Abstract
Where is the comprehensive project in Europe today?
After the Second World War, the OECD promoted the idea – which had begun to emerge between the wars in various European countries – that the creation of a comprehensive school system, bringing together all children from age 6 to 15 or 16, was the precondition for the democratisation of society and economic progress. This model was implemented very differently from one country to another. The ideal has now ended in disenchantment. Almost everywhere, the schooling of 11 to 15-year-olds is seen as the weak link in educational systems, a site of violence and suffering for pupils and teachers. A new system is being put in place, which some call post-comprehensive. Without abandoning the concern for equality, the international organisations are foregrounding a new system of reference based on performance obligations: skills standards, international comparisons through which each country’s performance can be judged in a context of competition. The debate has moved on: the American New Right places its hopes in the market; the European texts propose several readjustments of the social-democratic compromise: an equality of performances which takes the form of the definition of key skills; an attempt at compromise between the ideal of redistribution, the imperatives of performance and the creation of a collective consciousness in pluriethnic and pluricultural societies which takes the form of the idea of inclusive societies.
The comprehensive school and the debates surrounding it are liable to be overtaken before being analysed. A retrospective analysis seems necessary to do justice to the efforts that have been made. The way societies organise their educational system is a key element in the production and transformation of the social. This special double issue of the European Educational Research Journal examines the current state of the comprehensive model in Europe and formulates the hypothesis of a post-comprehensive era; in so doing, it addresses the fundamental problem area of the relationship between education and society(ies). It was this aim of retrospective analysis that inspired the organisation, at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in Porto in 2014, of a symposium on “The emergence of a post-comprehensive school in Europe? The role of social science journals in constructing a reflexive and critical analysis”. This was followed by a call for contributions for this EERJ dossier, “Re-examining the comprehensive school project in Europe.” The aim of that invitation and of this ensuing double issue is to offer a European perspective on the question of the comprehensive school. There were 21 responses to the call; ten articles were selected after review. Together they provide a wide-ranging view of the situation.
A first observation is immediately apparent, namely the limits of the consensus that seemed to accompany the implementation of the programme in the 1960s and 70s. Almost all countries had comprehensive school projects which sprang from their own history, and the concrete implementations correspond to compromises. This issue reports on the cases of Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hungary and Finland. A non-European perspective is also offered in an article on the comprehensive project in Quebec. Before talking about the failure of the comprehensive project, we should no doubt first ask, were we ever really comprehensive? The articles in this double issue show the diversity of the implementations of the comprehensive model in Europe and beyond. This diversity clearly needs to be explained. One possible way of making it intelligible is to mobilise, as Katharina Sass does in this issue, power resource theory, which links the diversity of comprehensive projects to the diversity of the European welfare states.
Next, this overview of the European scene brings to light the difficulties on which the project has faltered. From the Enlightenment onwards, the Left had enjoyed a kind of monopoly on critical thinking and initiative in educational matters. The 1980s saw the return of a reactionary thinking whose origins go back to the thinkers who, from the end of the eighteenth century, developed a critique of the principles of the French Revolution (Hirschman, 1991). In the new context, this critique challenged what it saw as the illusions of the welfare state. It did not draw only on economic arguments about the poor returns on the investments made for equality in the 1960s. The attack focused on values – the decline of reference to knowledge and weak learning outcomes, the maintenance of cultural traditions, the critique of bureaucracy and the leviathan state which presumes to decide what is best for its citizens whether they want it or not, a call for the liberation of initiatives in a market framework, etc.
One can speak of a change in the frame of reference for public policies in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Derouet and Normand, 2007). The comprehensive school was one of the centre-pieces of the welfare state; it was blasted by the critiques of the New Right. The “Black Papers” that preceded the Tories’ return to power in Britain and the A Nation at Risk report commissioned for President Reagan in the United States were clear calls for a break with comprehensive principles. The honesty of the arguments has been questioned (Berliner and Biddle, 1996) but their impact is indisputable. This aspect, which has already been studied extensively, no doubt played a decisive role, but one can argue in these matters like Montesquieu when he considers the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: whatever the pressure of the Barbarians, the walls would not have fallen if Roman society had not entered a deep crisis. The ideas of the New Right would not have caught on so readily if the social-democratic model had not disappointed.
From the beginning there was fear for the quality of knowledge and the maintenance of the cultural tradition. Perhaps the comprehensive project risked losing in quality what it gained in quantity? This anxiety was felt as much on the left as on the right, but, for a certain time, the prospects of democratisation were stronger. The return of the repressed was all the more anguishing when, by the 1980s, it became apparent that the comprehensive project was not fulfilling its promises. In a general way, societies felt a need to return to traditional values and, as regards schooling, the movement back to the central place of knowledge was accompanied by a discrediting of the pedagogy and the social sciences that were held responsible for the supposed decline in educational standards.
A second difficulty relates more to an unexamined aspect of the comprehensive project, which is the relation between a collective project and the multiple differences that make up the richness of societies. The comprehensive project is based on a degree of homogenising of the supply of schooling: the same route for all until age 15 or 16, the same curriculum, the same teacher training, the same status and the same organisation for all schools, etc. Within the system, all difference is seen as a potential source of inequality. External differences seem initially to have been ignored: all pupils were to be included, however different they might be in socio-economic, cultural or any other terms. This conception – an indifference to differences – was called into question from the early 1970s, and the comprehensive model then faced a dilemma: is a system comprehensive only if it treats everyone the same way, by excluding social, economic and other differences? Or is it comprehensive when it tries to take into account and compensate for social differences and other inequalities? Feminist activists brought gender inequalities into the open in the 1970s. The demand for recognition of religious, ethnic and cultural differences began to be asserted at the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite considerable differences between countries, this is no doubt the main cause of the unravelling of the social-democratic model (Derouet and Derouet-Besson, 2009).
This overview finally enables us to return to the notion of a post-comprehensive period and its political meaning. Some countries have made a clear break with the comprehensive system. Others, such as France, continue to make reference to the comprehensive model while putting in place the instruments devised by the international organisations on the basis of another definition of justice. So the transition is being made through slippages, shifts of meaning, etc. The result is a degree of blurring, which requires an effort of clarification: are we seeing adaptations that regenerate the means of the project of equality in a new situation or breaks that correspond to a profound change in political orientation?
Equality and performance: The new framework of reference in the 1980s
There is of course a fundamental tension between the concern for equality and the pursuit of performance (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006), but, contrary to what is often asserted, this is not the main stumbling block. The comprehensive model itself is based on a compromise: equal opportunity is not equality of social conditions, and the system readily accommodates – after schooling for all children until age 15/16 – a diversification that corresponds to the social division of labour. Conversely, the movement critical of the comprehensive school does not continue the tradition of critique of equality that sprang from the adversaries of the French Revolution. It naturally foregrounds the objectives of efficiency; it criticises, sometimes pertinently, the means of the comprehensive school: bureaucracy, standardisation, lack of attention to individuals, etc., but no one questions the principle of equal opportunity. Ultimately, policies to differentiate the offer of schooling quickly arrive at their limit. No government can neglect the objectives of social cohesion. This is the compromise sought, in the US, by the No Child Left Behind Act. Likewise the PISA survey, which first measures pupils’ results, is also concerned with inequalities.
While there is some antinomy between the principles, it is not as great in practice as was thought. Many compromises have existed in the past, and new ones are proposed every day. The new framework of reference does not explain everything. One also has to consider the difficulties intrinsic to the comprehensive model.
Around the curriculum project: A gulf between the comprehensive project and public opinion
The question of the curriculum project has been at the centre of public debate. It goes back to the beginnings. In Britain in the 1960s Raymond Williams and Geoffrey Bantock clashed over a long period on this issue (Forquin, 1989). Williams pointed to innovations carried out in the major Labour-controlled Local Education Authorities. He argued for a curriculum project based on simple, practical knowledge, close to everyday life, a culture of debate underpinning the involvement of individuals in a participatory democracy, values of solidarity and mutual respect, antiracist and antisexist education, etc. Bantock, by contrast, was committed to the maintenance of the cultural tradition. Inequalities seemed to him acceptable if they were the price to be paid for this transmission. This debate took place, with differences, in all countries. In France, with its declared passion for equality, no one dared use such crude terms, but already in the 1930s the right-wing press was lamenting a “declining standard” in education. Above all, French secondary education is organised on a subject basis. Many people see this as a necessary condition of its quality and fear that bringing it closer to life would lead to a dilution in common thinking. The French workers’ movement itself has always demanded access for its children to the school of the bourgeoisie such as it is. The fear was that if schools were changed to democratise them, the efforts of the newcomers would be rewarded with a devalued currency: everyone has access to culture but it is no longer the real thing.
Beyond these real divergences, a kind of compromise between the parties of the left, educationists and the middle classes had slowly emerged from the 1930s. Lower middle-class parents wanted their children to have access to secondary education; the welfare state politicians made this objective an essential part of their project of redistribution; the educationists presented a number of changes, in particular active learning, as a necessary accompaniment to this opening-up. This compromise, as has been said, broke up in the 1970s–80s, no doubt because the democratisation policies were not delivering on their promises. Here too, the critiques from the New Right have fuelled the debate, but they may not have played a decisive role. There are several movements at the present time, but they are distinct. The critiques of the New Right in the wake of the A Nation at Risk report are both contradictory and convergent. One line of argument advocates a return to basics. The approach to cutting-edge knowledge is called into question: is learning to read helped by drawing on the most recent advances in linguistics? There needs to be a retreat from cultural challenges and critical thinking; introduced too soon, these references put working-class children in difficulty or end up as mere parroting.
A second line of argument, by contrast, is concerned with the risks of losing high culture. In the A Nation at Risk report, this position mainly takes the form of a redirection of investment into the training of the elites. This point is perhaps the one most directly aimed at politicians. In the late 1990s, the eyes of politicians and academics turned towards higher education.
These debates naturally fed into public opinion, but it was also affected by a more general movement. A certain disappointment with the revolutionary ideals of the 1960s induced a movement back towards traditional values. On the intellectual level, this orientation took the form of a comeback of philosophia perennis against the relativism of the social sciences. It was a matter of reaffirming some elementary principles: human rights, democracy, freedom of expression, etc. Reference to Hannah Arendt (1961) became universal. As regards education, the aim was to restore the place of knowledge against child-centred education. The role of the school is to teach the values of the world, which must be against the values of the world that is. The development of constructivist conceptions of learning, which had accompanied the setting up of the comprehensive project, was caught in the same line of fire: the rejection of rote learning and of exercises in application had led to perverse effects – ignorance of chronology in history, for example.
Many of the intellectuals who expressed these ideas came from the left, even the far left. Their arguments gave form to a vague anxiety in society. The lower-middle and working classes had believed in the promises of equal opportunity; they had made big sacrifices for their children’s education and, in many cases, they were disappointed. Democratisation failed to arrive. This would not be so serious, a journalist wrote, if the families were at least sure that their children were learning something at school. But the results of the first international evaluations (IEA, then PISA), published from the late 1970s, were sometimes very disappointing. The idea began to gain ground that the opening-up of schools and the new pedagogies had disorganised the system. Nostalgia developed for a golden age of schooling when the educational system was supposedly able to solve all the problems that beset modern societies. That golden age clearly never existed but the invocation was a permanent disavowal of the current situation.
Faced with this crisis, the new model put forward by the international organisations (Lawn and Lingard, 2002) offered another translation of the demand for quality: a definition of objectives in terms of skills or competences and not knowledge; the devising of standard skills as a basis for international comparisons; a reformulation of the comprehensive programme based on the definition of key skills that must be acquired by all. The success of this model was ensured by the major surveys that took it as their basis (Normand, 2006, 2011). It may however be wondered whether it developed a real hold on the teaching profession and the rest of society.
From a collective conception of equality to the recognition of differences
This point relates more to the unconscious aspect of the comprehensive project, which is an attachment to the collective and a way of posing problems in terms of structures. There are several conceptions of the project of democratisation. Many countries have seen policies of expanding recruitment to the elites based on the upward mobility of working-class children who manifest dispositions towards learning. The comprehensive programme, by contrast, proposes a collective raising of the level of competence. These differences were set out clearly by one of the architects of the French project, the psychologist Henri Wallon: There are two ways of conceiving democratic education. First there is an individualist approach which seems to have predominated in the period between the Wars: it posits that every man, every child, whatever his social origin, should be able, if he has the merits for it, to attain the highest executive positions […]. It is a conception that remains individualist […]. Today we envisage the democratic reform of education in a much more general form […]. Our democratic conception of education envisages a total raising of the nation, whatever the situation occupied or rather whatever the job, whatever the tasks that all the individuals of the society will have to perform. (speech in Besançon, 1946)
This aspect has clearly been more or less pronounced depending on the forms of implementation – stronger in centralised, planning states than in federal systems – but the idea is everywhere the same. Democratisation requires a unification of the supply of education: the same status for all schools, the same curricula, the same teacher training. The differences introduced by choice of languages or other options must be limited as far as possible. This “one size fits all” approach ignores the variety of persons and situations. A better analysis of the progress of schooling since the beginning of the twentieth century might have alerted politicians to the dangers of this standardisation. Unfortunately it was only known to a few historians. So in the 1960s and 70s much energy was devoted to forms of diversification – within the now common framework – corresponding to the variety of publics. The attempts at differentiated teaching within classes quickly revealed their limits. It gradually became clear that where streaming and selection were abolished or pushed back, the differences between the old streams often reappeared, after a certain number of displacements, at the level of differences between schools. This totally justified the demands of families: if all schools did not offer the same service, it was only right for parents to be able to choose the school to which they would send their child. The definition of democratisation gradually abandoned the collective approach to comprehensive schooling and moved towards an individualised monitoring of the path of each pupil; and the European texts extend this new definition to lifelong education.
Diversity of pathways and educational success: A historical perspective
The French case highlights a point that passed completely unnoticed in the 1950s: a creeping democratisation based on a diversity of modes of schooling (Prost, 1986). The tradition of French centralisation is not a myth, but it has taken several forms. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even if all principles of autonomy were excluded, there was in fact a strong differentiation of schools linked to local conditions and practices (Prost, 2009). Above all, alongside this education of an elite, the first movement to extend schooling for working-class children advanced through the collèges du peuple set up by municipalities, Chambers of Agriculture, Commerce and Industry, and even firms inclined to philanthropy. These schools offered courses closely linked to the local economy. The curricula were very different; the teachers were often former farmers or craftsmen, trained on the job. The routes taken by the pupils were also extremely varied. They could resume their studies after some years of work (Briand and Chapoulie, 1991). This system, which appeared chaotic to the planners of the 1960s, provided a first phase of opening-up of secondary schooling to working-class children. It is clearly very significant that this creeping democratisation stopped when the long march towards the comprehensive school, the collège unique, began. The standardisation was inspired by the cursus honorum of the children of the bourgeoisie and created difficulties for those whose lives were less well-ordered. The theme of diversification of the educational offer is now coming back strongly, but clearly with a quite different meaning.
The pursuit of diversified teaching: From classes to schools and lifelong individualised routes
The period from the 1950s to the 1980s was characterised by intense work on pedagogy. There was some loss of confidence in active methods. It appeared that they were more favourable to middle-class than working-class children. The 1950s and 60s saw the coming of new theories from the English-speaking world: teaching by objectives, mastery learning, then the notion of skill or competence. All these novelties were articulated more or less successfully with the comprehensive project. The essential point is, however, that of differentiated teaching. It seemed in fact impossible to deliver the same teaching to all the pupils in classes composed on a principle of heterogeneity or to enable them to progress at the same rate.
Very quickly, experience showed that the real differences lay at the level of schools. How was this new factor to be handled? Local autonomy is a traditional component of political socialisation in countries with a decentralised tradition; it is harder to establish in countries with a centralised tradition. Major national differences were apparent beneath the uniformity of international rhetorics. The theme is now the diversification of the offer of education and there is no doubt that the individual school is a fundamental unit in the management of this diversification. This presupposes a real autonomy, extending in particular into the domain of the curriculum. Not all European systems are ready to grant such freedom to grassroots actors. In France, for example, the fear of a loss of control and a drift towards marketization continues to haunt the central administration.
Alongside diversification, the principle of individualisation was one of the essential novelties of the end of the twentieth century. This development is most obvious in the area of priority policies. The Zones d’Education Prioritaires, for example, started out with very general objectives on a territorial scale. They gradually became concentrated on a smaller number of persons and took the form of responsibilisation and individual monitoring. Target populations were identified: handicapped people, women returning to work, youngsters in educational and social difficulty. These people have difficulty in finding their way. They first need to assess the skills they have and those they may lack in relation to the labour market; then they need to make choices in the maze of resources offered to them. While the state is withdrawing from a number of areas, it retains a major role on this point. This reformulation is no doubt one of the fundamental components of the post-comprehensive model. It is also one of the hardest to interpret. There is no doubt that it abandons the collective undertaking of an overall raising of the cultural level of the nation. At the same time, taking account of individuals corresponds to another aspect of the democratic project and redresses the impersonality of the 1960s approach.
A new definition of justice – recognition of differences: From gender to pluriethnic and pluricultural societies
A new definition of justice did indeed emerge in the 1970s and 80s: recognition of differences (Honneth, 1995). In the first stage, as has been mentioned, it was the American feminist movements who foregrounded the gender issue. The argument very quickly extended to the question of homosexuality. It became apparent that it was not enough to add a supplementary variable to surveys on educational inequalities; the whole question of the learning of sexual roles had to be rethought. The importance of this movement was very soon overtaken by that of ethnic, cultural and religious differences. The situations vary greatly depending on the history and political culture of each country. The English-speaking countries have long recognized the existence of communities. Other societies base their conception of the political on a citizen freed from his traditional attachments of family, community, religion, etc. In the late twentieth century they discovered that they were pluriethnic and pluricultural. Their whole political grammar had to be rewritten. Everywhere conflicts broke out about the wearing of religious signs in school; and very quickly there was a dilemma. If wearing the veil was a sexist discrimination unacceptable in a school whose principle is equality, the exclusion of girls who wore it amounted to refusing them the education that might enable them one day to emancipate themselves. The traditional discourse on “living together” seems inadequate to handle these tensions, given the violent situations that arise on a daily basis in some areas. These threats are not just leading to a resurgence of the xenophobic far right; the left is also concerned. Secularism is part of its tradition, but the anticlerical struggle had lost its urgency in the course of the twentieth century. In many cases, the educational system was much more concerned to preserve its independence from economic power than from the churches. The battle for secular education is now back on the agenda and is leading to a kind of retreat by democrats to a neo-Kantian tradition out of phase with contemporary reflections. No doubt with a view to renewing this discourse, the European Community is pushing forward the idea of inclusive societies. The aim is to provide a stock of common values and rules of life to young people with diverse origins and systems of reference, while respecting those differences. This objective does not efface the old objectives of equality and performance, but shifts them to the background (Fraser, 2008; Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009).
Conclusion 1: The owl of Minerva takes wing
We can adopt a formula of Hegel’s which Andy Green (2008) has already used: the owl of Minerva takes wing only when dusk starts to fall; in other words, it is only when a movement declines and breaks up that a retrospective view can better understand and question a number of principles which went without saying at the start of the dynamic. This is first true of the construction that held together a political project (the rise of the welfare state); an organisation of schooling (a unified route from age five to 15 or 16) and a curriculum project (active methods, knowledge close to life). It corresponded to a convergence of interests in one period and then, in another context, was subject to stresses that dislocated it. Above all, this backward look leads one to relativise the strength of the comprehensive project. In the immediate post-war years, it was certainly an omnipresent reference in Europe. Does this mean it was really implemented? In this regard the European landscape offers a picture full of contrasts: we see a variation of the intensities and modalities of the application of the project. In many cases, one could speak of a weak comprehensive programme, as Linda Greveling, Hilda TA Amsing and Jeroen J. H. Dekker show, for example, in their article on the Netherlands in this issue. Some countries set up a common core but allowed forms of education corresponding to early selection to persist alongside it. In Scandinavia, the practical curriculum belongs to a tradition pre-dating comprehensives (Blossing, Imsen, Moos, 2014; see also Katharina Sass in this issue). The Latin countries remained attached to subject divisions in their curricula and their teacher training. So one should avoid overstating the importance of the comprehensive programme and therefore be prudent in speaking of its failure. If the lower secondary school is everywhere in crisis, the fault cannot be imputed to a policy that was only very partially implemented. In the introduction to his masterly history of education in France in the twentieth century, the historian Antoine Prost (1981) points out that the history of the school cannot be separated from the history of modes of socialisation in families and especially the relations of authority. “What if?” history is always reckless, but it is likely that the schooling of 11 to 15-year-olds would be difficult now even if early selection had been retained.
Conclusion 2: Why is it so difficult to govern educational systems?
In retrospect we can also examine the relationship between educational research and the governance of educational systems. Discussions of the comprehensive model are closely linked to – often quantitative – research on the relations between the differentiation of the educational system (into ability streams, subject-group courses, specific and often hierarchised schools, etc.) and the more or less equitable and more or less efficient distribution of the pupils’ results. Several articles in this issue – in particular those of Jeroen Lavrijsen and Ides Nicaise, Alba Castejón and Adrián Zancajo, and Stephen Gorard – consolidate what the literature has long shown: the systems that introduce the most differentiation are also the least equitable and the least efficient. So it seems that the comprehensive model cannot really be challenged from this point of view. The question then obviously arises of why so many systems seem to have failed to set up a comprehensive school and are now moving away from it.
This mismatch between knowledge of educational systems and their actual development is puzzling: why does it seem so difficult to govern them with the aid of reason, supported by research? It is clearly not sufficient to know what should be done in order for things to happen. It is as if the systems had their own dynamics, sui generis: they cannot be handled like tools in the hands of our leaders; they do not respond to the recommendations of experts; nor do they follow the aims of this or that interest group; neither the left nor the right has managed to turn educational systems into what they wanted. These systems result from multiple, very complex interdependences whose effects are difficult to predict. It is a simple truth, but hard to accept: the world of schooling – and, beyond it, the social world – evolve and change without anyone or anything really being able to foresee, still less decide, these evolutions and changes. The impossibility of really governing (Luhmann, 1997), which is what is meant in reality, by the – often misunderstood – notion of governance (Jessop, 1997) and the (connected) idea of heterarchy, clearly does not mean that the world is chaotic, but rather point towards the idea of an always emerging order, responding to none of the intentions applied to it (Rudolph, 2001). This should not lead to the fatalism of abandoning the system to the vagaries of power relations. While the system evolves in unforeseeable ways and while it is true that no actor is really in control of it, the fact remains that everyone has the possibility of participating in and perhaps influencing the overall movement. Research, especially in the theory of autopoietic systems (Luhmann, 1995), simply teaches us that, in modern societies, it is normal (in fact, inevitable) that the observed results never correspond to the expected effects. The future is undetermined. One can nonetheless put forward some hypotheses about it, as we shall here.
Conclusion 3: For the future: the power of the market, the search for new compromises and the expansion of civic logic
The first alternative to the comprehensive project, presented by the New Right in the 1980s, was the market. This has shown its limits. The consequences are not only increased inequality and the risks of a breakdown of society. Contrary to what was hoped, the market does not lead to a diversification of the educational offer and does not necessarily improve learning performances (Ball, 2008). It is true that one of the great novelties of the period is the emergence of the voice of school consumers. The right to choose a school is now the main demand of families. Should this be seen as the expression of a particular interest to which the opening-up to market can respond? It could also be seen as a new definition of the general interest: an assertion of the rights of the citizens against the leviathan state. It is in this context that the European Community has developed the idea of inclusive societies. This registers an indisputable necessity – taking account of the recognition of diversity in a new conception of the political project. There is also something healthy in the new distribution of responsibilities that it proposes. The comprehensive project no doubt overestimated the capacity of the school in promising equality of opportunity, in other words a social mobility based on merit. This exaggerated claim has had its consequences: it is the school system and more especially the teachers who are called into question when the programme has not fulfilled its promises. The school has to accept a more modest role. Inclusion is an overall objective that concerns societies as a whole. Education no doubt has a fundamental role to play, but so do families, municipalities, the world of work, religions, etc.
As regards the comprehensive programme, a new period is indeed beginning: the shift from a collective project to the valorisation of individual responsibility, priority given to the objectives of inclusion over the objectives of equality and redistribution, the search for a balance between family choice and state management, etc. Is this a betrayal of the civic logic (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) that has inspired the educational project since the Enlightenment, or rather an extension of that logic, integrating new dimensions that were previously missing (Éducation et Sociétés, 2011)? There is lively debate among specialists in political philosophy. The reflexive and critical position of the social sciences seems more necessary than ever (Boltanski and Fraser, 2014).