Saying the unsayable

The second reason I'm pissed with academia is that it's virtually impossible to say anything vaguely controversial without being bounced away from the good journals. Take you for an example. There are two main approaches to who you are in the social sciences.

The first, promoted by postmodernists, is that you only exist because people talk about you. What you believe to be 'you' is actually a mirage, a transparency that takes the multiple images of the talk that it encounters. Some postmodernists* are more sophisticated and throw in a bit of reflexivity (you think? really?) but none have really tackled the key objection which is, if you are just a 'mirage' that is created by social forces then how the buggery do you do manage to do stuff to change those forces?

The second, bigged up by the realists* out there, is that you do things because you, well, you exist. For a while they argued that we did what we did because social structures and institutions made us think and act in certain ways. However, faced with people who often do the opposite, they have come up with various ways of explain how these entrepreneurs and resisters can do what they do. However, explanations for how choice and innovative action come about are still pretty much in their infancy.

What I would like to add to this debate is that you (the actor, self, agent or - god forbid - person) when deciding to do something, are not simply governed by the rules of society but are also constrained and enabled by your psychological state and your biological architecture. In other words, when you chose to resist social rules or make an informed choice, these processes, whilst heavily influenced by society, can not be explained without reference to very real constraints that are inside you.

This simple statement is self evident to most lay people. Our conversations, assumptions and common sense are all geared towards understanding people that react differently in some situations because of their genes, their 'nature' or their current psychological state. Now, there will be two completely different reactions to this sentence. Lay (i.e. normal) people will not see anything objectionable here and will hopefully be wondering what all the fuss is about. Social scientists will have seen the words genes, nature and psychological, and be screaming essentialism, or, more likely, will have assumed this is a weak argument and turned to a different website.

How can it be so obvious to the lay person that their actions are, in part, explained by their biological and psychological states, yet so anathemaeic to sociologists? This is one of the many reasons, of course, why the public, 'proper' scientists and policy makers spend much of their time avoiding, if not laughing, at academics. I'm starting to wonder who the first person will be to notice that the (expensive) emperor's new clothes don't just fit badly....

* I've obviously simplified the pomo and realist positions somewhat but, seriously, their models of who you are are generally so theoretically unhinged and blatantly unrealistic that I'm not sure how they've got away with it for this long without being horsewhipped through town.

(Professor) Roger Irrelevant

I'm increasingly frustrated with academic writing. There are many reasons for this but two stand out in reference to the research I'm currently doing - which, being in a business school, should be a thousand times more relevant than, say, someone studying the history of pockets.

First, there's the question of relevance. I've just completed a piece of work for the UK government research council examining the extent to which academics meet the research needs of industry. The answer, in a nutshell, is not at all. Don't get me wrong here - I'm not one of the children-of-Thatcher fascists who believe that academic research should be dictated by the economy. It's just that, if academia produces, for example 200 articles (funded by you) on management consultancy, it would be nice if management consultants actually read some of this research - but they don't.

The reason they don't is because our writing in inaccessible, elitist and needlessly complex. Another reason is that when you finally work out what an academic is really trying to say, it is either incredibly obvious (businesses exploit people; organisations make us think certain things) or too boring to warrant anyone else reading it.

Maybe one in every hundred articles I read will actuallyEven if one drops the 'relevance to the economy' criteria beloved of Thatcherites everywhere and seeks instead relevance against moral, social or 'progressive' (as if) criteria, we still fall short. be read by a policy maker and the odds are it will be ignored for the reasons already cited.

It appears that the sole audience for academic writings is....academics. There is a circle of intellectual masturbation by which academics write for other academics who then attempt to "improve" on their writing (more acurately, try to use it to get something published). The flaw in this entire incestuous orgy is that the knowledge social scientists create, unlike real scientists, is not cumulative - social scientists are no closer to understanding society, people or change that they were 100 years ago. They have simply splintered into a miriad of diverse groupings which talk past each other, babel-like, lampooning and misunderstanding in equal measure.

The cause of the problem is two-fold. The first are the funding bodies (and the RAE) which appear to rank highest those journals which are most inaccessible and irrelevant (Organization anyone?). The second is that, virus-like, post-structuralist have spread the theory (and practice) that, as no-one has 'real' interests, there is no point feeding the hungry, clothing the poor or healing the ill, because it is all socially constructed anyway - and it would be demeaning their identities to suggest they should not be happy with their lot.

I'm exaggerating to make a point here. But I think thirty years of postmodern writing has singularly failed to make a difference (or even wanted to). The old Marxists may have had a flawed ontology but at least they manned the baricades

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