Financial Reform orBusiness as Usual?CRESC Assesses the Evidence

John Law is joining CRESC in April. Following the departure of one of CRESC’s foundingdirectors Tony Bennett, John is moving from Lancaster to the Chair of Sociology at theOpen University. He’ll be working closely with OU colleagues Marie Gillespie and

Sophie Watson as a CRESC Centre Director, and will be convening the new Social Life ofMethod (SLOM) research theme with Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage. John’s backgroundis interdisciplinary. [continued on page 9]

In October, CRESC’s ‘Alternative Report onUK Banking Reform’ made waves in thedebate about the extent to which the

government should increase regulation in thefinancial sector following the 2008 crash in

the global financial markets. Drawing onresearch produced by a 12 strong workinggroup of CRESC researchers and outsidepractitioners, CRESC’s public interest Reportchallenged the old City of London arguments

about the social value of finance which havebeen re-used since 2008 to deflect any re-regulation which threatens to harm thecompetitive position of the City of London [continued on Page 2]

www.cresc.ac.uk

In this issue:CRESC’s Alternative Reporton Banking Reform p2

Researching TransformativeEvents: Witness Seminars asMethod 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

CRESC Conferences p11

New Working Papers p12

CRESCNewsI S S U E 1 0 F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 0

ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

New CRESC Director:Welcome to John Law

[continued from p1] It was thus unsurprisingto CRESC researchers that in December’s Pre-Budget Report the government announced atax on banking bonuses and the New Year’shonours list then pointedly omitted bankers,including the outgoing Lord Mayor. Thesechanges marked the end of the cosydeferential relation between British politicalclasses and London’s financial elites .Thebonus tax proposal predictably sparked ahostile reaction from the City. As AngelaKnight of the British Bankers Associationwarned, the tax was ‘populist, political andpenal’.

It is likely that CRESC’s ‘Alternative Report onUK Banking Reform’* contributed to the shiftin opinion in the preceding months. Earlier in2009, the Treasury White Paper ReformingFinancial Markets accepted the Bischof andWigley reports’ narrative about the benefitsof financial services to the British economy.The Alternative Report was taken up in theObserver and the Guardian whose first leader(16 October 2009) praised CRESC’s "excellentcorrective" to the finance lobby’s "fairy story"about taxes paid and jobs created.Subsequent coverage in the Guardian andFinancial Times focused on the Report’spolitical analysis of excessive "insider"influence.

The tax revenues from the finance sector arenow offset by the immediate cost of bankbail-out. In the five years up to 2006/7, thefinance sector paid and collected £203 billionin taxes in the UK, but the immediate,upfront cost of the UK bail-out was £289billion, and this could rise potentially to£1,183 billion. This is a pro cyclical sectorwhich socialises its losses so that the taxpayer is largely responsible when the bubblebursts.

In finance, rising profitability on the upswingdoes not translate into new jobs. By 2007 thefinance sector directly employed around 1million workers (mainly in retail), which wasno more than in 1991. Indirect employment

(i.e. jobs in consultancy, accounting and lawdependent on finance) added another500,000 workers. According to these figuresthe finance sector (directly and indirectly)employs less people than Britishmanufacturing.

Finally, finance concentrates rather thandiffuses prosperity because of thegeographical clustering of wholesaleemployment in East London. Highly paidinvestment banking jobs are heavily clusteredwithin the City Mile and Canary Wharf, whilstretail banks do not create jobs as they mustcontrol high street and back office head countas they attempt to deliver shareholder value.

If we ask why these points had not previously

2

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

THEME 1: REMAKING CAPITALISM

CRESC’s Alternative Reporton Banking ReformAdam Leaver and Karel Williams

Source: Publicly available information on the members of the Bischoff Working Group

Exhibit 1: An analysis of the Bischoff ReportPublic Sector

60 Years(9%)

Media71 Years

(11%)

Industry36 Years

(5%)

FundManagement

66 Years(10%)

FinancialInfrastructure

38 Years(6%) Banking

186 Years(28%)

Para-Finance205 Years

(31%)

Number of panelists: 21Total number of years experience: 662Average number of years experience: 32

been made, the answer is that finance sectorinsiders and lobbyists had undue influenceover the Bischof and Wigley reports. As CRESCcalculated, the Bischoff committee membershad 75% of their 662 years of workexperience in the City or City-related services.Another Guardian first leader (26 November2009) used these results to lambast officialreports, like the Walker Report on bankgovernance, as "chaps talking to chaps andcoming up with a few limp proposals thatneed not inconvenience anyone too much".So CRESC helped make the financial crisis intoa democratic issue.

* downloadable from the home page of ourweb site at www.cresc.ac.uk.

Non-City167 years

25%

City495 years

75%

Over the course of the last year work inTheme 2 has taken a newmethodological direction with the use

of the witness seminar as a research format.In research carried out in concert withCRESC’s affiliated ‘Tuning In’ project, andalong with researchers in Theme 3, twowitness seminars were held on a) theBangladesh Liberation War of 1971, whichsaw the establishment of Bangladesh as anindependent state, and b) the fall of theBerlin Wall in 1989, which marked the end ofthe post-war settlement in Eastern Europeand the beginning of the fall of communism.These two witness seminars drew togethermembers of the BBC World Service whoreported on these seminal events at the time,many of whom had not seen one anothersince the events took place, along with otheragents involved in the processes theyreported on.

A witness seminar is essentially a form ofgroup interview in which participants in theevents under discussion can meet together todebate their role in and perception of theissues. The format was devised in the 1980sas a means of studying the recent past by theInstitute for Contemporary British History(now the Centre for Contemporary BritishHistory) at the Institute of HistoricalResearch. Unlike traditional oral history,which relies on individual interviews carriedout by a researcher, the witness seminarallows the participants to interact with oneanother, taking the conversation in differentdirections as new details or perspectives areuncovered. Although usually mediated by anacademic chair with a set of issues they askthe panel to address, this gives much morefreedom to the participants to engage withone another and may draw out issues thatwould otherwise have remained buried as

participants stimulate one another’smemories, or react to discoveries aboutothers’ perspectives or motivations that wereunknown to them at the time the events tookplace. This approach prevents the discussionof the subject from being dominated by theperspective and concerns of the researchersinvolved, giving a good sense of what theparticipants considered important and theextent to which they agreed about this. Wefound it also gave significant insights into theoperation of the BBC World Service whichmight not have been evident from individualinterviews.

The witness seminars were important eventsin themselves, both for the researchers andhopefully for the participants, providing aform of commemoration and camaraderie aswell as a source of information for furtherstudy. However, we did not want to make thewitness seminars the end of our research,rather we sought to use them as a way ofstimulating a new research trajectory.Therefore we used the information andperspective we gained from these seminarsto frame a new set of questions or an array oftraditional oral history interviews thatallowed us to follow up the issues raised inthe seminars in more depth and to offercritical engagement with some of thecomments made.

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

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THEME 2: REFRAMING THE NATION

Researching TransformativeEvents: Witness Seminarsas MethodFrancis Dodsworth

“A witness seminar is essentially a form of groupinterview in which participants in the events underdiscussion can meet together to debate their role inand perception of the issues.

”

Researching the City is a significant newresearch initiative in Theme 3 tocomplement those research areas that

were already thriving - notably anengagement with the relationship betweengovernance and culture, in particularmuseums and the heritage sector. Thisinitiative takes forward the notion of the cityas a tool of government and pushes it into anexploration on how the materiality of urbanspace intersects with urban cultures. Thenotion of materiality encompasses theimportance of economic processes inunderstanding cities as well as the idea of thecity as a built environment which ‘solidifies’social and cultural processes in visible andmaterial ways. Buildings and builtenvironments are thus read as texts whichreveal embedded social and culturalprocesses. Visual signs, symbols and artefactsare key here. So too are the ways in whichgovernmental policies act to embed socialand cultural relations in particular urbanspaces and forms.

There are a diversity of projects commencingor in progress on the topic of ‘The City’ takingup a number of different themes. FrancisDodsworth and Sophie Watson are exploringthe ways in which different faiths have beenmade visible, tangible and legible in EastLondon through their inscription in places,texts, images and public practices. SimonCarter’s project takes tuberculosis as a casestudy to analyse the ways in which thescience of epidemiology came to be deployedas a key resource in policy making andgovernment practices concerning publichealth in the mid twentieth century, inparticular focusing on how it was crucial indemarcating urban/rural boundaries.

Several projects focus on questions of urbangovernance. For example, Allan Cochrane’sresearch reconsiders regional and urbanpolitics and power, questioning scalarapproaches and looking for other waysunderstanding governance spaces,theoretically drawing on notions ofassemblage and topology. Kevin Ward is

involved in a program of work arguing for aconceptualization of the making of urbanpolicy through both its territorial andrelational geographies. This considers howcities are assembled by the situated practicesand imaginations of actors who arecontinually attracting, managing, promoting,and resisting global flows of policies andprograms. Eric Swyngedouw’s researchexplores the transformation of urbandemocracy over the past two decades. Here,the objective is to reassess 'the polis' as ademocratic space in an age ofdepoliticisation. This project is framedthrough the lens of changing forms of urbangovernance, particularly with respect tourban development strategies on the onehand and urban environmental practices onthe other in a variety of European urbangeographical settings. Bringing a morehistorical focus to such questions, FrancisDodsworth is exploring the establishment ofa wide range of governmental institutionsand practices instituted between 1780-1835,the aim of which was to reform both thestructure of the city and social practice withinit. This project explores the intersection of

social practice, infrastructure andinstitutional organisation in the governmentof the modern city.

Questions of the transnational and globalhave been exercising urban theorists over thelast couple of decades, and this area isexplored by Nina Glick Schiller in her researchon the relationship between the migrant andthe city. This represents a development ofmigration theory which contests themethodological nationalism of mostmigration studies that remain fixed withinthe comparative framework of individualnation-states and state policies. Otherresearch looks at the materiality of the citythrough the genealogy of objects such asstreet bollards (Evelyn Ruppert) - toinvestigate how social change is congealed inthe design, operation and presence of urbanobjects - and blue plaques (Sophie Watson) -to explore shifts in the cultural and materialpractices of incorporating figures into thenational memory.

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

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THEME 3: GOVERNING CULTURES: CITIES,POLICIES AND HERITAGE

Researching the CitySophie Watson

Shanghai Skyline

The organisation of a series of publiclectures marked a turning point inTheme 4 researcher Gillian Evans’

ethnographic research about London’sOlympic legacy. Embedded within thecommunications and marketing team of theOlympic Park Legacy Company, Gillian’schallenge, as a participant observer, was toprove that she too could engage the public inevents designed to communicate key legacymessages, raise the profile of the LegacyCompany and contribute, thereby, to the taskof realising the Olympic legacy. Learning in-depth about how the legacy is being plannedand focusing on the processes through whicha complex material entity – a new piece ofcity - is to be brought into being, Gillian’spersonal challenge for the public lectureseries was to create the opportunity forcritical debate.

The 246 hectares of Olympic Park land wasassembled via compulsory purchase order outof mostly post-industrial brown-field sites inthe lower Lea Valley. It will play host, in thesummer of 2012, to four weeks of world classsporting events and after this, the hope isthat the billions of pounds of public moneyspent on transforming contaminatedindustrial land and waterways into usableparkland, development platforms andsporting venues will begin to reap dividends.As one of the largest regeneration projects inEurope takes shape over the next forty years,the aspiration is for the growth of a newmetropolitan district of London. Change anddevelopment within the park is to beintegrated with transformation in the areasaround the fringes of the park which aresome of the most deprived boroughs in thewhole of England. The Olympic Games arebilled as a once in a lifetime opportunity tobring change to the lives of everyone living inthe East End of London and it was on thispromise that the bid to host the Games waswon.

Regeneration projects are, however,notoriously difficult developments to deliver

and this is the first Olympic Gamesto ever make legacy promises.Everyone in the East End of Londoncan allude to the precedent ofnearby Canary Wharf. A massiveregeneration project that is stillgrowing, Canary Wharf is a financialdistrict first developed in the 1980s under alaissez-faire Conservative government with atrickle down model of socio-economic changefor surrounding neighbourhoods.Unfortunately that model delivered little inthe way of local benefit and even as the areanow boasts the creation of 90,000 jobs in aservice economy associated with the world offinance and could claim (at least before therecession) to be creating significant wealth atthe city-wide and national level, it has donelittle to ameliorate the devastating effects ofpost-industrialisation on the ex-dockingcommunities of the East End. This has meantthat the spotlight is on the Olympic ParkLegacy Company to prove that the lessons ofCanary Wharf have been learned in terms ofurban planning and design, that everyonenow understands that it is essential tointegrate the new development into thesurrounding areas rather than creating anisland of middle class prosperity in a sea ofdeprivation; to come up with a model ofdevelopment that has socio-economictransformation of local areas at its heart andto engage local working class residents whoare proud of their history and their localityand who need to feel ownership of thedevelopment as opposed to being excludedfrom it.

Working on behalf of the Olympic Park LegacyCompany and liaising with some of theforemost urban studies centres in centralLondon universities, Gillian designed eventsaimed primarily at postgraduate students,but that attracted a much wider audienceincluding local and central governmentstakeholders and which generated significantpress interest including BBC Radio 4 You andYours. 1200 people in total attended the

events each of which reflected the specificfocus of interest of each urban studies centreand debated one of four timely legacythemes. The universities Gillian worked withwere the London School of Economics andPolitical Science, University College London,Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary.Respective urban studies centres were TheCities Programme , The Urban Lab , theCentre for Urban and Community Researchand The City Centre .

Titles of the four events which took place inNovember 2009 were as follows:

• The First Legacy Games: the physical andsocio-economic development of the EastEnd of London.

• Growing a New Piece of City: designing alegacy for 21st Century London.

• The Art of Regeneration: creating an artisticand community legacy for London 2012.

• The People’s Legacy: communityparticipation in the shaping of East London2012 and beyond.

The success of Gillian’s events has led to theextension of her ethnographic researchplacement with the Olympic Park LegacyCompany and she now has the opportunity toobserve legacy planning until 2012. For moreinformation about the Gillian’s researchproject 2013 and Beyond see:

http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology/about/staff/evans/

For more details of the Olympic legacy andeach Lecture Series event showing the list ofspeakers for each lecture and podcasts seewww.legacy-now.co.uk/education/lecture-series/

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

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Growing a New Piece of City: designinga legacy for 21st Century London

THEME 4: TOPOLOGIES OF SOCIAL CHANGE

The 2012 LondonOlympic LegacyGillian Evans

CRESC is launching a new theme ofresearch entitled ‘trajectories ofparticipation’, convened by Mike

Savage, which focuses on how individualsmove into, and out of, various kinds of socialengagements and cultural activity duringtheir lives. This will also contextualise thesepatterns through a series of historicalanalyses of cultural engagement in post warBritain.

An important early paper on these issues bySimone Scherger and Mike Savagedemonstrates the importance of parentalencouragement for affecting the educationalattainment, social mobility prospects, andcultural participation of Britons today. Theyanalysed the wide ranging evidence onparental encouragement for cultural andartistic activity when children were growingup contained in the Department of Culture,Media and Sports Taking Part-Survey (2005and 2006). Slightly more than 50% of Britonshad never, as children been taken to dance orclassical music performances, and only 12 percent had been taken at least three times ayear. Museums or art galleries have a quitesimilar distribution, though at a slightlyhigher level. Children were most likely to havevisited historic sites, though still around 35per cent had never been taken. There arestriking findings regarding libraries, wherethere was a strong polarisation betweenthose who never went there with theirparents or other adults (around 43 per cent)and those who went there at least threetimes a year (46 per cent). Around half of therespondents were encouraged to read a lot bytheir parents. Only one third wereencouraged a lot to play musicalinstrument(s), act, dance, sing, draw, paint,write stories, poems, plays or music.

Scherger and Savage grouped together allthese different kinds of encouragement into

one index. This shows that parents fromdifferent social classes have very differentproclivities to encourage their children. Thechildren of higher professional fathers scoresystematically higher than any other class.This is a very sharp contrast to those inroutine occupations where only three percent score so highly. By contrast, 40 per centof the children of routine workers are inhouseholds with very low scores of 4 or lesspoints. Lower professionals are closer tohigher professionals, with the highermanagers and large employers rather furtherbehind and closer to the intermediate classesthan to the higher professionals.

Savage and Scherger go on to show thatparental encouragement affects how wellchildren do in the educational system, evencontrolling for social factors such as socialclass which are known to be important. In afinal model examining the determinants ofupward mobility, they show that, asexpected, the experience of higher educationboosts the odds of being upwardly mobile.However, the intensity of parental

socialisation into cultural activities has aclearly significant effect over and above thatof education. After the inclusion of theadditive index of parental socialisation, theexplanatory power of the model rises slightly,and the effects of educational achievementbecome slightly weaker. Being taken to artsevents or to the library, and being encouragedto be active in the arts, in sport or in readingenhances the chances of being upwardlymobile and makes a difference within thelower and intermediate classes. Part of theeffect of education on mobility chances canbe traced back to differences in culturalsocialisation. Gender, ethnicity and exact

class of origin do nothave any significanteffects.

This research suggeststhat cultural capital isa significant feature inthe shaping ofpeople’s life chancesand builds on thearguments developedin CRESC’s influentialCultural Capital andSocial Exclusionproject. The bookresulting from thisstudy, by TonyBennett, Mike Savage,Elizabeth Silva, Alan

Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright,Culture, Class, Distinction was published aspart of the Routledge CRESC book series in2009 and has alreafy been hailed as a‘landmark text’ by a reviewer in the BritishJournal of Sociology Cultural Transmission,Educational Attainment, and social mobility bySimone Scherger and Mike Savage, CRESCWorking Paper No 70, is available from CRESCwebsite.

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

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THEME 5: TRAJECTORIES OF PARTICIPATIONAND INEQUALITY

New research:on how parents’ encouragement affectschildren’s cultural activity and prospectsMike Savage

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%large

employers,higher

managerial

higherprofessional

lowerprofessional

intermediate(incl. lower

managerial)

smallemployers,

own accountworkers

lowersupervisory,

technical

semi-routine

routine

0 1-4 5-8 9-12 13-16

Figure 1: Overall-index parental socialisation for different parental classes

Weighted percentages. Unweighted n=10,568

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

7

In 2009-10 CRESC researchers, organizedin a centre-wide integrating theme onThe Social Life of Methods are pursuing a

range of projects exploring the challenge ofthe digital to conventional social scienceresearch methods. This strand, organized byEvelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage picks up onthe much discussed arguments of Mike

SOCIAL LIFE OF METHODS

The challenge of the digital Mike Savage

Savage and Roger Burrows ‘The comingcrisis of empirical sociology’ in the journalSociology (2007) which claims that thesample survey and the qualitativeinterview are losing ground to thewidespread deployment of transactionaldata in business, government andadministration. These projects will develop

these interests through focused casestudies of how conceptions of ‘population’and ‘social relations’ are being re-constructed. Our projects include interestsin the deployment of digital data in censusand population metrics; in archival sources,and as a complement to survey sources.

In July CRESC organised a visit to the ‘Rank:picturing the social order 1516-2009’exhibition at the Grundy Gallery,

Blackpool. (The exhibition also appeared atLeeds Art Gallery and Sunderland’s NorthernGallery for Contemporary Art). This wasfollowed by a seminar at which the exhibitioncurator Alistair Robinson and Gordon Fyfe ofthe University of Keele, who contributed anessay to the excellent catalogue, spoke aboutthe show.

The broad remit of ‘Rank’ was to collecttogether and scrutinise how rank - a termdeliberately chosen for the breadth of itsconnotations - has been depicted visually.This was something the show accomplishedwonderfully well, in juxtaposing a profusionof very different material - includingphotographs, video, painting, frontispieces,posters, maps, cartoons and diagrams -gleaned from a sweeping five century timeperiod.

‘Rank’ resonated with a series of CRESC’sconcerns. The politics of rank and the shifts ininequalities of power, income and status thatunderpin this politics were present across theexhibition. Alongside this ‘Rank’ drewattention to the multiple relationships thatcan exist between those who undertake thedepicting and ranking and those who aredepicted and ranked. Notable in its

questioning of this relationship was NinaBeier and Marie Lund’s ‘Most outstanding’(2006), with its images of groups asked toarrange themselves in hierarchies.

At the same time ‘Rank’ showcased themyriad techniques of visualisation deployedin the attempt to render visible and makesense of rank, demonstrating the capacity ofthese techniques to overshadow and take ona life beyond what they seek to depict. Theseprocesses were particularly evident in thecharts and diagrams used to plotdistributions of inequality, and thesuggestion they contain that the world canbe known in this way and might be actedupon and altered. These processes wereevident, in a rather different sense, inhistorical works as well, such as Frith’spersistently beguiling Derby Day (1856-8) andthe cast of long departed figures it continuesto make visible from mid-Victorian society.

In so doing ‘Rank’ raised questions about thevisual as a source of knowledge and how thisknowledge differs from that generated bytextual and numerical sources. Drawingtogether a range of visually intriguing works,‘Rank’ emphasised how these concernscannot be separated from questions ofaesthetics. In placing artworks alongsidemore factually orientated material ‘Rank’highlighted how this isn’t a process limited to

works of art, but finds its way into moreunlikely places as well, including CharlesBooth’s famous maps of London poverty from1898-9, which continue to draw the spectatorin with their colour-coded depictions of afragmented, divided city that seems at oncedistant and close to that which we encountertoday.

In bringing together these themes theexhibition served to raise a rather differentconception of change - a focal point ofCRESC’s work - to those usually encounteredin the social sciences. ‘Rank’ emphasised theway in which imagery offers not only analternative and never simply commensurableaccount of change to that provided by textualand statistical accounts. But the exhibitionalso raised the question of the extent towhich change can be rendered visible, andwhat remains as unseen as the story of theimpoverished homeless man who is thesubject of the 1896 photograph ‘One ofthem’.

Picturing RankAndrew HillR

EVIE

W “The broad remit of ‘Rank’was to collect togetherand scrutinise how rank -a term deliberately chosenfor the breadth of itsconnotations - has beendepicted visually.

”

8

Anish Kapoor at theRoyal Academy of Arts Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey

Can sculpture escape its objects? Issculpture not in itself an art defined bythe object? If this is so, perhaps it is

precisely amongst the sculptors and theircurrent experiments with the limits,possibilities and agencies of matter and spacethat we might find some assistance in ourown thinking as social and cultural analystsas to what is happening when objects andspaces open up or are effaced in thedescriptions we provide of social and culturalphenomena.

Anish Kapoor’s recent exhibition at the RoyalAcademy of Arts provided the group of uswho went from CRESC with an experiencewhich certainly disturbed our expectationsabout objects and their capacity to surprise,disorient, provoke and erase themselves. Atfirst a great fountain of silver spheresannounces the exhibition in the courtyard ofthe Royal Academy. Some of us thought thetower of iridescent balls a little kitsch, a nod,perhaps, to the Christmas baubles adorningthe shop window displays on nearby OxfordStreet and Regent Street. Yet stand at thefoot of Kapoor’s sculpture and stare awhileand it starts to have the dramatic effect oftransforming the four walls of the classicalcourtyard into a circular realm reflected overand over, the spheres reflecting other spheresuntil, at the top of the work you no longer seeyour own reflection or those of the sky or theground or even the courtyard but merely afractal of bubbles overflowing in the middleof the tower.

Mirrors figure large in this latest exhibition ofKapoor’s work. They provide the idealmedium for forcing the spectator toconstantly re-evaluate what kind of object itis that they are looking at. In ‘non-objects’,one room of the academy is transformed intoa hall of mirrors. The viewer is drawn to thepolished surfaces, invited to play with thepossibilities of bodily distortion – at oneremove - as the reflection in the mirrorpresents a relational, unstable and changingform that induced a visceral queasiness ormotion sickness in some of us. Here thequestion of which is the object-denied isconstantly left uncertain – is it the visitor’s

body that is in question as it becomeselongated, flipped or squashed in thereflection, merging with others or jumpingunexpectedly out of a silvery pool? Or is it themirrors themselves that are the non-objects,refusing scrutiny of their materialcomposition and geometrical shape? Visitorsare asked not to touch any of the exhibits butthe mirrors drew us right up close as we triedto see the curve and line of the surface whosereflective qualities kept disorienting us. Wedutifully refrained from touching these non-objects, and satisfied ourselves withbreathing on the polished surface to force itto take some more recognisable form.

Other parts of the show were harder to keepour hands off. In the exhibit ‘Svayambh’ ahuge sticky, glistening work of red wax creepsits way through the middle of five hugerooms of the gallery, shaped by the hugedoorways that it is forced through, leaving asmeared trail of red on the door framesbetween the rooms and the rails upon whichit moves. The slow-moving body ismesmerising and visitors are told over andover not to get too close and not to stick theirfingers in the deposits left in the corners ofthe room. The gallery attendants watchpeople who all want to touch – to see whatkind of stuff this solid, yet plastic materialactually is. Another sign suggests that theprohibition on ‘touching’ may be to protect

the visitor - "beware, wax may stain clothes".The Royal Academy had given Kapoor itsentire gallery space: what stain would thewax leave on the precious mouldings,doorways, floors? We found from anothersource that all had been treated prior to themounting of the exhibit – another invisibleskin placed between the wax and the galleryfabric necessary to sustain the illusion ofdirect sensation.

In a BBC interview with Alan Yentob, thesculptor talked about his preoccupation withthe skin of the object. Materials are subtleand the choice of finish is a significant one, asthis surface is what draws the viewer in, whatengages the eye, what informs and whathides. The play with the unconscious isexplicit – itself an illusory surface perhaps –as the exhibit pursues the scatological, thenarcissistic, the sexual, the violent withschool-boy enthusiasm and yet – as with thekitsch baubles - the banal masculinity of thewax ejaculated from a canon, and the cementexcreted into solid piles enacts an illusorydefacement. The Royal Academy is defacedand yet retains its institutional control bothof its fabric and of the objects it displays. Theobjects play with scale, they impress andseduce and make you think about space anddistortion, proximity and distance - they arebeautiful and they made us laugh.

REV

IEW

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

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Warm Welcome to John Law [Continued from Front Page]

Part sociologist and part from STS (science,technology and society), he’s probably bestknown for his work with Michel Callon andBruno Latour on actor-network theory.

He agrees with Latour that this isn’t atheory. It’s a toolkit or a sensibility forexploring the processes by which socialand material relations get assembled andhold together. Indeed often, he says,structures hold together without beingstructures: they are non-coherent. And thishas implications for research methodswhich often have a bias to consistency.Researchers go looking for coherentstructures, and if they don’t find them theythink they’ve failed. But if the world is non-coherent, then perhaps we need to rethinkthe agendas that are built into ourmethods.

He is excited by recent work within CRESCthat is exploring the performativecharacter of research methods in domainsranging from financialisation, to the digitalmodelling of cities, and the remaking ofsocial science methods. The argument isthat these tend to produce – though often

in unanticipated and contradictory ways –the worlds they claim to be describing. Ifmethods are indeed performative we need tothink hard about the realities they produce,and what the alternatives might be. We needto be alert to the failures as well as thesuccesses of research methods. We also needto find critical ways of engaging with newmethods developed outside the academicworld. Then we need to ask about the novelmethods and social realities that might becreated in social science in the next decade.Finally we need to think about theimplications of new methods for thecharacter of knowledge and its locations.CRESC members share an interest in theseissues, though with different disciplinaryperspectives and theoretical frames, and theSLOM theme will be an exciting opportunityto debate these issues in a wide-ranginginterdisciplinary forum. This is a major reasonwhy he is so excited to be joining CRESC.

John’s STS background also informs hisprofound interest in the material world. Theargument is that people and socialcollectivities are shaped at the same time as

materials, technologies, animals and the‘natural world’. He suggests that it isdifficult to imagine separating them out.For instance, how the boundariesbetween people and animals get drawnshapes both sides of this divide: humansdo not get shaped by the social alone. Inhis recent empirical work he has exploredthis ‘post-human’ sociology in a variety ofareas: he’s worked on foot and mouthdisease, on farm animal welfare, and iscurrently working on salmon farming. Thelatter is an industry in which people, fish,genetics, micro-organisms, technologies,environmental issues, markettransactions, supply chains, national andinternational politics, social inclusionsand exclusions, regulations and humanhealth are all mixed up. But how does thiswork in practice? And what does it tell usabout emerging forms of the social?These are key questions for socialresearch.

John’s email address until April 2010 isj.law@lancaster.ac.uk. Please feel free tocontact him.

We would also like to welcomethe following people who havealso joined CRESC recently:

Modesto Gayo.Modesto is a lecturerat the School ofSociology of theUniversidad DiegoPortales in Santiago,Chile. He wasinvolved in theCultural Capital and

Social Exclusion project, based at theUniversity of Manchester and the OpenUniversity and has returned to CRESC as avisiting fellow.

Meral Özbek. Meral was trained as anarchitect in Middleeast University,Ankara. And currentlyteaches at MimarSinan University inIstanbul at theDepartment ofSociology. Herprincipal academic

interests lie in the general field of culture andpolitics. She joins CRESC during 2010 asCRESC’s Honorary Research Fellow.

Adrian Favell. Adrian isProfessor of Sociologyat UCLA, and Professorof European andInternational Studiesat Aarhus University,Denmark. He joinsCRESC as anoccasional visitor in

the academic year 2009/10, with acomparative project to consider the sub-cultural sources of creativity in cities such asLondon and Tokyo and the role thatmigration/mobility can play in driving thedynamism of such urban global hubs.

Fabiana Li. Fabianawas awarded aNewton InternationalFellowship (2009-2011) and joinedCRESC to work withProf. Penny Harvey,her UK Sponsor. Her

postdoctoral research aims to describe thecultural dynamics that shape thetransnational production and circulation ofgold and focuses on a controversial miningproject on the Chile-Argentina border.

Daniel Tischer. Danielrecently started hisPhD at CRESC afterfinishing his Mastersin Global BusinessAnalysis atManchester BusinessSchool. His PhD topicrevolves around the

financial crisis and its impact on civil society.

Finally, we would also like to welcome as acore member of CRESC staff, Alban Webb.Alban is taking up the post of research fellowfor research theme two Reframing the Nationand will be based at CRESC’s Open Universitysite.

To find out more about the work of people atCRESC and how to contact them please visitthe CRESC website at:www.cresc.ac.uk/people

CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

Meral Özbek is working atCRESC as an honorary researchfellow during 2009-10. She joinsus from the SociologyDepartment of Mimar SinanFine Arts University in Istanbul.

1. What brought you here to spend time atCRESC?

My interest in Pierre Bourdieu’s social-culturalthought and methodological thinkingbrought me here. The related work done atCRESC excited me and I wished to becomepart of its seminar-workshop environment, tomeet colleagues with similar interests, andspend in Manchester (which I think is aperfect city for studying and walking) somehappy time of intellectual work withoutlecturing. When I wrote to Mike Savage, hekindly invited me. This is also the first time Ihave left Turkey for sabbatical study.

2. What are you working on during your timein Manchester?

So far I have been working on the CRESCworkshop on "Social change and NewMethods: New Perspectives on TurkishLiterature", which was held on the15th ofJanuary 2010 at the University of Manchester.As one of the participants, I did apresentation on Orhan Pamuk’s last novel"Museum of Innocence", inspired by PierreBourdieu’s internal-external reading methodof Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, inhis The Rules of Art. I also rely in this work,which is a start for a larger project of literaryfield in Turkey, on the concepts and problemsposed by Walter Benjamin (politics ofremembrance and experience), M.M. Bahktin(cronotope), Franco Moretti (bildungsroman,graphical thinking) and Henri Lefebvre(everyday life). Now the workshop is over, Iam writing up the final paper from mypresentation. I also plan to start a smallanalysis using Multiple CorrespondenceAnalysis (MCA), with the help from colleaguesat CRESC, looking at the homology betweenthe narrative positions of focalization and

social-gender positions in the novel. I alsohope to read some of the written material atCRESC to get acquainted with the conceptualand methodological debates in them as wellas the research methods being used here,especially social network analysis andmultiple correspondence analyses, in order tobe able work in the long run comparatively oncultural fields and texts.

3. There is a lot of interest in CRESC in the ideaof bringing studies of fiction into conversationwith more conventional social scientificmethods. What do you see to be the payoff ofcombining these approaches?

This interdisciplinarity, I believe, will bringenrichment. What is at stake here is to beable to envision the conjectural relationbetween social structure (the statisticalregularities) and individual-collective practiceand experience in changing everyday lifepatterns. But I think we need envision thisconversation in a larger frame. We need toremember here the legacy of earlier works,too: such as Simmel, who showed us theobjective-subjective mental structures of themodern era through the delineation of its"social types"; or, Raymond Williams whocoined the term "structure of feeling" as asurplus to compensate for a lack in socialanalysis. Newer sub-disciplines like the

Question and Answer:Meral ÖzbekHannah Knox

sociology of emotions and personal lives orthe anthropology of social networks arealready making a bridge, and I believe askingtheir questions to the material of novels, andusing their methods of analysis whilepositing novelistic spaces as both social andnarrative fields in themselves will prove to befruitful. There is much to learn from thinkerswho have literary correlates to their theory orphilosophy, like Benjamin on Baudelaire andProust; Deleuze on Proust and Kafka; Zizek onvarious popular texts or Ranajit Guha onTagore in subaltern studies. Theories ofliterature are very important, not only in thatthey provide us with models to comprehendhuman experience and individualsubjectivities, but also, since their object ofanalysis are narrative and discursive forms,they teach us a lot about representation.Without this mediation of language, thenature of experience (or the demise of it) orideologies (and doxa) are not conceivable.Think of Bahktin and his concept of cronotopeas a representation of the time-space modellived in the external social world. LikewiseFranco Moretti’s large scale venture. Heanalyzes world literature in time and space,linking singular literary pieces, not onlyintertextually but also spatially in the worldarena, presenting the analysis of his vast datain visual figures like maps and diagrams.

In Bourdieu’s theory of practice and hisventure in analyzing Flaubert’s novelSentimental Education, there is somethingpeculiarly paradigmatic, in bringing a lot ofthe above interests into conversation as well.He thought that this novel (through the workof formalization) already supplied all thetools for the analysis of its structure, sincethe structure of the social space the herolived in was also the structure of the socialspace in which the author himself wassituated. Through inferring the position-taking (point of view) of the writer from thenovel, Bourdieu articulated his internalreading of the structure of the novel with anexternal reading whereby he could place theleading position of Flaubert in the productionof the autonomous literary field thatemerged in the 19th century France.

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In April this year, CRESC will be holding a distinctive andtimely international conference about finance whichinvites analysis by, and encourages debate between,

researchers from many disciplines who represent differentkinds of political and cultural economy as well as socialstudies of finance. The emphasis of the conference is onfinance in question as much as finance in crisis, as, wellbefore the onset of crisis in 2007, there were manyunresolved issues about the role of finance in present daycapitalism. The conference will re-examine received waysof understanding finance and to consider what changes tofinancial arrangement may follow from present strains.

As with other major conferences, there will be multiplethemes and an opportunity for academic researchers topresent papers and propose sessions. Themes so farproposed include: money, capitalist calculation, market

devices and techniques; financial crisis, social relations andtrust; the limits of prescience and the irrelevance of manyeconomic knowledges; finance, restructuring and labour;politics/markets/moralities; states, re-regulation andgovernance of finance.

There will also be media and practitioner panels andplenary sessions where distinguished academics will be setto answer big questions about what and who is in crisis,why did nobody see it coming and whether moredemocratic control of finance is possible.

Plenary academics include Michel Aglietta (CEPII), AndrewGamble ( Cambridge) Donald MacKenzie (Edinburgh),Doreen Massey, Philip Mirowski (Notre Dame), OnoraO’Neill, Mike Power (LSE), Saskia Sassen (Columbia) andWolfgang Streeck (Max Planck)

During the past century, social scientificmethods have come to be extensivelydeployed in government,

administration and business, as well as inacademic research as a way of understandingand intervening in processes of social andcultural change. Maps, enumerations,surveys, interviews, indicators, software andvisualizations proliferate. This poses animportant question regarding how we canbest understand how social science methodsboth shape, and are themselves shaped byeconomic, social and cultural forces.Developments such as digitization, newpublic spaces for debate, an increasingconcern for ‘evidence’, and a challenge to theability of some academic research to prove a

Finance In Question/Finance In Crisis12-14 April 2010, Manchester

CRESC Annual Conference:The Social Life of Methods31 August - 3 September, 2010, Oxford

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CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

capacity provide ‘useful’ knowledge, posespecific practical and ethical challenges toestablished repertoires of social sciencemethods. In August 2010 CRESC will berunning a conference which aims to engagewith these issues by taking a fresh look atwhere methods come from and what they do.

The conference promises to bring together abroad spectrum of interests of people fromdifferent social scientific backgrounds. We areparticularly excited that the conference willalso involve contributions from a number ofartists. We believe that the social scienceshave much to learn from artists and themethods that they deploy in theirengagements with, for example, changing

social forms, with new media andmaterials, and with non-academicaudiences. During the conference, theseartists and related practitioners, includingcurators, will join with the community ofsocial scientists in considering how themethods that each of us deploy in ourwork have the capacity to affect social andcultural relations. This promises togenerate a lively interaction betweenartists and social scientists encouragingeach of the participants to reflect uponthe ‘social life’ of the methods that theyuse, and inflecting the conference with areach that we hope will go far beyond theconventional limits of academic debate.

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CRESC News Issue 10 February 2010

wor

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pap

ersNew CRESC Working Papers

The following working papers have been added to the CRESC websitehttp://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 inthe United Kingdom

Mike Savage and Modesto Gayo-Cal

Working Paper No.73

Cultural Participation, the Making of Distinction and the Case of Fans ofFC 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 BusinessModel

John Buchanan, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams

Working Paper No.76

Affluence in the Making: The 1953-54 Household Expenditures Enquiryand 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 EventsFor more information about all our forthcoming events please check out our website http://www.cresc.ac.uk/

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