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It may be argued that sociology is of activist origins, propelled by a desire to comprehend, diagnose and ultimately administer solutions to societal ailments. However, with the advent of scientific discourse, especially the rise of so-called hard sciences, the discipline has been absorbed into the pedagogic realm of social-science which seeks to emulate its empirical cousin and take residence within the ivory tower of academia, virtuous in its efforts to seek objectivism, value-freedom and political abstinence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the proposition that sociology should reclaim its identity, expanding its imagination (Mills 1959) as a politically engaged agent tasked with improving society through a critical dialogue with various institutions and actors. This essay will consider the contention offered by some of sociology’s founding fathers, particularly Marx and Engels (1848) and Durkheim (1972), that sociology should be at the vanguard of social engagement and change – a citadel of moral and intellectual purity, a ‘philosopher king’ (Plato 1993: 109). By extension, this essay will include a critique of the academic milieu in which sociology resides, addressing the dispute that it has become colonised and thus compromised by wider market and political forces and thus incapable of functioning as an independent agent of knowledge and change.

The proposition of a Public Sociology is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, the founding progenitors envisaged a discipline actively engaged with the political milieu and public lifeworld. Indeed, Durkheim (1972), conceiving of a social world underpinned by tangible laws – reiterating Comte’s (1988: 33) ‘science of society’ – predicted that sociologists would become aides-de-camp to the state, revered intellects who would influence policy and legislature. By contrast, Marx and Engels (1848) were interested in the dissemination of knowledge to the grass-roots or proletariat – to reawaken their collective consciousness and engender a rebellious will-to-power (Nietzsche 2014) against the prevailing capitalist system. Importantly, despite its definition, sociology was less interested in the comprehension of social life per se: rather it was obsessed with the noxious configurations that comprised society, mournful of the crippling and incarcerating effects these had on humanity’s potential and species-being (Marx and Engels 1991). This remains a dominating theme within sociology today: the field of critical theory has almost reached a level of ‘theoretical saturation’ (Bryman 2004:544) inasmuch as abuses against civilisation on grounds of (for example) gender, class, race and creed have been researched and articulated repeatedly in pedagogic discourse, simply restructured in linguistic hyperbole to pass as authentic. By contrast, Weber (1989) was concerned with maintaining abstinence from the political arena, endorsing scientific mastery and the conduct of research for its own virtue i.e. ‘as a vocation’ (78); sociology held no greater esteem over the value-laden judgements of social-political discourse and must thereforelimit public discussion to the classrooms.

The debate regarding sociology’s public face was again revitalised by Mills (1959) who, acknowledging a gross depreciation in the social lifeworld, offered a critical assessment of his field, which had abandoned its public calling, instead becoming captivated by the power and prestige (including resources) offered by academia. The discipline had succumbed to institutionalisation, a servant of the university and its preoccupation with quantifiable (profitable) results, professionalism and its self-image as a reputable organisation. By extension, as a business, academia pandered to powerful organisations (purse holders) like the state and private shareholders; exploration was only authorised and noteworthy if it aligned with the demands and/or values of a minority who possess the architectural means of production (Zsolnai and Gasparski 2002). Also, Parker and Jary (1995) allude to the notion that sociology is subject to the McUniversity, whereby the fixation of budgets, time restraints and production of (quantifiable) articles, books and graduates has a detrimental effect on the vibrancy and eclecticism of its sociological imagination (Mills 1959), thereby crippling any possibility for politicking – scientific absence is the prevailing episteme or ideology (Gouldner 1971). Thus, sociology is not only accused of abandonment but also of participating in a form of symbolic violence inasmuch as it retains potentially empowering or life-giving knowledge, which it retrieves from an ailing world, to secure its own somewhat tentative (albeit profitable) status as a soft ad-hoc science. As Luck (2007) ably posits, this negative label cast on the back of sociology is based on ‘not so much its actions but failing to act’ (140). In addition, Gouldner (1971) had contended that, awkwardly aware of it betrayal and desperately seeking to generate a credible facade, sociology provides lip-service or commiseration and an imitated gesture of desire for social change.

Yet some have argued that sociology has required time to solidify itself and create a scholarly community based not only on substantive research but also camaraderie, interdependency and trust (Adair-Toteff 1995) from which a new breed of intellect could arise, unfettered by self-interest, and rather concerned with improving society and seeking to reinvigorate and enhance its intellectual flare through public engagement. As Marx and Engels (1848: 3) asserted: ‘philosophers have interpreted the world […] the point however is to change it!’. Therefore, sociology should be less concerned with holding onto the tailcoats of so-called hard sciences, and focus on harnessing its own methodology to irradiate, disseminate and help transform the social milieu – to become a participatory agent in the (re)creation of society. Indeed, the political life of Boudieu (1993) is often regarded as a prime example of the kinds of dirty work sociologists should be engaged in; having witnessed the venomous social disparities of a failing and unjust French society, he took to the streets in numerous political protests. This constitutes a form of academic bricolage (Hebdige 1988) whereby normative procedures and forms of professionalism prolific within the pedagogic milieu – designed to confine scholars to specific predefined scripts of conduct – are broken or otherwise inverted. His actions as a scholarly activist serve as a template for today’s sociologists; a reminded of their role involves dirty work or aligning themselves with ordinary people in a bid to better understand social angsts – thereby enhancing epistemologies and methodologies – and subsequently improve society. As a result, Bourdieu (1993) suggested that, only through public engagement could sociology develop an augmented, rich and powerful knowledge-base, otherwise it would simply be masquerading as a social-scientific field.

Thus, Chomsky and Otero (2004) denote that we must fashion a more reflexive sociology (third-order understanding) – to analyse and remodify the pedagogic habitus – capable of comprehending often subtle and taken-for-granted interconnections, like the asymmetrical interplay of power, capital and playing fields within academia, that affect and hinder the discipline. Sociology must be aware of its own metaphorical blind spot – its arrogances and handicaps – and critically engage in reciprocated policing within its various subfields and other interdependent social-sciences. As Bourdieu (1988) advocated, being self-critical will facilitate a comfortability in one’s own skin and ultimately strengthen the field’s core. Indeed, as Murji (2007) argues, sociology remains a host to external asymmetries such that a white middle-class male continues to demarcate the archetypal modern-day sociologist. In a similar vein, as Ossewaarde (2007) alludes, sociological productions are overwhelmingly driven by and imbued with Westernised ideals, values and perspectives, specifically those fashioned in the United States: this is obviously indicative of wider societal inequalities that belittle or otherwise disadvantage other countries not befitting first-world status. Also, as Parenti (1995) suggests, the types of research revered most are typically those aligned with empiricism (e.g. statistics, quantification, reports) and policy-centred. As a result, somewhat idealistically, Burawoy (2005) advocates an academic revolution within sociology to generate a more equitable playing field.

Despite the criticism inferred on sociology, concerning its diminished public identity and seeing it as a hotbed of malignance, many have come to its defence. For example, Hossfeld and Nyden (2005) have contended that an ASA Task Force has been created to reclaim sociological presence within the political, offering incentives and promotional positions to eligible scholars interested in disseminating the sociological imagination to wider audiences. Also, Kalleberg (2005) recognises the existing efforts made to produce jargon-free literature and broadcasts that pertain to parochial as well as (inter)national issues. Similarly, as Skeggs and Deem (2003) note, especially following the cultural turn, face-to-face and in-depth engagements with the public, including those disadvantaged groups such as women, the working-class and ethnic minorities, have intensified with the rise of qualitative methodologies. Hence, there remains active engagement and participation by sociologists with extra-academic cohorts, alluding to the fact that sociology can synthesise professionalism with public involvement; a by-product of this is the emancipatory and empowering effects such engagements can generate. However, proclaiming that sociologists should uproot and become heretical scholars is a monumental ask; one that threatens their very ontological wellbeing i.e. their reputation, financial security, friendships and way of life could be jeopardised in the process of transgression – one might even envisage a social death for those daring to try (Shilling 2003). By extension, such an act would invariably compromise the already fragile reputation of sociology; opening its doors to the public would risk its credibility and entice the stigmatised label (Goffman 1990) of just another fanatical ‘ism’ to be discarded alongside the other failed idealistic enterprises, such as Marxism and Feminism (Brady 2004).

In addition, given the fact that sociology is inhabited by a diverse and deeply opinionated cohort of intellects who occupy a range of paradigms, it is unlikely that (in the near future anyway) such individuals will collectively march in unison under the banner of a Public Sociology. Yet it might be plausible for sociology to formulate a democratically charged governing body that could represent the standpoints of a majority force; elected representatives may perhaps serve as champions charged with proliferating ideas and findings and leaving society to decide what, if anything, should be done with them. That said, Nielson (2004) makes the important point that there is a massive incongruence between the ideal and somewhat advanced heuristic devices and ideas generated within the pedagogic milieu and the realities of the social lifeworld; the latter remains a comparatively primitive figuration of ideologies and values incapable or unready to assimilate the ideas of the former. The mind is a cursed thing, it permits us to envisage infinitely wonderful (utopian) worlds where societal processes operate as a beautiful symphony unchecked by toxic social phenomena, histories, idiosyncrasies and other variants that make reality a constant work-in-progress of ebbs and flows, of civility and barbarism, of progress and regression (Parenti 1995). As a result, in true Weberian tradition, Nielson (2004) contends that sociology has no superior ‘right of way’ (33) in public-political affairs. Instead, we should concern ourselves with aiding the present or aligning ourselves with the spirit of the times (zeitgeist). In the end, the question of sociology’s public identity continues to be a hotly debated concept, its actual realisation requires a level of faith and risk and remains (in large) something to behold.

This essay has sought to detail the various arguments for and against a politically engaged Public Sociology – a controversy that has reigned since the subject’s inception and one that continues in a somewhat recurring pattern throughout its development. Indeed, as sociology becomes increasingly self-reflexive and more substantiated in its understanding of social processes, the urge for argumentation regarding its identity and role within society becomes greater. As this essay shows, there is certainly a moral imperative or compulsion within sociology to irradiate asymmetrical discourses that cripple humanity’s potential and subsequently assist in emancipating ourselves from them; this urge is expected given that we are sentient and empathic beings. However, this essay has also acknowledged the possible detriment that may befall sociology in such a venture. Moreover, we have explored the various external forces that contribute to the overall condition of the sociological paradigm; the discipline is imprinted with numerous inequalities and is persuaded greatly by market and political demands to the disadvantage of forming a Public Sociology. Finally, the issue of individual differences, whilst not extensively explored, will remain a long-lasting dilemma as we attempt to reconcile our differences, and harness our collective research and experiences to develop a legitimate and democratically-orientated discipline suitably equipped, confident and competent in participating within wider society.

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This work was produced by one of our professional writers as a learning aid to help you with your studies

‘Prison Works.’ Discuss.

Websters dictionary defines prison as ‘a place of confinement especially for lawbreakers; specifically: an institution (as one under state jurisdiction) for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.’ The idea and reasoning behind prison has been an issue of great controversy especially in the 20^th century. It has been greatly criticised due to its apparent lack of rehabilitation and early releases of paedophiles and rapists, especially in recent news with the release and re-offence of known paedophile Craig Sweeny.

However recent data and statistics have shown a significant decrease in levels of crime both in the UK and US. This paper will attempt to give a balanced argument both in support and against the imprisonment system and attempt to answer whether or not prison does in fact work. Prison systems across the world will be looked at and a comparison will be made between systems in the UK and those in other countries.

There is a lot of evidence in the form of statistics which shows a decrease in levels of crime and re-offending. Evidence from the US shows that as the likelihood of going to prison increases crime decreases. In the UK statistics show that increasing likelihood of getting caught and being put in prison reduces crime. However there is also the issue of there being serious flaws in statistics offered by the British Crime Survey (BCS).

The BCS focuses on crime against an individual, thus eliminating all crime against a business or organisation, including fraud. It fails to take into account “victimless” crimes such as drug offences and crimes such as murder where the victim cannot, for obvious reasons, be interviewed. Rape and other sexual offences are not included, an acknowledgement that many respondents would be unwilling to disclose this information. Crimes against people under the age of 16 are also excluded – removing large numbers of crimes that are common among this age group, such as mobile phone theft and child abuse.

There was also a significant change in the way methodology was carried out as new offences were added to categories of crime in April 1998. No distinction was made between new and old offences which made comparing new statistics to old rather difficult. This shows statistics and figures referring to crime should be taken in to account rather carefully as it is difficult to see whether this data is accurate.

The Government has set out to reduce crime, but the evidence from a study comparing the policies pursued in the USA with those in England and Wales suggests it has adopted the wrong policies. From the early 1980s until the mid-1990s the risk of imprisonment increased in the USA and the crime rate fell; while in England and Wales the opposite happened: the risk of imprisonment fell and the crime rate increased. Then, from 1993, policy in England and Wales was reversed and the risk of imprisonment increased, though it remained historically low. Even this relatively small increase in the use of prison was followed by a reduction in crime.

How do we compare with Europe?

During 2002, concern about prison overcrowding led Britain’s senior judge, Lord Woolf, to discourage judges and magistrates from sending criminals to jail. When he made his statement the BBC television news announced that the prison population was rising when crime was falling and Britain already had more people in jail per head of population than the rest of Europe. The implication is that judges and magistrates are deploying a rather barbaric instrument when everyone else in Europe prefers a more gentle approach.

But a closer look at the figures suggests a different interpretation. The proper comparison is not between the number of prison inmates and the total population, but between the number of prisoners and the volume of crime. A country with a high level of crime would expect to have to put more people in jail. And England and Wales have one of the highest crime rates among industrialised countries. (See above.)

In the EU the average number of prisoners per 100,000 population (unweighted) in 2001 was 87, compared with 129 in England and Wales. But if we compare the number of prisoners to the number of recorded crimes the EU average was 16.9 and the figure for England and Wales was 12.1. In fact, 8 out of 15 EU countries had rates of imprisonment for every 1,000 crimes that were the same or higher.

Comparison with countries outside Europe reveals a similar pattern. In 1999, Canada had 123 prisoners per 100,000 population compared with England and Wales, but 15.9 prisoners per 1,000 recorded crimes. Japan had only 43 prisoners per 100,000 population but 25.3 per 1,000 recorded crimes. Australia, which had the worst crime victimisation rate out of the 17 countries in the International Victims of Crime Survey, had 108 prisoners per 100,000 population and 15.4 per 1,000 crimes.

On this evidence prison in England and Wales is under-used. But does overseas experience suggest that greater use of prison would reduce crime? The best available evidence compares England and Wales with the United States, below.

The Government Line

The Government claims to be cracking down on crime. In the foreword to the white paper, Justice for All (July 2002), authored by the Home Secretary, the Lord Chancellor, and the Attorney General, tough language was used to back up this claim:

“Too few criminals are caught or convicted or prevented from reoffending. Justice denied is justice derided. This White Paper is designed to send the strongest possible message to those who commit crimes that the system will be effective in detecting, convicting and properly punishing them.”

But does the evidence suggest that the Government has adopted the best methods for reducing crime?

For at least 20 years until 1993 the Home Office was strongly opposed to the use of prison, but when Michael Howard became Home Secretary the use of prison was increased for a time against the wishes of officials. Subsequently this policy reversal was weakened and the long-standing bias against prison continues to influence policy today.

Custody, in the words of Justice for All, has an important role in punishing offenders and protecting the public, but it is expensive and should be limited to ‘dangerous, serious and seriously persistent offenders and those who have consistently breached community sentences’.⁽¹⁾

However, the old Home Office policy of reducing the use of prison has been tempered by acknowledgement that community sentences do not adequately protect the public. This realism has led the Government to the search for ‘tough community sentences’ that are a ‘credible alternative to custody’, including community sentences with multiple conditions like tagging, reparation and drug treatment and testing.

It is imperative, according to the Government, that ‘we have a correctional system which punishes but also reduces reoffending through the rehabilitation of the offender’.⁽²⁾ Consequently, a genuine third option is also needed in addition to custody and community punishment.

The planned new sentences combine community and custodial sentences. The list includes a modified suspended sentence called Custody Minus, under which offenders will be automatically imprisoned if they fail to comply with the conditions of the sentence. Custody Plus involves closer supervision by the Probation Service on release for those sentenced to up to three months in prison. The period of custody and supervision combined will be not more than 12 months in total. Intermittent custody is designed for low-risk offenders and involves serving time at weekends or overnight, but working or training during the day.

Seven aims of sentencing are listed in the white paper: to protect the public, to punish, to reduce crime, to deter (others as well as the criminal), to incapacitate, to reform and rehabilitate, and to promote reparation. In the heyday of the anti-prison consensus at the Home Office, ‘incapacitation’ and ‘punishment’ were very much out of favour. Some even denied that prison had a deterrent effect, preferring to regard all criminals as victims of social forces. The list shows how opinion at the Home Office has progressed. But has it absorbed all the lessons revealed by the evidence from overseas?

If the Government really thinks that ‘too few criminals are caught or convicted or prevented from reoffending’ and, if the real aim of policy is to ‘send the strongest possible message to those who commit crimes that the system will be effective in detecting, convicting and properly punishing them’, would an independent and rational person choose the policies set out in Justice for All?

What evidence is available? If we increase the rate at which criminals are caught, convicted and imprisoned, can we expect crime to fall? Two kinds of experiment would allow this theory to be tested. First, two countries would need to pursue opposite policies: one would need to reduce the risk of punishment and another to increase it.

If it is true that crime falls when the risk of punishment increases, then crime will rise in the country that reduces the risk of being caught, convicted and imprisoned. Or, second, a single country would need to reverse its policy, either by increasing or decreasing the risk of punishment, to allow an historical comparison of the impact on crime to be made.

In the social sciences opportunities for such experiments are rare, but for once we are lucky and both an international comparison and a single-country historical comparison are possible. We can compare the USA with England and Wales from 1981-1996 and we can contrast the impact of the anti-prison policy in England and Wales up to 1993 with the effects of the increased use of prison thereafter.

The policies pursued in England and Wales were very different from those adopted in America during the 1980s and 1990s. In America over the whole period, a vigorous effort was made to incarcerate more criminals. As a result crime fell dramatically. In England and Wales, however, the Home Office pursued an anti-prison policy up to 1993, preferring ‘community sentences’. During this period crime increased dramatically. After that date, criminals faced an increase risk of imprisonment. Crime subsequently fell.

Ann Widdecombe – undisputedly a conviction politician – answered the question posed on law and order by the Howard League for Penal Reform with characteristic speed. Speaking on the Tory party conference fringe, the shadow home secretary said simply “Yes” to the question ‘Does prison work?’ “Of course it does,” she continued speaking in a packed hotel function room in sunny Bournemouth. “When people are locked up they can’t commit any further crime,” she said.

By taking the persistent offenders off the streets the one-time Home Office minister said a significant dint could be made in the crime figures. But enough of incarceration. Miss Widdecombe quickly changed tack. “Prison does not do anything like as much as it should to prevent crime. “It only defers crime, it does not solve it.” Rehabilitating offenders was not, she said some “wet liberal extra, it is necessary.” “If people spend any length of time in prison they should not leave without being able to read and write.” Self financing prison workshops were the way forward, she said.

Something had to be done, said Miss Widdecombe, to change a situation where prisoners were set to work to produce 1.4m pairs of socks for a prison population of 67,000 people. Speaking for the National Association of Prison Officers, Harry Fletcher said that if model prisons run to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce re-offending could be shown to work then they should be taken up nationwide. But he said that the present size of the prison population made him “pessimistic” that the system could be made to work in such a way.

Speaking for the Howard League itself was David Faulkner. Although welcoming Miss Widdecombe’s words, he said he had heard similar speeches made by ministers and prison officials for the last 40 years. He then attempted to answer the question his organisation had posed. “Tackling crime requires so much more than incarceration.” Policies should be framed within a sound respect for human rights and framed on “evidence and experience” and not constructed by following populist cries for action, he said.

In the past three financial years, however, the three main types of rehabilitation scheme – psychological ‘offending behaviour programmes’, drug treatment and basic skills education – have been funded to the tune of ?213 million, and are set to expand substantially again. Last year, 6,127 inmates completed offending behaviour programmes, more than 11 times as many as in 1994. That figure will rise to 9,000 in 2002.

Another 16,000 are being taught numeracy and literacy – the basic skills of more than two-thirds of prisoners are so poor they are automatically excluded from 94 per cent of jobs. Research shows that nothing succeeds in preventing recidivism more effectively than employment. ETS is now in use in 79 jails and a similar programme adopted from Canada at another 24. Peer-reviewed research by Caroline Friendship, a Prison Service psychologist, compares 670 inmates who went through these courses with 1,801 offenders matched by offence and social categories who did not attend a programme.

All types of offender who had the treatment were significantly less likely to be reconvicted within two years. Among those judged ‘medium-low risk’, for example, only 18 per cent were reconvicted, against 32 per cent in the comparison group. The research concludes that prisoners who take the courses in 2002 can be expected to commit 21,000 fewer crimes. The effects of rejecting the bleak ‘nothing works’ philosophy go beyond the courses themselves, to prison culture as a whole. The rapid spread of offending behaviour, drugs and education programmes, and the increasing involvement of ordinary prison officers in running them, means the old, militaristic ethos is breaking down in many prisons.

Small signs point up deeper changes – most prisoners address their officer tutors by their first names, for example. From the staff’s point of view, convicts struggling to overcome dyslexia, or to analyse their worst past actions, are less easily dehumanised. To use a word from a previous era which believed in rehabilitation, albeit through religion, they have begun to appear redeemable. At the same time, as research from Canada has long suggested (see box below), prisoners on programmes are less violent, more sociable, and easier to work with. ‘I’m more outgoing, more relaxed,’ says Dave from the CSCP. ‘And if someone calls me a wanker now, I’m OK with it. That’s their opinion, that’s all. It doesn’t mean everyone thinks that.’

At Pentonville, all staff, not only those running programmes, attend an ‘awareness course’ to learn what they entail. ‘You see a prisoner develop, so your attitude to him changes,’ says officer Steve Oliver after one such session. ‘He’s no longer the prat he was, so you treat him better. When you see a prisoner doing something you never thought he would, it’s an incredible buzz.’ ‘There have always been people in the service prepared to treat prisoners decently,’ Narey says. ‘But sometimes they might have felt they had to treat prisoners decently by stealth.

Recently I took a guy into Wormwood Scrubs who had worked with Lord Woolf on his report into the [1990] Strangeways riot. He was astonished at the change.’ The best testimony comes from prisoners themselves. After 16 years inside, Dave says the changes are palpable. ‘It’s much less hostile. The media’s constantly saying that society has got so much more violent. The funny thing is, it’s got less violent in here.’ Politicians and police officers complain about dropped cases and acquittals in court, but the facts remain that judges and magistrates are much more likely than they were a decade ago to send convicted criminals to prison, and they are awarding longer sentences.

The stresses on the prisons are immense and they may, in the end, obliterate the good Narey and his staff are trying to do. The effects on the programmes are already being felt. Peter is on his third attempt to settle into the CSCP – far from ideal for such a demanding programme. At Ranby, near Nottingham, where he started, the course has been closed altogether; he then moved to Dartmoor, where it met the same fate.

He says he knows the course is valuable to him and may indeed be essential for release. But he is being forced to spend a year hundreds of miles from his family in the North. ‘They can’t visit me. And believe me, doing this, I could really do with their support.’ In other jails, overcrowding means prisoners are disappearing from courses just as they get into their stride.

This first concern is substantive, that is, whether deterrence-based programmes are effective in reducing crime. Current scientific opinion on an international basis is that punishment through imprisonment does not reduce crime rates and, in some instances, even worsens crime rates. For example, in a recent review of 29 evaluation studies of boot camps, this approach was considered ineffective in reducing crime.1 Analysis2 of 50 studies from 1958, involving nearly 350,000 offenders, showed that prison slightly elevated the risk for recidivism. Also, lower risk offenders tended to be more negatively affected by the prison experience. Therefore, recent research has failed to establish a link between length of prison sentence and recidivism as predicted by deterrence theory.

As a product of numerous factors, crime requires varying interventions targeting problem-specific areas. Best practice rehabilitation programmes are those that target factors empirically linked to the risk for re-offending. These include pro-criminal attitudes, problem-solving deficits and creating opportunities for education and employment. Evidence from a wealth of studies shows that the risk for re-offending is modifiable when such programmes are delivered. For example, recidivism rates in serious or persistent young offenders can be reduced by 40% in community treatment and 30% in institutional treatment.3

A second concern is methodological, that is, whether the right measures have been used. Incarceration rates should have been computed as the ratio of persons admitted to prison for a particular offence in a given year to the number of persons arrested for that offence in the same year. In this way, the likelihood of the results accurately capturing cross-national differences in the willingness to incarcerate is enhanced. By using number of prisoners in custody on a given day (stock data), the authors have confounded sentence length with imprisonment rates. Stock data often over-represent more serious offenders with longer sentences, with the potential for over-estimation of the propensity to incarcerate in those countries with higher serious crime rates.

By contrast, the number of admissions to prison (flow data) is not affected by the accumulation of more serious offenders, thereby allowing the separation of the propensity to incarcerate from the length of sentence served. For instance, in a comparison of the use of incarceration in US, Canada, Germany and England, Lynch4 found that, in terms of either population-based stock rates or population-based flow rates, the US was several times more likely than any of the countries to incarcerate for homicide, robbery, burglary, and larceny. For homicide, the US was incarcerating 7.5 times and 5.3 times more frequently than England and Germany, respectively. Flow rates based on police arrests revealed a different pattern, showing a broad similarity in the probability of incarceration for the offences.

It appears that Saunders and Billante have not adjusted for variations in size of unsentenced prisoners. Failure to make a distinction can affect comparisons of stock-based incarceration rates since not all those held in a prison have been convicted of an offence.5

To minimise bias in comparative studies, police arrests, rather than crimes reported to police, seem to be the most appropriate data to use. One of the reasons for establishing the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) was to provide an alternative mechanism to inaccurate police records on crime. The trends reported have not controlled for differences in the seriousness of crime across the countries compared.

Countries could have similar crime rates but the nature of the crimes committed could vary. The ICVS (the fourth round, 2000) reported that ‘there was a higher than average use of weapons in the US, Spain, Scotland and Portugal’.6 Guns were used more often in the US and Spain. Without standardising for such variations, it is incorrect to attribute differences in incarceration rates to punitiveness. Therefore, offence-specific analyses provide a better approach.

Correlation between crime rates and imprisonment rates

A third concern is largely empirical, that is, whether crime rates can necessarily predict imprisonment rates. Simple correlation analyses are insufficient for exploring the complex and multi-dimensional association between crime and incarceration propensity.7,8 Several studies have shown the influence of crime rates on imprisonment rates to be limited.7,9,10

In Canada, where the criminal law is the same across the country but administered provincially, Sprott and Doob 11 found that crime rates did not predict incarceration counts. Numerous and complex factors, such as the organisation of the criminal justice system and reward structure, need to be examined. More detailed analyses are required to substantiate Saunders’ and Billante’s claim that ‘the rate of crime and incidence of punishment are closely associated’.

Conclusion

The observed differences reported by Saunders and Billante in the propensity to incarcerate cross-nationally have been made in terms that are too general to serve as a useful and valid basis for policy guidance. Stringent requirements focusing on more sensitive measures and specific crime categories are critical. Analyses of comparable crimes minimise the effects of variations in crime seriousness cross-nationally, thereby yielding more credible results.

Well-designed studies show that deterrence-based programmes are ineffective in reducing crime and the focus should be on developing rehabilitation programmes that do reduce the likelihood of recidivism. The case for Australia adopting the US approach to crime reduction through the use of imprisonment has not been established.

It is common sense that the only guarantee of protecting the community from an offender during the period of a sentence is a custodial sentence. It has been calculated that over a quarter of offenders serving community sentences will have re-offended at least once by the time an offender has served an average length sentence.

The majority of offences are minor ones. For offenders who present a risk of serious harm, prison is quite properly used. Prison provides absolute protection from an individual only for the duration of the sentence. This will not always mean protection from crime. It was suggested to the Home Affairs Select Committee in 1998 that demands for drugs from people inside prison results in crime outside.

The Home Office collects information on serious offences allegedly committed by offenders under supervision by the Probation service. In 2000, among those serving community sentences 103 convictions for very serious crimes were reported-about one in sixteen hundred of those starting sentences in that year. Better longer- term protection may be provided by community supervision.

If prison has not done anything to change offending behaviour, it cannot be said in the long term, to protect the public. If community sentences are effective at weaning offenders away from a criminal lifestyle, they may, in many cases offer the most effective long-term protection of the public. It has been shown that even allowing for selection effects, prisoners released early under parole supervision are reconvicted less than those serving the whole sentence.

For the Lord Chief Justice “many things can be done as far as offenders are concerned without sending them to prison which actually provides better safeguards for the public”. Lord Chief Justice Woolf 27.12.2000. Some community sentences offer more intensive supervision than others. Probation hostels can offer 24 hour monitoring at 50-66%% of the cost of prison. There are just over 100 hostels providing 2,200 places.

ISSP for under 18’s combines intensive supervision with close monitoring. The community surveillance element of the programme aims to ensure the young offender know that their behaviour is being monitored and demonstrate to the wider community that their behaviour is being gripped. ISSP schemes tailor individual packages of surveillance to the risks posed by each offender. They have available either:

Tracking by staff members
Tagging
Voice Verification
Intelligence led policing
– 12 –
We know from research and statistics that

There is no clear relationship between the use of imprisonment and the rate of crime in the UK or internationally. The 12% increase in recorded crime in France between 1987 and 1996 was similar to that in Holland although the percentage rise in the Dutch prison population (143%) was twenty times greater than the French

Incapacitation has only a modest effect. If a drug dealer is locked up, another will enter the market. If one of a gang of burglars is locked up the others may well carry on regardless. The Home office estimates that a 15% increase in the prison population produces only a 1% reduction in recorded crime. (Home Office)

Properly designed community measures or early interventions are a more cost-effective route to prevention than imprisonment. The

American Rand Research Institute found that graduation incentive programmes and community supervision were considerably more cost effective than prison building in reducing crime.

People subject to community alternatives commit no more crimes afterwards than people who have been to prison and in some cases the results are even better.

The Home Office say there is no discernible difference between reconviction rates for custody and community penalties. 56% of prisoners discharged from prison and commencing community penalties in 1995 were reconvicted within two years.

Reconviction rates do vary by type of order. 2 year rates for probation and combination orders were 59% and 60% respectively considerably higher than the 52% for community service. Reconviction rates for prisoners released after short sentences of up to 12 months were higher (60%) than those for longer term prisoners.

Actual re-offending may be higher than that which is measured by reconviction rates. Crude measures of reconviction do not allow distinctions to be made between the seriousness of types of offence. Some individual projects report markedly better rates. The HASC concluded that “some evidence suggests that the most successful forms of community sentence can reduce re-offending more effectively than prison.” HASC 1998. Since then, the most effective community supervision programmes have been shown to reduce offending 15% more than a prison sentence.

The Wiltshire aggression replacement training programme achieved a 14% difference and the West Midlands sex offender programme reduced overall offending by 22%. Among the individual projects which report better results are Sherborne House and the Ilderton Motor Project in London; C-Far in Devon and two Scottish projects, the Airborne Initiative and Freagaarach. The Home Affairs Select Committee in 1998 found “the absence of rigorous assessment astonishing”. While the position is getting better, we still do not know as much as we might about effectiveness. As the then Home

Secretary Jack Straw said in 1997: “We know that community sentences can be effective. But we need to ensure that they are consistently effective”. Research has confirmed the common sense view that offenders with no legitimate source of income, no settled place to live and or addiction problems are particularly likely to re-offend. Studies (e.g.) have found that a number of social factors affect the likelihood of re-offending. These suggest that successful approaches need to;

Get offenders into work. In a comprehensive North American study getting young offenders into work was by some way the most effective way of reducing recidivism (Lipsey et al)

Solve accommodation problems. A Home office study found that in Nottinghamshire 44% of those with stable accommodation were reconvicted compared to 62% with unstable accommodation (May 1999)

Address and treat drug use. A Home office study found that drug use was highly related to reconviction in all areas; offenders with drug problems were more likely to predict that they would re-offend (ibid)

Help with financial problems Research has found some relationship between debt and reconviction (ibid)

For some offenders, approaches are needed which deal with relationship problems and engage the question of peer pressure (ibid)

All of these factors are capable of positive resolution through community intervention and likely to be made more problematic by imprisonment.

“Evidence certainly exists to show that imprisonment creates additional challenges when prisoners are released- for example through loss of job or accommodation, or reduced prospects of obtaining either or both. (Home Office 2001). A research study from Scotland found that “the supervision of offenders in the community can bring about positive changes in behaviour”. (McCivor and Barry 2000). Reconviction rates were lower following the imposition of a probation order than before, the majority of probationers believed that their circumstances had improved since they were on supervision. In the literature on effectiveness, community based programmes have shown more positive results than those in custodial settings. (Vennard) This is not surprising given the then Prison Commissioner’s insight 80 years ago that “it is impossible to train men for freedom in conditions of captivity”.

References

1. Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General, Justice for All, Cm 5563, London: 2000, p. 87.

2. Justice for All, p. 87.

3. BBC News: Does Prison Work? “yes”. Monday, 2 October, 2000, 14:15 GMT 15:15 UK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk_politics/2000/conferences/conservatives/953257.stm

This work was produced by one of our professional writers as a learning aid to help you with your studies

Introduction

A significant proportion of the British electorate has become disengaged from both politics and the political process (Flinders, 2015; Norris, 2011). Evidence of this is reflected in the low turnout in the 2015 General Election whereby only two-thirds of the electorate used their democratic right to vote (NatCen, 2014). Concerns about this withdrawal of British citizens from political participation has been mounting across the last twenty-five years (Flinders, 2015). Myriad reasons underpin this growth in collective apathy. Negative attitudes and opinions underpin how election candidates are out of touch; do not listen to the people; are self-interested and do not keep their promises (Flinders, 2015; NatCen, 2014). In sociological terms, the reasons for non-participation has been linked to ideas of ‘habitus’ and the ‘charismatic leader’ (Weber, 1968: 212; Bourdieu, 1977: 90). These debates will be evaluated to illustrate how and why democracy is under threat. The conclusion will find that the absence of political motivation is most acute within the young adult population particularly where age intersects with class, a lack of political knowledge and social capital (Phelps, 2006)..

Participation

Political participation comprises numerous activities from engaging with the local MP to canvassing for a party and taking part in opinion polls to debating politics in the pub (NatCen, 2014). Similarly, signing a petition, lobbying for a cause and marching in protest against a government policy is also political participation [See (Appendix A.] (Scottish Executive, 2005). However, those who participate in this way, do so in addition to, and not instead of voting in General Elections (Marsh et al., 2007). Voting remains the most commonly used form of political participation within the EU15 (Sloam, 2015). Participation is crucial because ‘citizen involvement in the political process is essential for democracy to be viable and meaningful’ (Dalton, 1988: 35). However, some argue that if voter turnout drops below 50% then whoever gains power cannot claim legitimacy within a democratic system as the results would not reflect the choice of the majority of the electorate (Marsh et al., 2007). The British government is concerned that this is generational and that the subsequent generations will mobilise a greater democratic deficit to the point whereby the legitimacy of the incoming government is called into question; or where democracy ceases to exist (Marsh et al., 2007).

Numerous theories exist as to why voters are disengaged (Kolovos and Harris, 2005). For example, voting is a rational choice which is made following the evaluation of the benefits against the costs of voting (Kolovos and Harris, 2005). Crewe et al., (1992) dismiss this model as too weak but, given the politically illiterate young adult coupled with a sense of apathy and/or alienation; the party they elect could contain policies that are detrimental to them (O’Toole, 2015).

Habitus

The sociological model identifies issues of class, gender, race, ethnicity and age starting with middle age onwards (Kolovos and Harris, 2005). The middle class electorate possess the ‘habitus’; a ‘lasting disposition’ that informs a lifestyle which is enabled by their cultural, social, symbolic and economic capital (Bourdieu, 2015: 15). Habitus is described as the ‘permanent internalisation of the social order in the human body’ and as such, it cannot be learned; it emerges through socialisation (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 190; Bourdieu 1990; Costa and Murphy, 2015: 4). Habitus provides the means to decipher the cultural codes to which less privileged voters are oblivious (Gerwitz et al., 1995). This elite group is more likely to stand for election or lobby parliament for policy shifts that reinforce middle class values (Bourdieu, 1977). Such policies are out-of-touch with working class lives thereby discursively excluding poor, black and minority ethnic groups (Bourdieu, 1977; Kolovos and Harris, 2005).

Political efficacy, by contrast, draws a distinction between political apathy and political alienation (Kolovos and Harris, 2005). Political apathy is rooted in political passivity and indifference (Kolovos and Harris, 2005). Apathetic citizens do not feel obligated to vote whereas, political alienation involves a conscious decision not to participate in voting because it views such participation as negative (Kolovos and Harris, 2005). Russell Brand is politically alienated as marked by tweet to his two million followers that they should not vote in the 2015 General Election if they could not distinguish the differences between the parties (Brand, 2015; Dunt, 2015).

O’Toole (2015) focused on the crisis of political participation in young adults as they are the least participatory group local and global. One exception to this rule could be found in the 86% turnout for the Scottish Independence Referendum which allowed sixteen and seventeen year-olds to vote; this propelled Scottish youths to participate with a hitherto unseen enthusiasm (Electoral Commission, 2014). However the referendum was driven by issues of identity and not leadership. In contrast however, 66% of Americans under 30 voted for Obama in 2008 revealing a racial, gendered and generational shift towards a ‘new class of interested citizens’ (Ting and Rundle, 2012). It was charisma that overwhelmed the hitherto inconceivable notion that an African American could govern America.

Charismatic Leader

While this was However, Obama epitomises what Weber defined as the ‘charismatic leader’ (1920[1968]: 212). The charismatic leader denotes an individual who possesses unique qualities that are beyond the scope of ordinary individuals (Weber, 1920[1968]: 241). Charismatic authority is one of three classifications of authority or ‘legitimate domination’ (Weber, 1920[1968]: 212). However, unlike ‘rational-legal’ and ‘traditional’ authority, ‘charismatic’ domination does not rely on the structural norms to achieve success (1920 [1968]: 212). Rather, charismatic authority is non-coercive; it rests on a ‘devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him’, (Weber, 1920[1968]: 213). In a pre-modern context, the charismatic leader was perceived as ‘superhuman’, ‘divine’ or ‘supernatural’ (Weber, 1920[1968]: 241).

Charismatic leaders also demarcate the highest and lowest turnout to UK General Elections (See Appendix B.). The first was Winston Churchill who led Britain through WWII against the NAZI regime (Dubrin et al., 1998). In this context his leadership style was ‘charismatic’ insofar as he was trusted and adored by the nation which felt assured by his speeches via the radio (Dubrin et al., 1998: 55). While, the Beveridgean vision of the welfare state overpowered the electorate in 1945, Churchill regained power in1951 by an 82% turnout (UK Political Info, 2015).

In stark contrast, the lowest turnout was 59.4 per cent in the 2001 re-election of New Labour’s Tony Blair (UK Political Info, 2015). Blair perceived as a ‘new kind of politician with enormous charisma’ (Gov UK: 2015: [Online]). Riddle asserts that ‘Mr Cameron … has long aspired to capture some of the Blair charisma’ (2015: [Online]). Since then there has been a gradual rise in voter turnout; 66.1 per cent of the electorate voted in the 2015 General Election (UK Political Info, 2015).

Elements of the charismatic leader can be found from a poststructural perspective. Numerous sociologists have adopted the Foucauldian approach to explain how the bio-power of governments produce passive and docile subjects who are easy to control without coercion (Foucault, 1977; Galston, 2001;). Docile societies are self-regulating and see only the positive power of the government; as such, docile subjects trust their politicians and the institutions from which governmental power emanates and circulates (Foucault, 1977). As such, bio-power underpinned the reason why 46,425,386 people chose to vote in the 2015 General Election (Foucault, 1977). However, wherever possible, docile subjects tend to elect the most charismatic leader (Galston, 2001).

UK 2015 General Election

The Labour manifesto was carved on to twenty foot high stone slab costing ?30,000 (BBC News, 2015b: [Online]). Cameron just wanted to be ‘pumped up’ and then pulled the ‘right to buy’ out of the bag at the eleventh hour (BBC News, 2015a: [Online]). Neither possess charismatic authority and only 17% of the nation trusted them (NatCen, 2014). Few people felt any allegiance to a particular party and just 57% felt obliged to vote including academics and those located in London and the South East (NatCen, 2014). 76 % felt an obligation to vote in 1986 compared with 57% in 2015 (NatCen, 2014). Other variables impact the results in terms of a duty to vote such as the This appears supports the notion of habitus which middle class can decipher the cultural codes of the party’s manifesto and policies (Bourdieu, 1977). Interest in politics remains unchanged (29%) as does the belief that democracy works in the UK (57%) (NatCen, 2014).

Election Results and Non-Voters

Despite a slight rise in voting, it is argued that if all the non-voters in the 2015 General Election formed the ‘Apathy Party’, the Apathy Party would have won the majority vote (Dore, 2015: [Online]). This is based upon the number of non-voters outweighing the number of votes received by the winning party within each constituency (Dore, 2015: [Online]). While the election results in terms of seats and percentages looked like Figure 1 if the non-voters formed the Apathy Party it would have won the majority vote winning 345 seats (Dore, 2015: [Online]). Clearly, there has to be a shift in British attitudes to engage the electorate in politics.

Youth Participation

One of the reasons for the apathy of young adults however is linked to another charismatic personality informing his 2 million-strong Twitter followers or ‘disciples’ not to vote (Weber, 1920[1968]; 241). Russell Brand was actually stating that they should not vote if they were unable to distinguish between the parties (Dunt, 2015;, Sloam, 2015). Nevertheless, it was harmful insofar as the media and young adults misinterpreted this as do not vote at all; the youth vote generally goes to Labour thus the outcome could have been different (Dunt, 2015). However, Brand (2015) retracted this assertion having realised that Labour must win to oust the Conservatives.

Diverse Political Participation

Contrary to popular belief, almost two-thirds of young adults take interest in political issues generally (Mycock and Tonge, 2014). However, 75 per cent of young adults felt they did not have the power to influence political decision-making and just over half were politically illiterate (Mycock and Tonge, 2014). Political activism manifests in numerous ways ranging from signing a petition to embarking on active protest against polices (Rusbridger and Rees, 2012). The student protests and the UK riots in 2011 are key responses to the Coalition government’s spending cuts as part of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 which blocked routes to further education and social mobility for many working class youths (Rusbridger and Rees, 2012). In addition, it should also be noted that Russell Brand is not the sole reason for the lack of voting by youths (O’Toole, 2015).

Table 1 illustrates that the political participation of young adults has continued to fall steadily since 1992 and that the percentage of their participation is far lower than the total turnout up until 2010 when it rose slightly. Labour captured the majority of 18-34 year-olds voters who were classified as social class DE which encompasses: the ‘semi-skilled and unskilled manual occupations’; the unemployed and ‘lowest grade occupations’; ‘private and social tenants’ and; ‘Black and minority ethnic groups’ (Nardelli, 2015: [Online]).These labour supporters would have felt the full force of the Coalition government’s Welfare Reform Act 2012 which supports the sociological model of voting by Kolovos and Harris (2005). The most loyal group with the highest turnout to vote for the Conservatives was the 65’s and over (Nardelli, 2015). This is due to the fact that this age group has been spared from the welfare reforms and are exempt from sharing the burden of the deficit to maintain and secure the ‘grey vote’ (Livesey and Price, 2013:21).

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is evident following the debates above that the decrease in the turnout of voters in the British General Elections is contingent upon numerous shifting variables in accordance with the political, social and economic landscape; these are then impacted in terms of social divisions such as gender, class, disability race and minority ethnic groups all of whom experience governments and policies differently. These groups have yet to witness any evidence of the positive social change that sends the elderly to the booth in droves to vote. What does not work includes young working class adults who are politically illiterate illustrates a need to teach politics at school is one solution. The middle class habitus that informs future policies by lobbying banishes the less privileged into oblivion. Cross-Class lobbying is required to counter this issue because as long as middle class values are being imposed, the working class will remain disaffected. The elderly turnout illustrates that voting turnouts will rise if the policies are appropriate. Leaders must have charismatic authority to promote inclusion; traditional top-down power, promotes political disengagement and alienation, which will fester as long as habitus informs policies. Disengagement from politics also explains the political alienation of non-political revolutionaries such as Russell Brand who could his influence his followers by charisma alone. Similarly, charisma informed Obama’s presidency in a racist nation. Furthermore, the highest and lowest ever turnouts for Churchill and Blair’s leaderships were both determined by charisma based upon trust.

Word Count: 2,195

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Appendix A
Participation by citizens over the last 12 months: Europe and UK compared

Table 2. Participation by citizens over the last 12 months: Europe and UK compared

Country

UK

Europe

High

Low

Signed petition

35.54%

24.5%

Iceland 48.76%

Greece 2.95%

Boycotted certain products

20.58%

16.2%

Sweden 34.75%

Ukraine 1.79%

Contacted politician or official

14.94%

12.5%

Iceland 30.30%

Portugal 5.46%

Worked in another association

7.98%

13.1%

Iceland 49.47%

Slovenia 1.68%

Worn campaign badge/sticker

7.5%

8.1%

Iceland 34.4%

Hungary 1.34%

Taken part in a lawful demonstration

3.75%

10.8%

Ukraine 21.69%

Hungary Slovenia, 1.61%

Worked in political party/action group

2.22%

4.0%

Iceland 14.24%

0.94% Hungary

Source: Scottish Executive – FCSD – Analytical Services using European Social Survey 2004/2005

Appendix B

Table 1. Prime Ministers by Turnout and Party since 1945

Year

Turnout %

Prime Minister

Party

1945

72.80

– –

Atlee

Labour

1951

82.60

^

Churchill

Cons (Highest Turnout)

1955

76.80

v

Eden

Cons

1959

78.90

^

MacMillan

Cons

1964

77.10

v

Wilson

Labour

1966

75.80

v

Wilson

Labour

1970

72

v

Heath

Cons

1974

78.80

^

Wilson

Labour

1979

76

v

Thatcher

Cons

1983

72.70

v

Thatcher

Cons

1987

75.30

^

Thatcher

Cons

1992

77.70

^

Major

Cons

1997

71.40

v

Blair

Labour

2001

59.40

v

Blair

Labour (Lowest Turnout)

2005

61.40

^

Blair

Labour

2010

65.10

^

Cameron

Cons

2011

66.1

^

Cameron

Cons

Source: Modified from data collated by UK Political Info, 2015: [Online]

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One thing that is clearly evident is that human beings have consistently developed new forms of solidarity as we have evolved from roaming bands of hunters and gatherers to a digital society with swiftly eroding national borders. Organisations such as Medecins sans Frontieres, The Red Cross, and Amnesty international were created as platforms of international solidarity (Baglioni 2001, p. 224). For these organisations, all that mattered was helping people in need, wherever they were and utilising individual expertise for global benefit (Baglioni 2001, p. 227). Today, the primary basis of solidarity is nationalism—i.e. the recognition of a special duty to one’s own nation, although this notion is eroding in Europe and Asia. Although there are certainly extremists for nationalism, most support for these movements is moderate, and moderate nationalists would say that the individual does have a moral duty to treat others fairly (Wilde 2004, p. 137). Nevertheless, nationalist sentiments preclude global identification as prioritising one’s national group still allows discrimination to flourish. Of course, the next logical step of human solidarity is that of the global level—where through the creation of international bodies, people strive to articulate universal values that are common to all cultures and come together on that basis. The aforementioned organisations do play a role in helping us advance to that point, but there are still many things that need to happen before the cosmopolitan ideal can be put in place. For instance, there needs to be a development of a universal system of ethics, a common language for business, science, and politics, and a change in consciousness from being a citizen of Nation A to citizen of the world. In a sense, this has happened as local movements for equal rights have influenced other people around the world to campaign for their own interests as well. As more organisations and governmental bodies are recognising the inherent worth of the individual, it is reasonable to expect that the development of a broader form of solidarity will emerge.

In the scholarship of international relations, an increasing number of writers agree that the ‘old international order’ is insufficient for dealing with the current threats to human survival, such as resource shortages (oil and potable water), increased population growth, and chaotic climate patterns (Wilde 2004, p. 137). Therefore, it is recommended that a form of global governance and stewardship should emerge (Hardt & Negri 2005, p. 161). Now, more than ever, the primacy of the nation-state is in question, especially as new ways of identification continue to be explored. While some lean to embracing a more local identification—with one’s city or cultural group, others believe that identification on the continental or global level would be more relevant (Waterman 2001, p. 200). In the mid-twentieth century, there has been some movement to creating bodies that possess international oversight such as the International Criminal Court to try war crimes, the Geneva Convention, which dictates international provisions for the treatment of prisoners of war, and the United Nations which dictate standards and prohibitions for weapons proliferation and international trade agreement (Tarrow 2011, p. 2). Although this does present a positive advance toward a system that promotes global accountability and global collaboration on certain commercial and environmental issues—there is still a strong tendency to identify nationality before anything else, and in some circles, tribal identity is most important. Social change toward a more global perspective will likely be slow and painful because of the tendency of the ruling class to view all collective action with suspicion—i.e. as a conspiracy or an infection that must be extracted (Melucci 1996, p. 42).

One piece of evidence that supports the conclusion of social change as a contagion was the opposition’s past reliance on terrorism or guerilla warfare to achieve particular ends (Clark 2009, p. 1). In 1605, Guy Fawkes and his compatriots sought to blow up Parliament in order to kill the king and restore England to Catholicism. On September 11, nineteen hijackers seized control of four US planes and killed more than 3,000 people in order to force Americans from Muslim lands and decrease support for Israel. In both cases, that led to increased persecution of English Catholics and American Muslims and in the latter case, an even larger American presence in the Middle East. This was especially true of governments where any form of verbal dissent meant exile to a prison colony or execution. As violent reactions often backfire, nonviolent protests may succeed where armed resistance has failed in the past. Even though nonviolent protest was always an option as a tool of social change, it was not until the 1940s that it had been thrust into global consciousness (Tarrow 2011, p. 102). Since the movement for Indian Independence in the 1940s, the concept of the nonviolent protest has gained ground, and the results have been astonishing. To those on the outside, the protestors look like champions of social justice while the government looks repressive for violently putting down the protests rather than simply letting them make a statement. This has worked not only to successfully ensure Indian independence in 1947, but also helped to pass Civil Rights laws in the United States in 1965 and ultimately end the state of apartheid in South Africa (Tarrow 2011, p. 216). The world was moving toward a stance of inclusion and tolerance, stressing an appreciation of all cultures. Thus, governments could no longer maintain a racist status quo without global condemnation, nor could it inflict acts of cruelty on its own citizenry without censure (Tarrow 2011, p. 217). ‘The point here, however, is that global politics will slowly penetrate the domestic agendas and there will be a need for articulation of old and new politics’ (Wilde 2004, p. 150). Several movements from women’s rights to anti-war movements and other independence movements have used nonviolent protests to gain their objectives and the current democratic movements in the Middle East and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US shows that it continues to be seen as a viable tool.

One critique of the global mindset is that it would, on the micro-level lead to increased unhappiness, mental ill health, and distrust of others. This was especially true as the demands of an industrial society had split up neighbourhoods and created a world where people did not automatically know what their ‘place’ was (Spencer & Pahl 2006, p. 10). Yes, there are more options than ever as people are more free to emigrate to whichever nation would suit them best, but the discontent would more likely be attributed to the consumer-capitalist ideal of defining the individual by the sum of their purchases. This mindset has also been exported around the globe, which makes it difficult to form communities along anything other than product lines. Yet Spencer and Pahl are optimistic that the old communities can be re-established through the virtual communities of the Internet. While the old cities and towns were grouped around people performing a particular occupation, today, a teacher can go online and correspond with other teachers to discuss the challenges of moulding young minds. A doctor could contact other doctors to learn about treatment modalities they have not tried yet. Only in this case, the community of like-minded people is global rather than local in nature. ‘First, while rightly crediting communities for developing our sense of right and wrong, a universal moral sense, it overturns the universality of the moral sense by asserting the priority of a particular communal obligation’ (Wilde 2004, p. 137).

One defining characteristic of the modern Western state is that it is rich in racial, religious, and cultural diversity. Another is that many of these states are relatively peaceful in spite of this heterogeneity. Part of the reason for this is that states have begun to protect the rights of those historically considered to be an Other based on race, religion or gender. One critique of the liberal policies of cooperation is that it encourages people to think of themselves first as members of religious or ethnic groups rather than members of a society. According to Touraine & Macey (2000): ‘What the liberal conception lacks is a principle of unity that can facilitate communication between different actors. This is why we see so many individuals fleeing into communities, which ensure a high level of communication but also enforce a homogeneity that is potentially intolerant and authoritarian’ (p. 137). One way to avoid this kind of self-segregation is to ensure that society recognises and appreciates the contributions of all member cultures and teaches a mutual valuing of cultures within its educational system (Mason 2000, p. 149). If the dominant society insists that only its own contributions are relevant, minorities would not feel as though they belong to that nation and would continue to behave as strangers in a strange land. If the dominant society is not prepared to acknowledge the needs and interests of minorities, then change often comes slowly through local action. Even though movements such as the one for African American Civil Rights and the one to expel the Chinese from Tibet started out on a local level, they would eventually be able to exert influence on an international level (Pleyers 2011, p. 41). Another example of this is the women’s movements. Starting primarily in Western nations, the quest for the rights of women had taken on global significance when taken to nations that had allowed women little to no agency over their lives (e.g. Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan). While there was some success in the sense that women around the world were able to gain increased agency over their lives, they still remain entrenched in inequalities (Lyons 2010, p. 101).

Although Eric Fromm wrote with the intention of recognising the tenets of authoritarian regimes and analysing the tendency to get caught up in mass movements, he was pessimistic in the human capacity to establish a global society of peace and love because even as they adopt new ways of thought, the social structures still support the old ways. In this, he uses the example of the European conversion to Christianity. While the old pagan myths showed a strong male protagonist conquering adversaries, Christianity advocates turning the other cheek and practicing love for one’s neighbour. However, the history of Europe for the past five hundred years has been steeped in war, conquest, and greed. As Fromm (2007) says: “European-North American history, in spite of the conversion to the church, is a history of conquest, pride, greed; our highest values are: to be stronger than others, to be victorious, to conquer others and exploit them” (p. 116). This shows that even though a society may choose to embrace certain values, there is a problem of human nature and its slowness to align with their philosophical ideals. However, adaptation does take place because even though racism and sexism are still problematic, the Western world is significantly less sexist and racist than it was one hundred years ago. Progress is slow, but it is inevitable. Global solidarity is possible, but it would be a long time in coming. Curiously, the national socialist movements that were quite prominent in the twentieth century had drawn society together with the premise that they faced a common enemy in the existing social structure (Wallerstein 2002). For some nations, it involved becoming independent of a colonial ruler—for others, it was a war of the working class (proletarians) with the middle classes and aristocracy (the bourgeoisie). Usually, the existing structure only served the interests of a very small, wealthy minority and those in charge of the movements sought to create a society where almost every citizen stood to benefit. State governments, such as the People’s Republic of China and Soviet Russia had taken the position that religion was to blame for widespread inequity and rendered the practice of any faith illegal, even though it provided a sense of community among groups of people. In any case, Wallerstein described the socialist movement in two steps: the revolutionary phase, where the existing government would be overthrown and the transformation phase, where the former revolutionaries are now members of the legitimate government. Wallerstein (2002) argued that this two-part movement was problematic because the government would now have to contend with the fact that they are members of a wider international community whose requirements may get in the way of a particular agenda. On the left, there was also the problem of balancing the interests of women and minorities, as movement leaders have often promised that they would be solved ‘after the revolution.’ Working to restore most inequities may be a viable first step for socialist revolutions, but the needs of each supporting group need to be considered.

In summation, there is evidence that we are heading toward an expanding view of solidarity. While some European nations were caught in the grasp of nationalism during and after World War II, in 1958, six states established what would become the European Union—which would create a larger economic community and dismantle obstacles to travelling between member states. While member states have more autonomy than members of a federation (e.g. the US) with respect to the maintenance of the military or foreign policy, all member states must agree to support a democratic free market and the rule of law. Considering the sheer diversity of language, religion and culture, this was a remarkable achievement. This was what Honneth (1996) had in mind when he said that genuine solidarity was created not out of passive tolerance for one another, but with active concern for each citizen on to a degree, which encourages them to contribute their gifts and talents to abstract societal goals (p. 129). This does not mean that people should have a symmetrical level of esteem on a personal level, but instead cultivate a desire for people to develop their best positive attributes, even if it seems foreign. Yes, progress has indeed been made but the global community still has a long way to go before it reaches the point where the vast majority of people consider themselves to be citizens of the world rather than a member of a certain nation or race. According to Wilde (2004): ‘there needs to be a “more heroic” version of universalism that attaches no intrinsic significance to national boundaries… Cosmopolitanism [should be] the “ideal of the future”, which could not yet be realised because of the strength of national sentiments was too great’ (p. 138). Given the level of existential issues such as food and water shortages in a time of unchecked population growth, humanity can only travel one of two paths: global warfare or cooperative management of resources. Since humanity now has the capability to destroy itself, cooperation and global citizenship is the only realistic solution to these problems, otherwise the scope of felt solidarity would once more degenerate to the level of nation, race, religion, or social class. Perhaps Fromm is right in that while human beings can adapt to the reality of a new situation, the fundamentals of human nature can never change enough to ensure the development of a peaceful global society.

Bibliography

Baglioni, S. (2001) ‘Solidarity Movement Organizations: Towards an Active Global Consciousness’ in M. Guigni and F. Passy (eds) Political Altruism: Solidarity Movements in International Perspective, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Clark, H. (ed.) (2009) People Power: Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity, London: Pluto Press
Fromm, E. (2007) To Have or to Be?, New York: Continuum Publishing Group
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Honneth, A. (1996) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge: Polity Press
Lyons, L. (2010) ‘Framing Transnational Feminism: Examining Migrant Worker Organizing in Singapore.’ In Dufour, P., Masson, D. and Cauette, D., eds. Solidarities Beyond Borders: Transnational Women’s Movements. British Columbia: UBC Press
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Pleyers, G. (2011) Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age, Cambridge: Polity Press
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The marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle which will take place in May of 2018 will constitute a considerable departure from some of the protocols regarding royal marriage which have characterised the history of the Royal Family in Britain. Inevitably, Prince Harry’s decision to marry an American divorcee will draw comparisons with the same decision made by the Duke of Windsor with respect to Wallis Simpson, leading to the abdication crisis of 1936 (Valente, 1998). The Royal Family has changed dramatically in the eighty or more years which have passed since this crisis which almost brought down the Royal Family as an institution altogether, but Meghan Markle will nevertheless make a considerable impact, and bring about certain changes, even today. This essay will consider some of those changes, and assess the degree to which Prince Harry’s somewhat unconventional choice of bride will have repercussions for the image and function of the Royal Family in Britain and around the world. It will be argued that Markle, in her nationality, ethnicity, career history and personality, represents a radical departure from some of the conventions and traditions of the royal bride, ones which will likely have the impact of bringing about a significant modernisation and image development for the Royal Family. Further, if she and Harry were to have children, the impact on the Royal Family would be truly transformative and lasting, and may indeed preserve it from the abolition that may otherwise result from its becoming, or appearing to be, obsolete.

In the case of Princess Diana and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Charles and his son Prince William chose women who were not themselves royal but, in the case of Diana, of aristocratic English background and, in the case of Catherine, of British middle-class background (Church Gibson, 2011). A progression might be seen towards a less selective and restrictive choice of possible marriage partners between Charles and William. William, in marrying Catherine, chose a wife who did not have a royal or aristocratic background, something which in itself marked a departure from the traditions of royalty. In choosing Meghan Markle, Harry is departing even further from the conventional model of the royal bride, as she is both an American and someone whose background is in entertainment, meaning she was already in the public eye before her engagement to Harry was announced. Catherine has been credited with doing a great deal to modernise and de-formalise the image of the royal family. In coming from a middle class rather than aristocratic background, and in insisting on a more hands-on approach to child-rearing which departed from the more distant, aristocratic royal model, Catherine has brought the royal family in her generation and that of her children a distance away from some of its traditional past (Palmer, 2013). She has been engaged with the media and the public in a way which has blended formal responsibility with more light-hearted informality, and she has been identified with an increasingly modernised Royal Family.

Markle will not therefore constitute an unprecedented change, as she is of the same generation as Catherine and someone who has a lot in common with her. Instead, Markle’s impact can be considered in part a continuation of the work in transforming the Royal Family which has already been evidenced by Catherine. As was noted in the Belfast Telegraph, ‘Meghan is a modernising figure for the monarchy – which puts her in the same league as Kate, who has been credited with transforming its public face over the past six years.’ However, as will be outlined below, there are ways in which Markle represents a unique change. Nonetheless, it might be argued that the greatest changes will be made by Meghan rather than Harry or the rest of the Royal Family upon their marriage. Indeed, Markle will no longer pursue her acting career, and instead will devote herself to the kinds of humanitarian work which are a necessary part of the royal duties that Harry, her future husband, will be performing as part of his role as the likely Duke of Sussex. Moreover, she will be baptised into the Church of England and will be required to accompany Prince Harry on a number of his royal duties. Nevertheless, although the change to Markle’s life will be significant, it is equally true that she has had, is having, and will continue to have, a transformative impact on the Royal Family itself.

One of the ways in which Markle’s coming into the Royal Family will likely change it is in the kind of background and life experiences which she is bringing into her role. Indeed, her background is notable for being unconventional in royal terms and, as was noted above, for having already involved her in the public eye in her role as an actress before meeting Harry. She is from Los Angeles, and has spent her career in the acting industry, acquiring a number of Hollywood and show business connections as well as a degree of fame in the United States and the world. Although she has deleted her social media in the light of her new membership of the Royal Family, her forthcoming marriage has only increased interest in her and following from the United States. This Americanness is central to the ways in which she will transform the Royal Family, bringing it both into a more transatlantic, international alliance with other parts of the world and integrating it into areas of youth and popular culture from which it has always traditionally remained distant. Markle is notable for her calm and friendly media appearances, informed by her own career in the media spotlight, and this marks a distinction from some of the stiff or awkward interactions which have defined the Royal Family’s media engagements in the past. The Daily Telegraph has noted both Markle’s greater maturity when compared with Diana (being nearly twice the age Diana was when she announced her engagement to Prince Charles), as well as her and Harry’s greater ease and comfort in engaging with the media: ‘compared with the stilted, coy and embarrassing interview that pair gave when they became engaged in 1981, both Harry and Meghan displayed an assuredness and emotional maturity that bodes well for their future success.’ Harry, who is notably lower down the order of precedence for the throne than were either Charles (first in line) or William (second in line) at the time of their marriages, is also himself entitled to a greater freedom and liberality in his behaviour and associations than would be afforded to someone who was the heir or heir-but-one to the throne, and this is an element which Markle will be able to contribute to and exploit in her own fashion. Indeed, Harry has long been considered one of the more fun-loving and engaging members of the Royal Family, and thus in conjunction with Markle it is likely that their marriage and her contribution will be one of mellowing the somewhat austere and traditional image of the Royal Family abroad, and modernising both its perception and its actual practices.

The fact that Markle will transform the Royal Family, and the degree to which she will do so, can be evidenced by considering certain events which have taken place since the announcement of her engagement which, although seemingly innocuous, reveal in fact a striking departure from tradition. One such unprecedented event is her being invited by the Queen to join the Royal Family for their traditional Christmas Day lunch. Kay (2017) notes of this decision that it ‘represents a sea change in the Victorian attitudes which for so long have coloured the royal approach to modern life.’ This is an invitation which has never been extended to an unmarried partner, with Diana, Camilla and Catherine all being excluded from such an invitation. This despite the fact that the engagement had only been announced shortly before in November. This represents not only the fact that Markle is approved of by the Queen, but also that there are changes in protocol and tradition which are being brought about by her presence. Exceptions such as this demonstrate the degree to which Markle is likely to modernise and de-formalise some of the more standoffish or coldly traditional behaviours which have defined the Royal Family for centuries. This is a view which rhetorically voiced by Gore (2017: n.p.) who asks if it is ‘too mad to wonder, once the Brexit dust settles, whether the younger royals may – against all the odds – represent a Britain looking forward to the future rather than an imagined past?’ Markle, with her informal attire, relaxed attitude with the media, experience in the film and television in the United States and, by royal standards, humble origins, may very well provide the catalyst for bringing the Royal Family into the twenty-first century in a way which is compatible with internationalist and inclusive values.

Finally, it can be noted that the greatest impact and change that Markle will likely have on the Royal Family will be long-term in nature. She will take British citizenship with dual American citizenship, and so will any children she might have with Prince Harry. This means that future members of the Royal Family will be American, forging closer links between the two countries and also bringing the Royal Family into a more internationalist, modern light. Perhaps even more significant than this question of nationality is the one of race, with Markle the daughter of a white father and a black mother, her mixed-race status meaning that future generations of the British Royal Family will have parents and grandparents of African American ethnicity, bringing a further degree of integration and internationalism to the complexion of the Royal Family in this and future generations (Hirsch, 2017). It has been argued that the lack of debate and discussion about this aspect of their union is both evidence of changed social attitudes in Britain and evidence that the Royal Family, always slow to move with the times with regards to socio-cultural issues, has also moved beyond questions of miscegenation that might have plagued older putative unions. As Gore (2017: n.p.) has noted, ‘the lack of agitation suggests that British society has largely moved on and that the royal family has moved on with it: this union thus stands as important statement about the degree to which progressive values and diversity have been entrenched in the UK mainstream.’ Other commentators have said that the symbolism of a multi-ethnic Royal Family will change Britain’s relationship with race forever (Hirsh, 2017). In any case, this racial diversity, combined with Markle’s ties to the American entertainment industry, means that the Royal Family will likely be radically changed by the new links that its members will have with the rest of the world. All of these factors point to a Royal Family which is increasingly far removed from the antiquated and insular image which has come to define it in previous decades and centuries.

To conclude, the impact of Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry in Spring of 2018 has already been and will be huge in terms of changes to her own life. However, and perhaps more surprisingly, the impact in terms of changes to the Royal Family itself, the evidence suggests, is likely to be just as huge. Indeed, one can perhaps best characterise Markle’s integration into the British Royal Family in terms of a mutually transformative process. She represents, in her nationality, previous career, ethnicity and personal character, a strong departure from some of the traditional ideas and characteristics which have defined the Royal Family. In Prince Harry, she has found a member of the Royal Family who has frequently been more open and engaging than is the traditional model of royal behaviour, and the likely consequence of their union in the short-term is an increasingly modern-looking, internationally-engaged and informal Royal Family, and in the long-term the kind of future generations of royals who may not only change the British Royal Family but save it.

References

Belfast Telegraph. (2017). ‘Meghan and Kate: Will these royal sisters-in-law really shake up the monarchy?’ The Belfast Telegraph. 2nd December 2017. Available online [accessed 26th January 2018] at: https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/meghan-and-kate-will-these-royal-sistersinlaw-really-shake-up-the-monarchy-36368611.html

Church Gibson, P. (2011). New patterns of emulation: Kate, Pippa and Cheryl. Celebrity studies, 2(3), 358-360.

Daily Telegraph. (2017). Prince Harry and Meghan Markle wedding will give royals a boost.’ 1st December 2017. Available online [accessed 26th January 2018] at: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/prince-harry-and-meghan-markle-wedding-will-give-royals-a-boost/news-story/6b49375970613474d52a5ab297aa8d8c

Gore, W. (2017). ‘Meghan Markle: the royal family needs a desperate update – could a Trump-bashing American actress be the answer?’ The Independent. 27th November 2017. Available online [accessed 26th January 2018] at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/meghan-markle-prince-harry-engagement-royal-family-suits-actress-trump-update-needed-a8078936.html/

Hirsh, A. (2017). ‘When Meghan weds Harry, Britain’s relationship with race will change for ever.’ The Guardian. 27th November 2017. Available online [accessed 26th January 2018] at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/27/prince-harry-meghan-markle-britishness-monarchy-relevant.

Kay, R. (2017). ‘How Meghan Markle is transforming the Royal Family.’ The Daily Mail. 13th December 2017. Available online [accessed 26th January 2018] at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5177145/Meghan-Markle-transforming-Royal-Family-RICHARD-KAY.html.

Palmer, R. (2013). ‘It’s ‘hands-on’ parenting for the future monarch.’ Available online [accessed 26th January 2018] at: https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/416809/It-s-hands-on-parenting-for-the-future-monarch

Valente, C. (1998). The deposition and abdication of Edward II. The English Historical Review, 113(453), 852-881.

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The term abstraction manifoldly pervades Marx’s writing. The heterogeneity of its meaning is related to the fact that Marx understands production within a system of capitalism to be a totalizing process which presides over the finiteness of the individual mind and therefore determinations, particulars and forms must be understood as relations in an ongoing process and they can only be considered in isolation as abstractions.

Nevertheless, these abstractions are real insofar as they constitute the spaces, actions and behaviours of concrete social reality for individuals whether they are experienced as such or not. Using Roberto Finelli’s response to Chris Arthur’s work on abstraction, this essay will focus on a particularity drawn out by Marx in the Grundrisse related to the engagement of exchange and from this, will elaborate on Marx’s deployment of the term abstraction in his critique of political economy.

In The Chapter on Capital, Marx considers the nature of the putative social relations into which individuals must enter in order to engage in exchange. Before particularizing the moment of exchange, Marx tactfully draws our attention to the perceptual limitations induced by the totality of capitalist production, where the subject holds that “a social relation, a definite relation between individuals…appears…as a purely physical, external thing which can be found, as such, in nature and which is indistinguishable in form from its natural existence.” (Marx, 1993, p.240) Marx rejoins this faulty apprehension with the simple fact that “Nature does not produce money, any more than it produces a rate of exchange or a banker.” (Marx, 1993, p. 240) In this discreet move through which the concrete given of social reality is revealed to be the hidden operations of capital, Marx offers an early indication of his method for interrogating abstraction as a way of life.

Looking at the form in which the moment of exchange realizes itself, Marx distinguishes an equality brought to bear on the individuals involved in exchange. The expression of exchange value in commodities through the labour time spent in their production means that the moment of exchange, no matter the use values being compared, rearticulates that equivalence and in so doing transforms the individuals involved in the exchange into equivalent exchangers. Both the exchangers and the commodities they exchange, are by the logic of exchange value, equal; “The subjects in exchange exist for one another only through these equivalents, as of equal worth, and prove themselves to be such through the exchange of the objectivity in which the one exist for the other.” (Marx, 1993, p.242) The content outwith the act of exchange, the natural differences between the exchangers (needs, production, wealth etc.), does not alter the state of equality enshrined in the act of exchange. Rather, it is the natural differences of exchangers outside the act that are the very precondition of the equality expressed in the exchange. The social relation within which individual exchangers find themselves in the act of exchange is one predicated on the fact that each individual needs something from the other and has produced something the other needs in return, whether it is commodities, labour or money makes no difference in this case. The condition where individuals reciprocally produce the objects that service the needs of others and meet as such, determines the equivalence that anchors the act of exchange. Through the act of exchange, individuals acknowledge and realize in each other’s mutual compulsions the general self-seeking interest of human beings. Yet, when thoroughly considered it is forgotten that in the act of exchange, the presupposition of exchange value…in itself implies compulsion over the individual, since his immediate product is not a product for him, but only becomes such in the social process, and since it must take on this general but nevertheless external form; and that “the individual has an existence only as producer of exchange value, hence that the whole negation of his natural existence is already implied; that he is therefore entirely determined by society.” (Marx, 1993, p.249)

What at first appears as a natural and concrete moment in social reality is in fact riven by historical process. The formal determinations expressed in the act of exchange produce equality insofar as they coerce the individual into furnishing the needs of society in general in the form of exchange value through abstract labour.

Roberto Finelli draws attention to this role of formal determinations as much as it concerns a form as something that “is ‘invisible’, something not directly perceptible, unlike ‘material determination.’” (Finelli, 2007, p.4) In Marx’s conceptualisation of totality, Finelli sees the “abstraction-emptying out” (Finelli, p.6) of the concrete. Finelli’s view holds that the surface of concrete reality, including as we saw the example of the act of exchange, is propped up by a repression of abstract processes ongoing in the totality of production. Abstraction, says Finelli, is a “colonisation which is dissimulated and negated through an hysterical over-determination of the surface which, coloured and embellished, always has to display the contrary of that which it is.” (Finelli, p.66) With the concentration and centralisation of abstractions as a way of life, historically configured processes that reproduce social relations are naturalised and become perceived as concrete. The mediations comprising the disjunctive moments in social reality are made invisible by the cult of exteriority where objects don “a superficial appearance in order to strike and seduce that ideological and deceitful organ par excellence which is our eye” (Finelli, p.69), making the abstract symptoms of capital domination appear coherent and real. The predominance of exteriority over material essence is the result of appearance submitting to the “expansive-reproductive logic” (Finelli, p.66) of the totality of capital, which perpetually resumes its own basis in social reality.

The concrete, which is now discovered to be the congelation of real processes abstracted from the totality of capital production, is hallowed, formed and determined to supply the relational totality of capital its iterative force; as Marx says, “Within the value relation and the expression of value contained in it the abstract universal is not a property of the concrete, the sensuous-actual; on the contrary, the sensuous-actual is a mere hypostasis or determinate form of realization of the abstract universal.” (Marx, 1992, p. 32) The final chapter, therefore, in the domination of abstraction over social life occurs when individuals become psychologically inducted into the realm of superficiality, when the mind receives as and responds as if to concretise that which is abstract, “And there, through the abstract activity of many, the concrete is produced.” (Finelli, p.70)

Returning to our consideration of the act of exchange, the freedom promised there, as we saw earlier, proved in fact to be the contrary: “inequality and unfreedom” (Marx, 1993, p.249) The perceived freedom in the act of exchange is the historically produced naturalisation of exchange value behind which is hidden the social force of abstract labour. The social compulsion to embody the so-called freedoms in the act of exchange reinforces the grip of abstract labour over the exchanger, as the satisfaction granted by the former exchange realizes and legitimates abstract labour through exchange value, persuading the exchanger to see as free and beneficial a process that is ultimately coercive. To this, Finelli adds: “In the society of capital, abstraction assumes the explicit contours of matter of fact…it becomes a practically true abstraction…The universal is real only when it is the fruit not of logical intellect or even of theoretical ideation but of collective historical praxis.” (Toscano, 2008, p. 276) The universal realization of abstract processes as concrete objective reality occurs when the perceptual field is conditioned to the dissimulation of abstraction through social and historical mediation. This occurs when individuals internalize real abstractions and behave and act as such and when society binds its members to the capital-subject through their mutual adherence to the lure of the exchange value viz real abstraction, thereby manufacturing a radical reciprocal dependency.

Lucio Colletti notes in his introduction to Marx’s early writing that “The result [of the domination of real abstractions] is – given that ‘labour’ in general is, in Marx’s words, ‘…the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence’ – that the light of eternity comes to be cast upon the particular historical figure of the wage-labourer.” (Marx, 1992, p.28) The concealment of forced abstract labour behind the ostensible form taken up by the act of exchange structures the needs and wants brought to bear on the act by the labourer/exchanger. The obligation attached to the act of exchange forcing the exchanger to labour in order to furnish the general abstract wants of society, produces his social reality in such a way that his desires become caught up with the reproductive logic of capital. His needs become malformed by the guiding principle of reproducing his labour power and the basis of his own subjection. The increasing separation of the labourer from his own concrete basis in reality “which is an expression of the complete domination of dead matter over men” (Marx, 1992, p. 319) results in the pursuit and production of alien objects and, symptomatically, the “loss of and bondage to the object” (Marx, 1992, p.324) The more real-abstractions operate as the governing logic over social life, “the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself.” (Marx, 1992, p.324) Thus, the obligation of entering into estranged labour, concealed behind the form taken up by exchange (with its promise of mutual satiation) forces the individual to naturalize an alien reality without being aware of its taking place; “What the product of his labour is, he is not.” (Marx, 1992, p.324) The labourer’s alienation resides in his being compelled to embody an ontology that goes contrary to his own nature, or breaks his dialogue with nature, by deceptive abstractions reified as concrete reality.

The worker must continue to produce even when he is liberated from immediate physical need to service the needs of general society and thus continues to produce his own inorganic objective reality until “he regards….his objectified labour, as an alien, hostile and powerful object which is independent of him [and] then his relationship to that object is such that another man – alien and hostile, powerful and independent of him – is its master.” (Marx, 1992, p.331) The alienation generated by abstract labour is one which pervades man’s relationship with nature and others to the extent that a class formation emerges, grouping individuals whose estranged relationship with objective reality is made equivalent under the control of the capitalist.

However, Finelli prudently reminds us that the class, the proletariat, communism have been values and locations, ideal and real, conceived on the basis of the principle of abstract equality alone, or of an equality not vivified and made concrete by differences. It therefore ended up reflecting, in itself, precisely that same abstraction which it wanted to combat and eliminate. (Finelli, p.72)

The ideal function of the proletariat, antagonistic as they are to the reproductive alienation generated by the abstract labour process and the real abstractions structuring social life through exchange value, is built upon the same abstract equality that stabilizes the act of exchange in capitalist circulation. With this threat in mind, Finelli resolves that real change can only emerge when “a new anthropology” is conceived “that knows how to articulate difference together with equality, the right of everyone to see their own strictly unrepeatable singularity recognised, respected and developed.” (Finelli, p.73)

Abstraction continues to be a real reckoning force in modern life, particularly with the acceleration of global flows in our era of multinational capitalism. New forms of dissimulated abstractions synthetically generate the surface of concrete objective reality and condition the perceptual field to validate their hypostatization. Information technology is one obvious example of this process at work on contemporary lives. Comprehensively tracing the evolution of Marx’s writing on the subject of abstraction and the explications and extensions offered by Finelli will, however, give us an opportunity to reveal the real abstractions at work in our lives and salvage the real concrete from complete vacancy.

Bibliography

Finelli, Roberto. 2007. Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’, in Historical Materialism 15, 61-74

Marx, Karl. 1992. Early Writings. London: Penguin Books

Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Books

Ollman, Bertell. 2003. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Postone, Moishe, and Brennan, Timothy. 2009. Labor and the Logic of Abstraction: An Interview, in South Atlantic Quarterly 108(2), 305-330

Toscano, Alberto. 2008. The Open Secret of Real Abstraction, Rethinking Marxism, in A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 20(2), 273-287

Sayer, Derek. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

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Introduction

David Collinson and Jeff Hearn posit that “… a challenge to men’s taken-for-granted dominant masculinities could facilitate the emergence of less coercive and less divisive organisational structures, cultures and practices” (Collinson and Hearn, 1996: 73). This paper offers a critical evaluation of this proposition within a structuralist/poststructuralist conceptual framework, centring on discourse as a means by which taken-for granted dominant masculinities may be ameliorated.

The theoretical examination, detailed under Conceptual foundations below, begins with an appraisal of the value of discourse in both the workplace and wider society. Discourse is shown to be powerful and widely accepted, with the potential to challenge dominant masculinities. This potential, however, is not without its difficulties.

The practical considerations of the potential challenge identified are examined under The challenge to dominant masculinities below. Previous challenges to taken-for-granted masculinities are considered and are found to have been limited in their success, inter alia, due to the external points of origin of their discourses.

Finally the Conclusion recapitulates upon the paper’s findings. Collinson and Hearn’s (1996) proposition is found to be valid but conceptually flawed and optimistic, requiring a more robust challenge than they imply.

Conceptual foundations

Language is the tool of the various discourses that contribute to the formation and communication of social structures, cultures and practices (Van Dijk, 1997). The “linguistic turn” – the name given to the encapsulation of the centrality of language in the development of structures, cultures and practices – is a product of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy (Barrett, 1998), and is most commonly associated with the nineteenth and twentieth century work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (Potter, 2000). The linguistic turn concept captures the importance of both words and interpretation – “signification” (Barrett, 1998) – which may be described as being either “internal”, i.e. that which is acceptable to and readily adopted within the relevant settings (and usually originating therein), or “external”, i.e. that which is unacceptable and rejected by the relevant settings, due to having originated from outside and hence being recognised as alien. The processes by which these significations arise are herein respectively described as “internalisation” and “externalisation”.

Collinson and Hearn’s (1996: 73) suggestion can be read in two ways – as a workplace challenge, or one with a wider, societal base. Examination of the quoted sentence in its entirety – “The possibility of a challenge to men’s taken-for-granted dominant masculinities could facilitate the emergence of less coercive and less divisive organisational structures, cultures and practices, a fundamental rethinking of the social organisation of the domestic division of labour and a transformation of ‘men at work’” – suggests that their reference point encompasses the domestic division of labour (the private sphere) as well as the workplace (the public sphere). Collinson and Hearn (1996) optimistically suggest that dominant masculinities are “precarious” due to their inherent conflicts and the absence of solidarity between men. An alternative understanding of this is that dominant masculinities are necessarily in conflict due to masculinity’s characteristic division and competitiveness: it is in divisiveness that masculinity achieves its conceptual unity; the contradiction inherent in the converse situation, where divisive, competitive masculinities would be founded on consensus and trust, illustrates this. Collinson and Hearn’s (1996) conceptualisation may, therefore, be faulty and over-optimistic, and dominant masculinities may be less precarious and more difficult to challenge than they suggest. The dominance of masculinity is long-standing and deeply rooted; however, there is no deeper root than language, and from the root of language springs perception, assumption and understanding about reality, and importantly, the construction of reality (Potter, 2000). Any purely workplace-based challenge to masculinity would be unlikely to be sufficient, raising the question whether the domestic challenge has prospects of success. At the functional level it appears not: there have been many challenges that attempt to encourage or shame men into tackling domestic chores, yet these have met with overt resistance or subtle resistance, and have achieved little success (Crompton, 1997). It is, therefore, the contention of this paper that to be successful, any challenge must be rooted in language, as this is the only way in which discourse can be modified – the discourse which will ultimately shape the private sphere and the public sphere together, leading to the consensual and unitary structures, cultures and practices that Collinson’s and Hearn’s (1996) suggestion requires.

The challenge to dominant masculinities

Men’s specific experience in the workplace and society has only recently become the subject of academic focus. For masculinity to be challenged, however, issues around it must be considered from this particular perspective (Goodwin, 1999). Challenges to masculinity are not new, even though many take the form of explanations for gender segregation or discrimination and the challenges themselves remain implicit. Indeed, the promotion of feminine characteristics such as that favoured by Hong Kong businesswomen in contrast with their western counterparts (Hills, 2000) presents an oblique challenge, mirrored by Cockburn’s (1991) call for equivalence rather than equality. Feminism too, in its typical western form, represents such a challenge, albeit still a secondary one emerging from feminism’s aims, many of which are conceived in terms of gender conflict. Previous conceptual challenges typically took the form of critiques of patriarchy – a conceptualisation whereby women are subordinated through tacit co-operation between men and capital (Pateman, 1988), or whereby capital and patriarchy are not supportive but are mutually exploitative in the interests of their survival (Johnson, 1996). Alternative challenges emerge from conceptualisations including preference theory, within which women’s biological circumstances govern their choices (Hakim, 1996), and social reproduction, whereby despite women’s education levels having equalled and sometimes exceeded those of men, women are conditioned to expect discontinuous employment and lower-level work (Blackburn et al, 2002). Additionally direct, top-down challenges arose from more practical and codified bases, typically in the form of equality legislation and workplace initiatives. Included in these challenges was the modification of language so that it came to use the explicitly gender neutral and spectacularly clumsy singular pronouns “s/he” and “him/her”, and the grammatically difficult plural pronoun “their” in place of the singular, the latter typically favoured by those who wish to be fair but do not wish to be seen to be motivated by a feminist agenda, an example of which is BT’s missed-call message “You were called at 5.32pm today. The caller withheld their number.” (Humphrys, 2004: 287-288).

This modification of language has not, so far, been central to the feminist process; it has not driven the process forward, but has merely followed along as a by-product of it and a useful signifier of “correct” attitudes. As detailed in the previous section, language has a long history of reflecting thought and forming thought (Van Dijk, 1997). In language there is a historically accredited and widely accessible means of challenging men’s taken-for-granted dominant masculinities, but to be successful, language must be the main focus of the challenge, internalised in the cultures, structures and processes of society and the workplace, and its signification must be internal.

It is easy to explain what the challenge must do, but less easy to imagine what it will look like. The two strands described above – nouns (and by extension, pronouns) and discourse – are good places to start. Each is examined in turn below.

It has been shown that nouns carry meaning and assumptions, and that they establish and perpetuate the dominance of masculinities. It is true that there is a feminist critique of, in the terminology of this approach, “malestream” nouns – exemplified by the comparatively new noun “womyn”, the use of which is intended to neutralise the adjunct-to-“men” associations of the noun “women” (Warren, 1989). Unfortunately, due to faulty signification, this strategy has not achieved the sought-for outcome; “womyn” has, for some, come to mean no more than “woman” expressed in the context of the feminist critique of patriarchy – effectively it has externalised itself from the settings it was designed to reform (Kendall, 2008). Dialect of the Middle Ages provided the non-gendered pronoun “a” and the sixteenth century similarly contributed “ou” (Wright, 1898), but both have fallen out of usage and reintroduction would be difficult without externalisation, although due to its comparative contemporary familiarity “one” may be used with greater prospect of success and with reduced likelihood of externalisation.

Discourse in both the private and public spheres traditionally uses metaphors relating to confrontation, struggles, hunting, warfare and the sports field. In the commercial world, examples can be readily found in management statements, an interesting example of which may be found in IBM’s corporate song: “… we’ve fought our way through, and new fields we’re sure to conquer too; forever onward IBM!” (Deal and Kennedy, 1988: 115). The winning of contracts is also frequently conceptualised and verbalised as “winning a battle” in the “commercial jungle” (Collinson and Hearn, 1996: 69-70). The “jungle” image implies a view of the market as a place where “survival of the fittest” and “dog-eat-dog” are recipes for success, with failure to achieve these being “soft”, i.e. feminine. The overarching signification implies that masculine equals success and feminine equals failure. This is the basis of dominant masculinity, and it is through long-standing usage and deep internalisation of these admittedly useful and vivid metaphors that dominant masculinities come to be taken for granted. The Hong Kong businesswomen mentioned above wanted their femininity, not their ability to imitate the behaviour of their male colleagues, to be respected (Hills, 2000). If they wish to achieve this they must begin by revolutionising the discourse of their lives and their workplaces. This means that “fighting” must become “discovering”, and “goals” or “victories” must become “answers” or “solutions”. The ways in which discourse must change are as numerous as the types of structures, cultures and practices in which they operate. It is not through the appreciation of female characteristics that the discourse and structures, cultures and practices of the workplace will become less coercive and less divisive; it is through discourse that female characteristics will come to be appreciated and structures, cultures and practices of the workplace will become less coercive and less divisive. It is, among other things, from discourse that dominant masculinity came to predominate, and it is, among other things, through discourse that it may be abated. Within the compass of this paper it is discourse that is the root and the cause of the problem, not the symptom and the outcome.

Conclusion

Critically evaluated, it has been shown that the initial statement may be too optimistic. Collinson and Hearn’s (1996) view that dominant masculinities are precarious as a result of their inherent division and competitiveness seems at first sight to be reasonable, although this may be illusory. Examination of the converse situation, that of a hypothetical consensual and trusting masculinity, reveals that, conceptually at least, masculinity’s divisions and competitiveness are to be expected and in this it finds a kind of unity, and hence calls into question the validity of Collinson and Hearn’s (1996) conceptualisation of the problem. That is not to say that a challenge cannot successfully be made. The common shortcomings of previous challenges are that they all suffer from faulty signification, having originated externally or having become externalised. The suggestion made in the context of this paper is that for the challenge to be successful it must originate in discourse. The power of discourse as a support to dominant masculinities has been shown, and so it is not unreasonable to suppose that a similarly rooted challenge may have comparable power and resultant success. The key to success, however, is that the challenge must begin with discourse and be – and remain – wholly internal. Previous challenges developed their own discourses but these were weak due to their emergence from externalised agendas: they were effectively limited to their academic, political or feminist original locus. To be successful and all-embracing in both the workplace and wider society, the agenda must emerge from discourse, not vice versa, and must encompass all aspects of the public and private spheres.

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Social control can be defined as a system of ‘measures, suggestion, persuasion, restraint and coercion’ by which society brings people into conformity with an accepted code of behaviour (Sharma, 2007, p. 220). There are many forms of direct and indirect social control. The family has always provided a strong means of social control in its direct influence on the behaviour of its members. However, with the changing nature of the family structure in modern Britain, the family’s ability to provide an effective means of social control has been called into question. This essay will explore the concept of social control in relation to the changing role of the family and the increasing influence of other areas, in particular the mass media and the internet.

Social control comes in two distinct forms: direct control and indirect control. Direct social control works when someone exerts influence on a person directly due to their close proximity, for example, the family. Indirect social control is provided by other factors removed physically from the person, such as institutions, traditions, customs and culture: these indirect means of social control are ‘invisible and subtle’ (Sharma, 2007, p. 221). There are also two forms of social control within these groupings: control by sanction, which rewards the compliant and punishes the miscreant, and control by socialisation and education (Sharma, 2007, p. 222).

Social control can be maintained by positive means and negative means. Positive means of social control make people want to conform to society in order to enjoy rewards, such as praise, social recognition or respect. Negative means of social control work in the opposite way, making people want to conform to society in order to avoid emotional or physical punishment, criticism, ridicule or shame (Sharma, 2007, p. 222).

Formal and informal types of social control are also recognised as mean of controlling people’s behaviour within society. Formal social control is ‘carried out by an agency specifically set up to ensure that people conform to a particular set of norms, especially the law’ (Browne, 2011, p. 17). Forms of formal social control include the control exerted by official institutions such as the government, education establishments, religion, the police and the army. Informal social control, in contrast, is ‘carried out by agencies whose primary purpose is not social control’ (Browne, 2011, p. 18), such as family and friends, who influence us by socialising us into certain customs, values, ideals and norms.

One example of socialised ‘norms’ is gender roles. Boys and girls are encouraged to behave in way which accords with what society accepts to be masculine (assertive and dominant) or feminine (passive and submissive) forms of behaviour. To step outside these socialised expectations would be seen as transgressive and may lead to disapproval from others. Gender roles have been proven to be socially constructed rather than the result of any natural inclinations by studies that show men and women’s accepted gender roles to be very different in other cultures and tribes around the world (Browne, 2011, p. 20).

The family has always provided a strong means of social control. Parents provide children with direct guidelines to follow regarding acceptable behaviour. Social control through the family is achieved by both positive and negative means, with children keen to gain praise from their parents, while wanting to avoid punishment in any form for disobedience. According to social control theory, ‘those who are socially integrated … are more likely to engage in socially sanctioned behaviours and less likely to engage in risky behaviours’ (Baron, 2007, p. 9). In this way, social integration offered by the family unit helps to encourage socially accepted behaviour.

However, the role of the family has changed significantly over the years. There has been a reduction in economic functions due to an increase in government help; a reduction in activities performed by the family with an increase in baby sitters and nurseries; an increase in family recreation with the advent of television and radio; and most importantly, a change in the relationships between men and women (Sharma, 2007, p. 256), which has seen the dominance of the patriarchal head being replaced by a need for co-operation among equals (Sharma, 2007, p. 259).

The traditional idea of the nuclear family, consisting of the mother, father and two children, is no longer relevant in modern times. Today, there are many families made up of unmarried parents and single parents, while there are also many step-families and increasingly, homosexual partners with children. The traditional family is also being replaced by other modes of living, for example, single-person homes and house-shares of friends. The changing nature of the family unit means that today the word ‘family’ can suggest such a variety of situations that no typical ‘family’ now effectively exists. Bernardes suggests that ‘… family situations in contemporary society are so varied and diverse that it simply makes no sociological sense to speak of a single ideal-type model of “the family” at all’ (Bernardes, 1997, p. 209).

Indeed, the Office of National Statistics tells us that the number of unmarried parent families has increased significantly ‘from 2.2 million in 2003 to 2.9 million in 2013’ (Office for National Statistics, 2013). There has been a slow but steady rise in the number of single parent families, 1.9 million in 2013, up from 1.8 million in 2003. Out of 26.4 million households in the UK in 2013, 29% consisted of only one person, while ‘the fastest growing household type was households containing two or more families (Office for National Statistics, 2013).

It is clear that the family unit is constantly changing as society changes and so it seems natural to suggest that there are many elements of diversity within families that can affect their social control. Fogarty, Rapoport and Rapoport (1982) identify five main types of family diversity in modern Britain:a. organizational, b. cultural, c. class, d. life-cycle of family, and e. cohort. (Rapoport, Fogarty and Rapoport, 1982, p. 479) Organisational diversity speaks of the family structure, kinship patterns and division of labour within the home. For example, traditional nuclear families, consisting of husband, wife and two children; single-parent families; ‘dual-worker’ families where both parents work; and step-families. (Rapoport, Fogarty and Rapoport, 1982, p. 479)

Cultural diversity refers to the differences in lifestyles between families of different ethnic, religious, or political backgrounds. For example, Catholic societies do not allow abortion or contraception, so this would necessarily lead to larger families and thus, perhaps, a stronger social influence over younger members. Class diversity means the class divisions between different classes, which give different amounts of access to resources. This can be seen in relationships between men and women, parenting of children and connections with extended family. (Rapoport, Fogarty and Rapoport, 1982, p. 479)

Life-course refers to differences in family life that occur over time. For example, young parents living with their child have a different experience from an elderly couple with adult children. Cohort refers to generational links within families, which can be important when extended family members live close to the nuclear family (Rapoport, Fogarty and Rapoport, 1982, p. 479); this would generally increase the strength of familial social control.

The family unit has historically always been an important in shaping the characters and behaviour of its members, so that ‘the family is the first institution that helps in implementing social control mechanism’ (Pandit, 2009, p. 73). Children grow up within the moral framework laid down by the older family members. However, with the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family structure, there have been other modes of social control that have become increasingly important.

The mass media is actively engaged with virtually all people’s homes in the modern world. Mass media, such as television and newspapers, influences our attitudes and even our values can be skewed by the media as products and services are advertised as necessities. Advertising acts as an effective form of positive and negative social control by encouraging the consumer to confirm to social norms. For example, we are encouraged to buy deodorant to avoid body odour and thus the disapproval of others, while we are also encouraged to buy fashionable clothes to impress others (Batra, Myers and Aaker, 2006, p. 359). It is, in this way, that the media has become an important source of social control on a day to day basis because the more pressing influences on our daily behaviour are those influences that exist in our immediate vicinity. Indeed, ‘the proliferation of the media has altered the very nature of contemporary social order’ (Innes, 2003, p. 60). However, the most pressing influence of the media is not necessarily as a form of social control but as a form of ‘social ordering’ in that it determines not how we think but what issues we tend to think about (Innes, 2003, p. 60). The media directs public attention to certain issues and causes them to be the subject of public and private debate.

More specifically within the media, the rise of the internet has made social media an important element in social control and social ordering, particularly among young people. The rise in personal technology and popularity of social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, has meant that informal social control has grown between young people and their peer group. Friends can share photos on social networks and record every event in detail, tagging each other in photos, thus appearing on other pages without explicit consent. There is less privacy than ever before and people are being pressured into social conformity in many different ways via social networks: ‘social media can enable teens to succumb to peer pressure en masse’ (Firger, 2015).

There is no other form of media that allows for greater recording and sharing of the smallest details of every interaction. These details can be projected around the world at the touch of a button. The social control exerted by social media is effective due to its wide reach and easy access. This kind of influence can be used for both good and bad (Herring, 2015, p. 50). The ability to connect with people so easily is a positive element of social media, strengthening bonds and encouraging greater understanding of other people’s cultures and viewpoints (Herring, 2015, p. 141).

However, other areas of negative social control have also arisen in the digital space. Not only can social media be a means to communicating the wrong information, it has also led to new forms of social control, such as cyber bullying; disturbingly, ‘twenty-five percent of teens have reported being bullied online via social media on their phones’ (Herring, 2015, p. 142). Social media has also been cited as a main cause for the marked increase in eating disorders among young people in recent years (Dugan, 2014). People are now being threatened in new ways, often from a great physical distance, to conform to their peer group. This kind of digital social control is distinct from other social control in that it can be wielded 24 hours a day, in a similar way to familial social control.

The family has always been an important part of social control due to its close proximity to us, especially as children. However, with the changing face of the family, this form of social control has become less obviously effective. The change in the family unit and the reduction in traditional nuclear families means that the social control of families is more diluted. At the same time, the development of personal technology combined with the rise in internet usage and social media has meant that people now have more media influence in their lives. Indeed, powerful modern ‘technology is making it more difficult for individuals to exert control over their personal worlds’ (Spring, 2013, p. 62), as they are effectively controlled by social influences entering their lives through their own mobiles and tablets. The media as a type of formal social control and social ordering has always been powerful but now that news and entertainment can be accessed 24 hours a day from a mobile phone, and social networks mean every moment can be shared, people are more influenced by the media than ever before.

Despite this surge in the social control and social ordering by the media through the internet and social networking sites, the family still remains a highly effective means of social control. Robert Chester points out that, although times have changed, most people do still tend to spend a part of their life at least, within a typical family structure. We are usually born into a family, experience some kind of relationship and develop awareness of what family means (Chester, 1985). Although the media has increased its influence due to greater access to technology and the development of the internet, the primary role of the media, certainly for adults, tends to be in the realm of social ordering rather than social control. The family unit, in all its modern wide variety of forms and its strong influence over our values and morals, still maintains an effective role as a means of social control through its physical and emotional proximity and its direct influence over our behaviour, especially in our earlier, most formative years.

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Is society influenced by and organised around popular culture? Do some films, novels or songs have an effect on social relations and ritual?

For instance, do the releases of major films, or the spread in popularity of certain novels and songs, have a significant effect on social relations and ritual? Discuss, focusing on recent examples, in light of sociological theory.

This essay will examine the extent to which society may be influenced by and organised around popular culture. An introductory section will define key terms, before going on to analyse the opening question through a sustained focus on one key area of popular culture, that of television and its audiences. The essay will restrict itself to UK programming and scheduling. Following sections will assess the possible effects on social relations and on ritual, and will incorporate relevant sociological theories, approaches and concepts, and in particular a focus on the concept of ideology. The main thrust of the essay will be from a Marxist perspective, and will use ideas derived from Karl Marx and his successors in left-wing sociological thought.

Storey (2001, pp. 1 – 16) defines popular culture as being conceptualised in several different, though overlapping, ways. Often, for Storey (2001, p. 1), popular culture is an “empty conceptual category” always defined “in contrast to other conceptual categories: folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working-class culture” and so on. Storey (2001, pp. 1 – 15) offers six working start-points: first, that popular culture is simply that which is well liked with many people. In television terms, we might examine programmes or channels with high viewerships, or who cater to a general audience rather than to a niche. Second, that popular culture is what’s left over when high culture or art is discounted, that it’s the preserve of ITV or ITV2 rather than, say, Sky Arts or BBC4, channels that feature content we might understand as high culture, such as Proms concerts and biographies of arts movements. Storey’s third definition is of popular culture as being a mass culture. This is seen as a pejorative, in that (Storey, 2001, p. 9) such output is over-commercialised and bland, offering easy unthinking (and often American) entertainment. Notable work was done by the Frankfurt School of post-Marxist theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in this regard.

Fourth of Storey’s definitional possibilities refers to popular culture as being authentic folk culture of the people, as opposed to that which is provided to them by cultural and economic elites. Storey (2001, p. 10) critiques this as being overly-romanticised, with a definitional issue in understanding quite who “the people” might be, and an avoidance of the capitalist context in which much popular culture is produced and disseminated. Could there really be, with the possible exception of community television services (Ponsford, 2014) such as those offered in some UK localities – examples include London Live and the Humber region’s Estuary TV – a folk television that would be popular according to this potential definition?

The fifth of Storey’s definitions, and the one that his writing leans towards supporting, draws upon Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Hegemony is the term given to the intellectual and cultural domination of the people by elites over and above that physical domination which may be achieved through political and cultural organisations and ultimately the rule of law backed by force in the operation of those elites. A hegemonical approach, for Gramsci, explains how and why the people are controlled; it is done through their implied consent through inaction. Storey (2001, p 10) develops this, seeing the popular culture is not necessarily a mechanism for domination and control, but a site of negotiation; there are processes of incorporation and resistance, moving along at least two axes. The first of these axes (Storey, 2001, p10) is historical; a programme such as the BBC 1980s sitcom The Young Ones may be anarchic and subversive on one generation, but safely nostalgic in another. The second axis is synchronic, so that the perceived cultural value or status of a given text or practice may move “between resistance and incorporation at any given moment” (Storey, 2001, p. 10). The recently-cancelled BBC programme Top Gear may be simultaneously controversial, anarchic, morally conservative, patriarchal, classist and/or safely bland entertainment depending on one’s reading of the programme (Baird, 2014).

Storey (2001, pp. 1 – 16) goes on to outline five competing definitions of ideology. First, there is the perhaps straightforward notion of ideology as a coherent system of concepts and ideas understood by a defined group of people. Second, the definition of ideology as that which masks a truth beneath; an ideology is a distortion of the true picture that is passed off as truth itself. Here, there is a question of inequalities in power to be perhaps considered when looking at examples; this will be considered with regards to television scheduling, in the next section. The third of the definitions that Storey considers relates to the ways in which cultural texts (such as individual television episodes or whole series of shows) present a consistent worldview. Such a worldview may be deliberately skewed, and thus, in Storey’s terms, be both political and ideological.

Storey’s fourth definition draws on the work of Louis Althusser, whose “main contention is to see ideology not simply as a body of ideas but as a material practice” (Storey, 2001, p. 4). Habits, routines and customs have the effect, according to this perspective, of capturing us inside the social order; television viewership will be examined with this in mind. The fifth and final of Storey’s definitional aspects of ideology draws on Roland Barthes’ work, particularly his notion that (Storey, 2001, p. 5) “ideology operates mainly at the level of connotations”, and that subconscious inferences are provoked or allowed to be drawn that favour hierarchies and power-wielders in society.

So, popular culture is definitionally challenging and may be the site of top-down attempts to control or persuade the population towards the interests of social elites, and my also be the site also of what Storey (2001, p. 10) terms “struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups in society and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups in society”. For Croteau and Hoynes (2003, p. 15) mass media, of which television is a significant aspect, plays “a crucial role in almost all aspects of daily life” its social significance extending beyond communication and entertainment, affecting “how we learn about the world and interact with each other”. Television is a dominant medium, there being over 95% of UK households having at least one television set according to regulatory body Ofcom (BBC, 2014). Its penetration exceeds that of the internet, with only 73% of UK homes having domestic internet connections (Office for National Statistics, 2013). Our experience of major political events, such as the 2015 UK general election, is a mediated one; we experience it through our laptops, smart phones and through our television screens as much, if not more, than our unmediated selves do. So the ways in which politics are represented on our screens may have importance for our understanding of politics. Often, as in the 2015 election, issues may be simplified or essentialised; the current vogue for leader debates perhaps inevitably focusing on the personalities and performance of the party leaders, rather than on issue-based and record-based politics (BBC, 2015).

Though the digital switchover has complicated the situation somewhat, offering the Freeview service of over 40 – mostly niche – channels to all viewers, (Evening Standard, 2012), the main (and former terrestrial channels in the pre-2012 days of analogue broadcast) channels: BBC 1 and 2, ITV, Channels 4 and 5, operate a system whereby schedules are designed according to viewership. The viewing day “is divided into a number of time zones. The most important time zone is peak time, or prime time … from 7 p.m. to 10.30 p.m., and it is at that time that the television audience is largest” (Stewart, Lavelle & Kowaltzke, 2001, p. 235). Correspondingly, this is when the channel will broadcast its best-performing shows.

The TV schedule in itself may provoke a form of social ritual; people gather communally at the same time in their own homes to watch their favourite shows. Being able to hold conversations and opinions about soap opera storylines, reality contest contestants, televised sports events, new dramas and the like, is an aspect of everyday life. The perception of such a communal experience may be seen as a positive, a kind of social glue uniting the “imagined community” of the citizenship of the UK (Benedict Anderson, 1981). Alternatively, it may be seen as a negative; a site of the kind of hegemonic processes warned about by Gramsci as outlined above.

A sample view of an evening’s viewing may illustrate this. Taking the BBC1 prime time 7 – 10.30 p.m. schedule for Tuesday 25th August 2015 as a snapshot specimen (Radio Times, 2015), the schedule runs thus: The One Show, EastEnders, Holby City, New Tricks, the Ten O’Clock News. EastEnders and Holby City are long-running soap operas. The One Show is a weekday magazine programme offering celebrity interviews and light entertainment features. Both Holby City and New Tricks offer public service employees (the NHS and the police respectively) in the course of their daily duties.

Different approaches, as summarised above, might take different views of these programmes. A mass culture approach, for example, might critique the formulaic nature of each of these programmes, and their rote characters and situations going beyond that to concern itself with the ways in which audiences are lulled into accepting the preferred or dominant reading. These might include: an acceptance of celebrity and the trappings of success as worthy of merit and positive comment in a capitalist society, a focus on the fake problems of soap opera others than on your own problems and issues, an acceptance of the power and authority of the state and its agents, as represented here by the NHS and the loveable curmudgeons of the character-actor cast of police comedy-drama New Tricks.

That, though, may be overly negative an approach. Audiences are active, and not necessarily passive. The dominant reading is not the only possibility; oppositional or resistant readings “are made when a person finds their own life experiences are at odds with the views in the text” (Stewart, Lavelle & Kowaltzke, 2001, p. 27). Negotiated readings are made when “mental negotiations are needed to overcome some disagreement with the text” (Stewart, Lavelle & Kowaltzke, 2001, p. 27). Over time, sociological positions have shifted from a media effects perspective, where a simplistic sender-receiver – or hypodermic needle – model of communication assumed that audiences would passively take in what was broadcast or otherwise transmitted to them towards more inclusive models (Branston and Stafford, 2006, 271).

Television audiences are engaged, active and perhaps increasingly pro-active about their viewing. Models of audience behaviour such as the uses and gratifications model focus not on the television programme but on the audience and “emphasises what the audiences and readerships of media products do with them”, power being positioned not with the broadcaster but with the consumer, who navigates and negotiates constantly to gratify their own needs and their particular interests (Branston and Stafford, 2006, 275 – 6). In an age of real-time commentary on television viewing through social media services such as Facebook and Twitter, the active and engaged audience member may add their own voice, and interact with others adding their own, all from their sofa, or though time-shifting and on-demand services such as the BBC’s iPlayer service, can resist, create or subvert the schedules by devising their own should they wish.

This essay has approached the question of social ritual and relations in popular culture by focusing on television schedules and audiences. It has suggested that there is an importance attached to popular culture and its study, and that there are, and have been over time, a range of theoretical alternatives put forward to better understand the ways in which texts and audience engagement may be analysed. This essay has focused on Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, though there are others. The fact of the television schedule implies a set of social rituals; communal viewing at specified times and comment on them as a form of social glue as examples. The social relations we have in an interconnected society are perhaps necessarily mediated ones, and television remains a – if not the – dominant broadcast, entertainment and communications medium. For that alone it deserves serious study. The essay assert that audiences may best be conceptualised as active and engaged, and in the age of social media, that serves to reinforce the network of social relations and rituals underpinned by our experiences of watching, commenting and interacting with television programming.

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Historically, British society has been defined by a clearly demarcated system of social classes. In the medieval period, this was characterised by a feudal system of landowners and serfs (Bloch, 2014); in the early modern period the courtly aristocratic model defined the British class system, and this morphed in the last two centuries to form the traditional tripartite model of the working, middle and upper classes. However, in recent years such a system has been called into question. It has been argued that Britain is a class-less society, that socio-economic and democratising political forces have combined to rid the society of its vertical, pyramid structure. Proponents of this levelling process have argued that Britain, in the globalised twentieth century, is characterised by other, wider contextual forces than those of the national class system (Portes and Walton, 2013). However, this essay will take issue with this contention, and argue that announcements of the death of the class system in Britain are not merely premature or exaggerated, they are fundamentally wrong. Whilst net measures of wealth, education and so on point to improvements and progression en masse, the kinds of intra-societal divisions which mark out the class system have, if anything, increased in recent years, rendering Britain a society not merely defined but dominated by its class system.

One of the defining features of a class system is that it has a lowest strata or group. This has been defined variously as the lower classes, the working classes, the serfs or the ‘under class.’ Irrespective of terminology, this presence of a lowest social group is one which is a defining feature of class systems; it is seen, notably, in other cultural contexts such as the ethno-religious Hindu caste system, which identifies a clearly lowest class in the form of the so-called ‘untouchables’ (Rahaman, 2015). Thus, one argument in favour of Britain no longer exhibiting a class system might be the contention that no such underclass exists any longer. Such an argument is false, however, as social marginalisation, social exclusion, greater inequality and other social realities of contemporary British life make evident. What has often been mistakenly identified as the erosion of the class system is in fact a net movement upwards with respect to standards in British society as a whole. Therefore, it is true that British people, across the income spectrum, are better educated, live longer, and enjoy better living standards than they did in previous centuries (Graham, 2012). Yet, this has been matched by a general increase in standards for British people as a whole. The class system is a measure of demarcations within the collective social body, not a measure of general standards, and thus, it may be argued that the class system in Britain has become more rather than less entrenched in recent decades, as a net increase in standards has taken place alongside an increase in inequality.

The effects of the free market economic policies which defined the Thatcher governments of the 1980s and which were repackaged and continued in the form of New Labour have been significant in their impact on the British social structure and class system. They can be understood in the context of global free market economics, identified elsewhere with economics figures such as Milton Friedman, political figures such as Ronald Reagan, and concepts such as Monetarism, Neoliberalism, and so-called Reaganomics (Hill, 2015). Such policies have resulted in considerable wealth creation. In Britain under Thatcher, they were predicated on the so-called ‘trickle down’ effect, whereby it was believed that wealth creation among the upper echelons of society would have a knock-on effect whereby those members of the lower classes benefited from it. The very terminology – the idea that wealth would trickle down from higher up – betrays the degree to which these policies were predicated on the idea of a still-existent class system (Vinen, 2013). Indeed, Thatcher’s aspirational emphasis in her rhetoric and policy-making was indicative of this fact: she stressed the desire to create a British society (a term which she famously would not have used) in which members of the lower classes could aspire to join the ranks of the middle and upper classes, and that upward-mobility was something of which a society and its people could be proud (Hill, 2015). The very possibility of upward-mobility implies a class system, but what these policies effected was, rather than a collective move upwards for the lower classes and therefore an abolishment of the class hierarchy, was the exact opposite. Instead of reducing class differences, Thatcherism increased them. It enabled some to become enormously wealthy and others to remain poor. Even if the latter group were to be better off, the class system is a relative one and as such, a greater relative difference between one social strata and another compounds class differences, even if the overall result is that everyone is better off in absolute terms.

This misconception is at the heart of arguments which, this essay contends, mistake absolute changes in the nature of British social life for changes to the relative position of its social classes. The net result of Neoliberal economics, both globally and domestically in Britain, has been an increase in the wealth gap, a shoring up of the class system, and a greater distinction between the haves and the have-nots (Mount, 2012). This is seen most evidently in the persistence of the social underclass, which has been rendered relatively worse off by the wealth creation at the top of society, wealth which has not trickled down (Jones, 2012). Indeed, the creation by the New Labour government of a Social Exclusion Unit in 1998 (Stanley et al., 2011), tasked with the job of intervening among the lower classes to prevent people from being excluded from the benefits that society has to offer, is evidence of the fact that wealth has not trickled down. The severe economic disparity between the wealth of London – Britain’s financial capital – and the rest of the country, particularly the North-East, is further evidence of class division on a geographical level. Cribb et al. (2013) have shown that income inequality has knock-on effects in terms of social exclusion, such that even in the event that people want to move up the class system, the system itself, pace Thatcherism, works to prevent this from being feasible. The decision by Thatcher to privatise a number of British industries, to actively take on industrial and manual workers such as in the case of the Miners’ Strikes, and to concentrate much of British wealth and financial power in the hands of a number of leading banks and corporations in the City of London, all contributed to this greater division in British society (Jones, 2012). The result is that the poor are, relatively speaking, poorer, and the rich are, absolutely speaking, much richer and, relatively speaking, fantastically richer. A large percentage of Britain’s wealth is possessed by an increasingly small percentage of its population. The knock-on effects in terms of class division, social exclusion, and the perpetuation of the so-called underclass, are palpable.

It might be argued that, so far, this essay has demonstrated how income inequality and wealth gaps have increased in Britain in recent decades, and that this is not the same as saying that the class system has been entrenched and increased in the same way. Indeed, wealth is not a straightforward synonym for class in Britain. This essay has so far avoided defining the term ‘class’ for the very reason that it is nebulous and not something which can be defined in straightforwardly quantitative terms. It is, to some extent, a question of self-identification. Thus, a family with a low net income might identify itself as middle class, whereas a family or couple or individual with a greater net income might, conversely, consider themselves to be lower class. However, a useful working definition of class is inclusion/exclusion (Kraus et al., 2012). The higher the social class, the more social opportunities, resources and capital one is privilege to. The higher the social class, the greater access there is to the things the country has to offer, the greater the individuals are included. By contrast, lower social classes are defined by their being excluded from certain resources and opportunities that the society has to offer. Therefore, the lower classes might be excluded from private education, top universities, higher standards of medical care, and leisure opportunities and facilities (Scott, 2014). Whilst these are correlated with wealth, they are not simply coterminous with it. For example, a family might have the money to put their children through university, but if they or the children feel socially excluded from higher education (because they feel they are too lower class to belong there), then they will not attend and could therefore be socially excluded in any case. It is the contention of this essay that social exclusion remains a defining feature of British society, and as such the class system continues to operate to distinguish between those who are part of the ‘in’ group, and those that are not.

As noted above, this is seen in areas such as education and healthcare. One might cite the life expectancy variation in privileged parts of London compared with less privileged areas as evidence of the degree to which the poor are socially excluded from the benefits of British medical resources, technology and science (Scott-Samuel et al., 2014). Furthermore, one might cite the preponderance of public school educated children at top higher education institutions, and in the upper echelons of British social life more generally, as evidence of the degree to which people from lower-incomes or lower socio-economic groups are not afforded the same opportunities and the same inclusive rights as other individuals from higher class backgrounds. The prevalence of gang culture in inner-city environments is evidence of the marginalisation of youth from deprived socio-economic backgrounds (Jones, 2012). The London Riots of the summer of 2011 brought this class division into the spotlight, and constitute quite damning evidence of the idea that Britain is no longer a class-defined society. Similarly, the UK Uncut movement, whilst situated in the global context of the financial crisis, and its opposition to the 1%, is further evidence of a groundswell of social discontent within the UK at the degree to which the country’s population is socio-economically divided (Mount, 2012). This is not to mention some of the wider social problems which affect Britain and which impinge on the idea of class: among them questions of language (Standard English being the preserve of an elite class and contrasted with ‘lesser’ forms of speech such as regional or dialect English), race and nationality (with immigration and the resistance to inward-migration into the UK being topical political issues which impinge on ideas of class and social status).

In sum, and to conclude, Britain remains a society sharply divided on socio-economic and class lines. That these divisions have increased in both number and degree is clear evidence of the perpetuity of the class system. Although there has been net increases in living standards throughout the history of modern Britain (with the possible exception of periods of war (Price, 2013)), the relative changes which have taken place, especially in the last four decades, have been ones which have exacerbated difference rather than reduced it. The class system has been stretched rather than diminished, such that the socially excluded bottom is now excluded to a greater degree than before, whilst the wealth and privilege of the elite has increased exponentially. Whilst wealth difference is not a fool proof indication of class difference, analysing inclusion and exclusion (with the upper classes enjoying the former and the lower classes suffering the latter) makes clear the degree to which Britain is not an equal society of equal opportunities. The class system operates on the principle that there are those who have, and there are those who have-not. British society operates on the same lines, and as such continues, not merely to exhibit, but to be defined by its class system.

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