Abstract
This book sets out the case for the public value of the social sciences in the form of an ‘interpretive essay’ that weaves together exposition, analysis and evaluation within an overarching moral narrative that drives the story forward in a highly articulate and accessible fashion. As an ‘interpretive essay’, Brewer tells us, the book ‘deliberately seeks to confront orthodoxy and to critique taken-for-granted assumptions … it is very much a personal argument, but it is intended to throw out a challenge to contemporary ways of thinking about an issue’ (p. 5). The main challenge that the book advances is to charge the majority of social sciences’ professional practitioners and government managers of social science education and research in the UK of holding and promulgating fundamentally misconceived ideas about ‘the public value of the social sciences’ which have made the latter seem increasingly irrelevant to political debate and action in the twenty first century.
Two major threats to the continued existence and relevance of the social sciences are identified by Brewer as the book develops: first, the ‘global university crisis’ and, as epitomised in the UK, the increasingly ideological and policy dominance of marketization and the audit culture; second, the ‘impact agenda’ and the deeply flawed approach that it offers to assessing the public value of social science research. In combination, these two threats, Brewer insists, ‘has turned the debate gangrenous and ruled out the possibility of reasoned argument’ (p. 6) over the potential contribution that social science research and education has to make to our understanding and solving of the ‘wicked problems’ which continue to confront us in the 21st century.
As should be evident already, there is a very strong polemical intent behind Brewer’s ‘interpretive essay’ and he doesn’t ‘pull his punches’ in his coruscating critique of the governing neo-liberal ideology and policies that have led us to a ‘near total degradation of the public university in the United Kingdom’ (p. 7) and the virtual ending of public provision for social science university research and education. But rather than advocating a strategy of ‘principled disengagement’ from this neo-liberal inspired attack, Brewer argues for a position of ‘critical engagement’ and the design of a ‘new public social science’ from which resistance to the latter can be effectively prosecuted. While the ‘old or traditional social science’ was based on a mutually suspicious relationship between governments and social scientists that encouraged a pervasive academic culture of disciplinary closure and competition, the ‘new public social science’ which Brewer advocates will move beyond orthodox disciplinary agendas and develop a post-disciplinary, ‘transgressive’ identity that speaks to the complex policy issues—such as climate change, organized violence and peace, and poverty—that continue to shape the human condition. This overriding sense of ‘public value’ which, Brewer contends, has been marginalized, if not lost, as the social sciences professionalized and became more esoteric, specialized, technical, inward-looking and publicly-disengaged during the course of the 20th century, can only be revivified by social scientists reclaiming their own social worth through a form of social scientific practice that defines ‘the new public social science in and of itself as a public good’ (p. 12).
Brewer also recognizes that this new public social science will be based upon a conception of ‘value’ that fundamentally differs from that imposed by government managers with their focus on ‘price value’ or disciplinary professionals pre-occupied with ‘subject value’. In their place, he proffers ‘quality of life value’ as offering a multi-dimensional reconceptualization of the interrelated economic, social and normative criteria through which the standing and status of social science as a public good will necessarily be assessed. In this way, the new public social science will exemplify two essential qualities that the ‘old or traditional science’ has compromised or even lost in its quest for academic power and status; first, by generating crucial information for society to find out about itself and secondly by deploying the latter as a medium for society’s reproduction it will re-establish itself as a public good of inherent moral value and social worth. Inevitably, the new public social science, as adumbrated by Brewer, will directly challenge deeply entrenched disciplinary commitments to value freedom and moral relativism but, for him, these stand in the way of rediscovering and revitalising the crucial contribution that a renewed public social science can make to reconstructing civic values and civil society in the face of the ravages exerted by neo-liberal policy and practice over the last 40 years or so.
Having outlined his core arguments in the introductory section of the book, Brewer then proceeds to flesh the former out with a wide-ranging discussion that covers the intellectual character and content of social science with particular reference to its historical development, academic organization and social standing within the UK. On the whole, he is reasonably optimistic about the scale and standing of British social science insofar as substantial parts of it are truly world class and it rivals the natural sciences and the humanities as ‘the interloping third culture’ (p. 78). He is less sanguine about the future of UK social science in that the direct attacks that it was exposed to by neo-liberal ideologues and politicians in the 1980s have been superseded by more ‘indirect attacks’ over the last two decades or so in which the drive to marketization and re-regulation of higher education has damaged public universities beyond repair in undermining their status and rationale as public institutions dedicated to collective and individual learning. The latter is most clearly demonstrated in the ‘impact agenda’ that has come to dominate the ‘research excellence framework’ (REF) process under whose tutelage higher education institutions have toiled over the last five years. For Brewer, the ‘impact agenda’ imposed on British universities by the current coalition government—although its beginnings can be found in the dying days of the previous Labour administration—and the funding councils exemplifies the pervasive and insidious ‘business culture’ that has wormed its way into British academic life to such an extent that it seems unassailable at the time of writing. The specific implications of this ‘business culture’ for the longer-term health and standing of the social sciences is yet to become clear but Brewer suggests that its destructive ramifications are unlikely to leave the latter untouched in that ‘price or market value’ becomes the primary criterion against which everything is evaluated and legitimated.
The final three chapters of Brewer’s book raise wider issues about the status and significance of the social scientist as a ‘public intellectual’ working in ‘public universities’ whose major role is to nurture a moral sentiment in which people are made aware of themselves as comprising and constituting a society through the social relations in which they are embedded and performing the social practices through which the latter are reproduced and changed. He sees this moral sentiment as having its historical intellectual roots in the writings of the 18th century Scottish moralists, such as Smith and Ferguson, and its clearest contemporary articulation in C. Wright Mills’ call for a ‘sociological imagination’ ever-sensitive to the interconnections between ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’. Collectively infused and armed with this moral sentiment, Brewer is convinced that today’s social scientists can move forward with a ‘post-disciplinary lens’ which is problem-led and encourages participative or co-produced research designs actively involving ‘the publics that name it as such’ (p. 174).
However, he is also very clear that this new public social science and the moral sentiment which drives it will demand different modes of communication and language, as well as different forms of research practice and organization. This will necessarily entail less emphasis on in-group professional vocabulary and much greater effort devoted to communicating and interacting with lay co-producers as equal partners in a collaborative enterprise driven by the need for enhanced collective understanding and effective intervention. In turn, this raises additional questions about how social science needs to be taught in universities in ways that will consistently encourage new generations of social scientists ‘to come out of their disciplinary bunkers’ and to engage with their publics in a collaborative and egalitarian manner.
This is a serious book that deserves to be taken seriously. It is written with a controlled passion and sustained moral commitment that is rare at a time when postmodern relativism and neoliberal populism seem to dominate academic social science and wider political debate. While much of the exposition and analysis is focussed on the present condition of and future prospects for the social sciences in the UK, the book consistently displays an awareness of wider international developments and a keen sensibility to the historical complexity of intellectual change and innovation.
This is also a book that should be read and debated by students of organization. From its inception, this Journal advocated a form of ‘neo-disciplinarity’ that strongly resonates with the ‘post-disciplinarity’ which Brewer sees as a pre-condition for the ‘new public social science’ that he wishes to promote. Much of what he argues has relevance for our field and its future development but many of us are likely to find some of his arguments and aspirations downright uncomfortable if not objectionable.
I, for one, am very happy in taking C. Wright Mills’ injunction ‘to cultivate an imagination in the social sciences that helped ordinary men and women grasp the intricate patterns of their own lives and to see how these connected with wider structural forces and processes about which they had no understanding and over which no control’ (p. 146) as the intellectual and moral lodestar for the study of organizations in the 21st century. But I’m also acutely aware that many of my colleagues will be uncomfortable with various aspects of Mills’ characterization of the ‘sociological imagination’ and even more so in legitimating it as the guiding principle shaping the field’s intellectual development.
Indeed, this concern raises a number of additional problems, or at least ‘unfinished business’, that I see in relation to Brewer’s critique and the reform programme emanating from it. First, the evolving relationship between ‘professional social science’ and ‘public social science’ remains unclear; Brewer clearly sees the latter as promising a great ‘intellectual adventure’ and he envisages the former as continuing to provide the fundamental ‘knowledge inputs’ that make it possible. But as he puts it in the concluding paragraphs of his book, ‘should all social scientists be public social scientists now?’ (p. 202). His answer seems to suggest some sort of future for professional social science insofar as it provides the conceptual and methodological tools that make public social science feasible. However, there is little doubt in this reviewer’s mind that he sees public social science as taking centre stage in developing the knowledge and skills that the tackling of ‘wicked problems’ requires. Again, many of us who have defined, and continue to define, themselves as ‘professional social scientists’ operating within the field of organization studies may have some difficulties in coming to terms with, much less accepting, the ‘under-labourer’ role that Brewer has pencilled in for us.
Second, this emerging concern with the sort of future that Brewer seems to have in mind for professional social science and its practitioners raises wider issues that focus around his specification of ‘wicked problems’ as the driving force behind the demand for a new public social science. Brewer is acutely aware of the fact that the practical specification of ‘wicked problems’ (or is it now ‘super wicked problems’?), and the ways in which it feeds into research strategy, design and dissemination is a potential political minefield in which effectively dealing with the power and status of competing, if not conflicting, stakeholder interests and values requires a great deal of time, effort and sensibility on the part of the social scientists undertaking the research. Yet, he tends to underestimate the pervasive influence that powerful groups who are in a position to commission social science research can exert over the way in which the problems guiding the latter are defined and its results are disseminated and interpreted. This is particularly true in a field such as organizational studies where we have a ‘rich history’ of the manifold ways in which researchers have, sometimes wittingly and at others unwittingly, become the ‘servants of power’ so forcefully critiqued in C. Wright Mills’ published work.
Finally, the extent to which the current conjuncture of political, economic and social power is conducive to the sort of public social science which Brewer envisages is at least debatable if not downright dreadful. We seem to be living through times in which ‘policy-driven evidence’ is the order of the day rather than the relatively open, rational and ethical public social science that Brewer is striving for in this book. Nevertheless, one can but admire his attempt to put the case for the latter in such inauspicious times and to commend as many as possible of our fellow social science colleagues to read this book and to engage with the issues that it so eloquently and forcefully puts before us.