of power, income and status that textual and numerical sources. Drawing and statistical accounts. But the exhibition underpin this politics were present across the together a range of visually intriguing works, also raised the question of the extent to exhibition. Alongside this ‘Rank’ drew ‘Rank’ emphasised how these concerns which change can be rendered visible, and attention to the multiple relationships that cannot be separated from questions of what remains as unseen as the story of the can exist between those who undertake the aesthetics. In placing artworks alongside impoverished homeless man who is the depicting and ranking and those who are more factually orientated material ‘Rank’ subject of the 1896 photograph ‘One of depicted and ranked. Notable in its highlighted how this isn’t a process limited to them’.

7 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Arts REVIEW Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey

an sculpture escape its objects? Is sculpture not in itself an art defined by Cthe object? If this is so, perhaps it is precisely amongst the sculptors and their current experiments with the limits, possibilities and agencies of matter and space that we might find some assistance in our own thinking as social and cultural analysts as to what is happening when objects and spaces open up or are effaced in the descriptions we provide of social and cultural phenomena.

Anish Kapoor’s recent exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts provided the group of us who went from CRESC with an experience which certainly disturbed our expectations about objects and their capacity to surprise, disorient, provoke and erase themselves. At first a great fountain of silver spheres body that is in question as it becomes the visitor - "beware, wax may stain clothes". announces the exhibition in the courtyard of elongated, flipped or squashed in the The Royal Academy had given Kapoor its the Royal Academy. Some of us thought the reflection, merging with others or jumping entire gallery space: what stain would the tower of iridescent balls a little kitsch, a nod, unexpectedly out of a silvery pool? Or is it the wax leave on the precious mouldings, perhaps, to the Christmas baubles adorning mirrors themselves that are the non-objects, doorways, floors? We found from another the shop window displays on nearby Oxford refusing scrutiny of their material source that all had been treated prior to the Street and Regent Street. Yet stand at the composition and geometrical shape? Visitors mounting of the exhibit – another invisible foot of Kapoor’s sculpture and stare awhile are asked not to touch any of the exhibits but skin placed between the wax and the gallery and it starts to have the dramatic effect of the mirrors drew us right up close as we tried fabric necessary to sustain the illusion of transforming the four walls of the classical to see the curve and line of the surface whose direct sensation. courtyard into a circular realm reflected over reflective qualities kept disorienting us. We In a BBC interview with Alan Yentob, the and over, the spheres reflecting other spheres dutifully refrained from touching these non- sculptor talked about his preoccupation with until, at the top of the work you no longer see objects, and satisfied ourselves with the skin of the object. Materials are subtle your own reflection or those of the sky or the breathing on the polished surface to force it and the choice of finish is a significant one, as ground or even the courtyard but merely a to take some more recognisable form. this surface is what draws the viewer in, what fractal of bubbles overflowing in the middle Other parts of the show were harder to keep engages the eye, what informs and what of the tower. our hands off. In the exhibit ‘Svayambh’ a hides. The play with the unconscious is Mirrors figure large in this latest exhibition of huge sticky, glistening work of red wax creeps explicit – itself an illusory surface perhaps – Kapoor’s work. They provide the ideal its way through the middle of five huge as the exhibit pursues the scatological, the medium for forcing the spectator to rooms of the gallery, shaped by the huge narcissistic, the sexual, the violent with constantly re-evaluate what kind of object it doorways that it is forced through, leaving a school-boy enthusiasm and yet – as with the is that they are looking at. In ‘non-objects’, smeared trail of red on the door frames kitsch baubles - the banal masculinity of the one room of the academy is transformed into between the rooms and the rails upon which wax ejaculated from a canon, and the cement a hall of mirrors. The viewer is drawn to the it moves. The slow-moving body is excreted into solid piles enacts an illusory polished surfaces, invited to play with the mesmerising and visitors are told over and defacement. The Royal Academy is defaced possibilities of bodily distortion – at one over not to get too close and not to stick their and yet retains its institutional control both remove - as the reflection in the mirror fingers in the deposits left in the corners of of its fabric and of the objects it displays. The presents a relational, unstable and changing the room. The gallery attendants watch objects play with scale, they impress and form that induced a visceral queasiness or people who all want to touch – to see what seduce and make you think about space and motion sickness in some of us. Here the kind of stuff this solid, yet plastic material distortion, proximity and distance - they are question of which is the object-denied is actually is. Another sign suggests that the beautiful and they made us laugh. constantly left uncertain – is it the visitor’s prohibition on ‘touching’ may be to protect

8 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 Warm Welcome to John Law [Continued from Front Page]

Part sociologist and part from STS (science, in unanticipated and contradictory ways – materials, technologies, animals and the technology and society), he’s probably best the worlds they claim to be describing. If ‘natural world’. He suggests that it is known for his work with Michel Callon and methods are indeed performative we need to difficult to imagine separating them out. Bruno Latour on actor-network theory. think hard about the realities they produce, For instance, how the boundaries and what the alternatives might be. We need between people and animals get drawn He agrees with Latour that this isn’t a to be alert to the failures as well as the shapes both sides of this divide: humans theory. It’s a toolkit or a sensibility for successes of research methods. We also need do not get shaped by the social alone. In exploring the processes by which social to find critical ways of engaging with new his recent empirical work he has explored and material relations get assembled and methods developed outside the academic this ‘post-human’ sociology in a variety of hold together. Indeed often, he says, world. Then we need to ask about the novel areas: he’s worked on foot and mouth structures hold together without being methods and social realities that might be disease, on farm animal welfare, and is structures: they are non-coherent. And this created in social science in the next decade. currently working on salmon farming. The has implications for research methods Finally we need to think about the latter is an industry in which people, fish, which often have a bias to consistency. implications of new methods for the genetics, micro-organisms, technologies, Researchers go looking for coherent character of knowledge and its locations. environmental issues, market structures, and if they don’t find them they CRESC members share an interest in these transactions, supply chains, national and think they’ve failed. But if the world is non- issues, though with different disciplinary international politics, social inclusions coherent, then perhaps we need to rethink perspectives and theoretical frames, and the and exclusions, regulations and human the agendas that are built into our SLOM theme will be an exciting opportunity health are all mixed up. But how does this methods. to debate these issues in a wide-ranging work in practice? And what does it tell us He is excited by recent work within CRESC interdisciplinary forum. This is a major reason about emerging forms of the social? that is exploring the performative why he is so excited to be joining CRESC. These are key questions for social character of research methods in domains research. John’s STS background also informs his ranging from financialisation, to the digital profound interest in the material world. The John’s email address until April 2010 is modelling of cities, and the remaking of argument is that people and social [email protected]. Please feel free to social science methods. The argument is collectivities are shaped at the same time as contact him. that these tend to produce – though often

We would also like to welcome interests lie in the general field of culture and postdoctoral research aims to describe the the following people who have politics. She joins CRESC during 2010 as cultural dynamics that shape the CRESC’s Honorary Research Fellow. transnational production and circulation of also joined CRESC recently: gold and focuses on a controversial mining Adrian Favell. Adrian is project on the Chile-Argentina border. Modesto Gayo. Professor of Sociology Modesto is a lecturer at UCLA, and Professor Daniel Tischer. Daniel at the School of of European and recently started his Sociology of the International Studies PhD at CRESC after Universidad Diego at Aarhus University, finishing his Masters Portales in Santiago, Denmark. He joins in Global Business Chile. He was CRESC as an Analysis at involved in the occasional visitor in Manchester Business Cultural Capital and the academic year 2009/10, with a School. His PhD topic Social Exclusion project, based at the comparative project to consider the sub- revolves around the University of Manchester and the Open cultural sources of creativity in cities such as financial crisis and its impact on civil society. University and has returned to CRESC as a London and Tokyo and the role that Finally, we would also like to welcome as a visiting fellow. migration/mobility can play in driving the core member of CRESC staff, Alban Webb. dynamism of such urban global hubs. Meral Özbek. Meral was trained as an Alban is taking up the post of research fellow architect in Middle Fabiana Li. Fabiana for research theme two Reframing the Nation east University, was awarded a and will be based at CRESC’s Open University Ankara. And currently Newton International site. teaches at Mimar Fellowship (2009- To find out more about the work of people at Sinan University in 2011) and joined CRESC and how to contact them please visit Istanbul at the CRESC to work with the CRESC website at: Department of Prof. Penny Harvey, www.cresc.ac.uk/people Sociology. Her her UK Sponsor. Her principal academic

9 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

A Question and Answer:

& Meral Özbek

Q Hannah Knox

Meral Özbek is working at sociology of emotions and personal lives or CRESC as an honorary research the anthropology of social networks are already making a bridge, and I believe asking fellow during 2009-10. She joins their questions to the material of novels, and us from the Sociology using their methods of analysis while Department of Mimar Sinan positing novelistic spaces as both social and Fine Arts University in Istanbul. narrative fields in themselves will prove to be fruitful. There is much to learn from thinkers who have literary correlates to their theory or philosophy, like Benjamin on Baudelaire and 1. What brought you here to spend time at Proust; Deleuze on Proust and Kafka; Zizek on CRESC? various popular texts or Ranajit Guha on My interest in Pierre Bourdieu’s social-cultural Tagore in subaltern studies. Theories of thought and methodological thinking literature are very important, not only in that brought me here. The related work done at they provide us with models to comprehend CRESC excited me and I wished to become human experience and individual part of its seminar-workshop environment, to subjectivities, but also, since their object of meet colleagues with similar interests, and analysis are narrative and discursive forms, spend in Manchester (which I think is a they teach us a lot about representation. perfect city for studying and walking) some Without this mediation of language, the happy time of intellectual work without social-gender positions in the novel. I also nature of experience (or the demise of it) or lecturing. When I wrote to Mike Savage, he hope to read some of the written material at ideologies (and doxa) are not conceivable. kindly invited me. This is also the first time I CRESC to get acquainted with the conceptual Think of Bahktin and his concept of cronotope have left Turkey for sabbatical study. and methodological debates in them as well as a representation of the time-space model as the research methods being used here, lived in the external social world. Likewise 2. What are you working on during your time especially social network analysis and Franco Moretti’s large scale venture. He in Manchester? multiple correspondence analyses, in order to analyzes world literature in time and space, So far I have been working on the CRESC be able work in the long run comparatively on linking singular literary pieces, not only workshop on "Social change and New cultural fields and texts. intertextually but also spatially in the world Methods: New Perspectives on Turkish arena, presenting the analysis of his vast data 3. There is a lot of interest in CRESC in the idea Literature", which was held on the15th of in visual figures like maps and diagrams. of bringing studies of fiction into conversation January 2010 at the University of Manchester. with more conventional social scientific In Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his As one of the participants, I did a methods. What do you see to be the payoff of venture in analyzing Flaubert’s novel presentation on Orhan Pamuk’s last novel combining these approaches? Sentimental Education, there is something "Museum of Innocence", inspired by Pierre peculiarly paradigmatic, in bringing a lot of Bourdieu’s internal-external reading method This interdisciplinarity, I believe, will bring the above interests into conversation as well. of Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, in enrichment. What is at stake here is to be He thought that this novel (through the work his The Rules of Art. I also rely in this work, able to envision the conjectural relation of formalization) already supplied all the which is a start for a larger project of literary between social structure (the statistical tools for the analysis of its structure, since field in Turkey, on the concepts and problems regularities) and individual-collective practice the structure of the social space the hero posed by Walter Benjamin (politics of and experience in changing everyday life lived in was also the structure of the social remembrance and experience), M.M. Bahktin patterns. But I think we need envision this space in which the author himself was (cronotope), Franco Moretti (bildungsroman, conversation in a larger frame. We need to situated. Through inferring the position- graphical thinking) and Henri Lefebvre remember here the legacy of earlier works, taking (point of view) of the writer from the (everyday life). Now the workshop is over, I too: such as Simmel, who showed us the novel, Bourdieu articulated his internal am writing up the final paper from my objective-subjective mental structures of the reading of the structure of the novel with an presentation. I also plan to start a small modern era through the delineation of its external reading whereby he could place the analysis using Multiple Correspondence "social types"; or, Raymond Williams who leading position of Flaubert in the production Analysis (MCA), with the help from colleagues coined the term "structure of feeling" as a of the autonomous literary field that at CRESC, looking at the homology between surplus to compensate for a lack in social emerged in the 19th century France. the narrative positions of focalization and analysis. Newer sub-disciplines like the

10 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 Finance In Question/ Finance In Crisis 12-14 April 2010, Manchester

n April this year, CRESC will be holding a distinctive and devices and techniques; financial crisis, social relations and timely international conference about finance which trust; the limits of prescience and the irrelevance of many Iinvites analysis by, and encourages debate between, economic knowledges; finance, restructuring and labour; researchers from many disciplines who represent different politics/markets/moralities; states, re-regulation and kinds of political and cultural economy as well as social governance of finance. studies of finance. The emphasis of the conference is on There will also be media and practitioner panels and finance in question as much as finance in crisis, as, well plenary sessions where distinguished academics will be set before the onset of crisis in 2007, there were many to answer big questions about what and who is in crisis, unresolved issues about the role of finance in present day why did nobody see it coming and whether more Conferences 2010 Conferences capitalism. The conference will re-examine received ways democratic control of finance is possible. of understanding finance and to consider what changes to financial arrangement may follow from present strains. Plenary academics include Michel Aglietta (CEPII), Andrew CRESC International Gamble ( Cambridge) Donald MacKenzie (Edinburgh), As with other major conferences, there will be multiple Doreen Massey, Philip Mirowski (Notre Dame), Onora themes and an opportunity for academic researchers to O’Neill, Mike Power (LSE), Saskia Sassen (Columbia) and present papers and propose sessions. Themes so far Wolfgang Streeck (Max Planck) proposed include: money, capitalist calculation, market CRESC Annual Conference: The Social Life of Methods 31 August - 3 September, 2010, Oxford

uring the past century, social scientific capacity provide ‘useful’ knowledge, pose social forms, with new media and methods have come to be extensively specific practical and ethical challenges to materials, and with non-academic Ddeployed in government, established repertoires of social science audiences. During the conference, these administration and business, as well as in methods. In August 2010 CRESC will be artists and related practitioners, including academic research as a way of understanding running a conference which aims to engage curators, will join with the community of and intervening in processes of social and with these issues by taking a fresh look at social scientists in considering how the cultural change. Maps, enumerations, where methods come from and what they do. methods that each of us deploy in our surveys, interviews, indicators, software and work have the capacity to affect social and The conference promises to bring together a visualizations proliferate. This poses an cultural relations. This promises to broad spectrum of interests of people from important question regarding how we can generate a lively interaction between different social scientific backgrounds. We are best understand how social science methods artists and social scientists encouraging particularly excited that the conference will both shape, and are themselves shaped by each of the participants to reflect upon also involve contributions from a number of economic, social and cultural forces. the ‘social life’ of the methods that they artists. We believe that the social sciences Developments such as digitization, new use, and inflecting the conference with a have much to learn from artists and the public spaces for debate, an increasing reach that we hope will go far beyond the methods that they deploy in their concern for ‘evidence’, and a challenge to the conventional limits of academic debate. engagements with, for example, changing ability of some academic research to prove a

11 CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010 New CRESC Working Papers

The following working papers have been added to the CRESC website http://www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/papers.htm

Working Paper No.71 The Ancestor in the Machine Jeanette Edwards Working Paper No.72 Against the Omnivore: Assemblages of Contemporary Musical Taste in the United Kingdom Mike Savage and Modesto Gayo-Cal Working Paper No.73 Cultural Participation, the Making of Distinction and the Case of Fans of FC United of Manchester George Poulton Working Paper No.74 New Populations: Scoping Paper on Digital Transactional Data Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage Working Paper No.75 Undisclosed and Unsustainable: Problems of the UK National Business Model John Buchanan, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams Working Paper No.76 Affluence in the Making: The 1953-54 Household Expenditures Enquiry and Visualization of Taste Shinbu Majima Working Paper No.77 Urban Regeneration in East Manchester: A Process of Gentrification? Camilla Lewis Working Paper No.78 Old is New Again: National Responses to the Financial Crisis Adriana Nilsson Forthcoming Events

For more information about all our forthcoming events please check out our website http://www.cresc.ac.uk/ working working papers

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