Editorial

Introduction

On 22 June 2010 the UK Higher Education Academy annual conference opened with a keynote speech by Professor Calie Pistorius, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull. As he sat down to warm applause following his talk on how innovation could help universities shape the future in difficult times, George Osborne, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, rose in the House of Commons to deliver his emergency budget to cut the UK deficit.

Delegates at the HEA conference and many others in higher education have had the opportunity to look at Professor Pistorius’s slides and hear his keynote online. A keynote by its nature can give either an overview or a snapshot of specific areas. In his talk, the Vice-Chancellor explained how innovation was key to universities as ‘guarantors of the future’, while not commenting on the centrality of innovation to the survival of capitalism. He explored links and contrasts between innovation and creativity, picking up on Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of ‘creative destruction’. Innovation was described in terms of both small incremental step changes and one-off dramatic changes.

Mr Osborne’s speech and his government’s budget bill have reached a much wider audience than the Vice-Chancellor’s address, albeit in headline form. Exactly what the budget means and where universities can innovate to best effect remains unclear in policy terms. Of course, many will look askance at an apparent commitment to the university as a guarantor of capitalist outcomes. Innovation is a necessary part of the capitalist commodity chain with variable implications for learning and teaching. But the emphasis Professor Pistorius places on the costs involved if you do not do the things you need to do suggests a far more nuanced position on the role of the university in the current landscape. His slides and talk need to be considered for the values they propose as a necessary underpinning of the university into the next decade. 

For several days after the budget journalists reported on how ministers were going to address the deficit. For UK higher education, Mr Willetts has made several proposals since the general election, not all to do with deficit reduction. With regard to the latter he has apparently suggested closure of institutions through merger and some course reductions. Neither proposal is new but, in the present economic climate, both seem distinct possibilities. As a journal, we will address this through debate, proposal and future scenario development in our April 2011 issue.

Readers will find Helen Jones’ review of Wheelahan’s Why Knowledge Matters in the Curriculum: A Social Realist Argument (this issue) a helpful overview here. It does seem that for business to be restored to usual our students, who had no hand in producing the financial crisis, can expect to be told to acquire employability skills to meet the debt obligations induced by others, and also to acquire the skills to keep surplus capital flowing in directions from which only a few of them will benefit. Our task as social scientists who are lucky enough to teach is surely not only to make the truths of the crisis clear but also to establish new ways of thinking and acting in the world with students and others. Thus our job involves critique, and, as we all know and experience, that is far from easy in higher education today. Also in this issue, Elisabeth Simbuerger explores sociology lecturers' understandings of critique in their teaching.

Professor Pistorius sees universities not simply as generators of knowledge but as trustees of the future through their commitment to innovation. Innovation and acceptance of such in both market and non-market terms become crucial. As he presents it, there is a link between creativity and imagination on the one hand and innovation on the other. This takes us back to ‘the sociological imagination’, ‘the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his [sic] own fate only by locating himself within his period … the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society (Mills, 1970: 12). Our papers, project report, practice paper and book review in this issue all exemplify aspects of the sociological imagination and show that such an imagination is found in many different disciplines. But what can the ‘sociological imagination’ contribute to the outcomes Professor Pistorius argues the sector must achieve? How can ‘the sociological imagination’ help rebuild learning and teaching? I hope readers of this issue will read the papers and then return to the questions at the end of this editorial to help develop strategies for bringing the social imagination to the fore in university life.

Two books to release 'the sociological imagination'

I comment briefly on two quite different books from the late 1950s that underpin an interest in the sociological imagination. In his 1959 book of that name, Mills provides first an overview of the sociological imagination and then explores different approaches within the discipline of sociology. For present purposes, I do not ask what is distinctive about the sociological imagination other than to say that Mills locates it in the work of journalists, in public service, and in the fields of arts and science. My purpose is to explore, albeit briefly, some of what is involved in the use of imagination for teaching and learning. Mike Keating, a contributor to this issue, reminds us in an earlier paper (Keating, 2008) that Mills said little about the sociological imagination and teaching. I suggest that we need to unpack the notion of the sociological imagination against the prescriptions for conducting sociology in ‘On intellectual craftsmanship’, the appendix to Mills' book (1970: 215–248). It makes an excellent teaching text.

Mills makes the point that the work of the sociological imagination draws, at least, on art, history, literature and science. In fact, it has the quality to combine perspectives:

for that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two.

(Mills, 1970: 13–14).

Before commenting on the imagination directly we should recognise that both entity and quality are not specifically sociological. Mills had few alternatives back in 1959 to creating a starting point and certainly risked opprobrium in responding to the MacCarthy era in the way that he did. By 1973, David Harvey had added to the work by developing concepts of ‘spatial consciousness’ and ‘geographical imagination’ whose application I will assume below.

What Mills does not do is to examine exactly what imagination is as opposed to its status as a quality people can draw upon. Inviting us to see connections between history and biography is important and we could examine this through several historical–comparative approaches in all our social science disciplines. This, of course, is the perspective Mills takes in the appendix to The Sociological Imagination. Equally, we could explore the work of the scientific imagination in societies over time. Here I will make some reference to literature and we will focus on creative writing in the forthcoming issue of ELiSS. For Mills, writing in 1959, literature offered several examples that illustrated his point. Many of the leading novelists of the time and since worked as journalists. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer in the USA are two examples of writers whose journalism helped pay the bills but also gave them material for some of their major novels. If we include George Orwell, we can say that all three were committed to causes and all three connected biography to history through combining different perspectives. However, there is an important gap here. Where is over half the world if we think of the field of literature in the late 1950s?

In 1959, the majority of available poetry, drama and fiction to use on social science and humanities courses was either written in English or had been translated into English on a selective basis. European classics were easily available but very few texts had been translated from African languages. Writing in India followed an imperialist course, with only selected texts translated and made widely available. Even today, Dalit literature has only been translated from Tamil into either Hindi or English comparatively recently partly because the purpose of these texts is to resist translation. How can those rendered outsiders identify with a translator in ways that reflect or even enhance their identity? Thus, literature and literary production not only contribute to the sociological imagination but also share the same political and emotional tensions.

Let us now consider a second text, from the same era as Mills’ classic, and one that does not come directly from either the USA or the UK. In 1958, Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, was finally published by Heinemann in the UK, although it was written a few years earlier. This novel, with its balancing of the colonial against the long history of the Igbo, and with its use of English as the medium of writing, exemplified all that Mills said in his opening chapter. We see the small innovations Pistorius describes lived out through the life of Onkonkwo, his wives and children and his guardianship of Ikemefuma. Yet I doubt that this novel appeared directly on economics or social science courses at the time, although it was to spearhead a reappraisal of literature, people and cultural analysis. The book could easily illustrate how crisis management was handled in a non-capitalist society and how the entry of an external presence changed this. What it gives us is the ‘creative destruction’ of Onkonkwo and also his people. The passive aggressors, backed by an offstage force, form an external agency; they do not force the events that happen – the success of the white colonial power supported by the zealotry of Rev Smith and Enoch, the suicide of Onkonkwo and his resulting burial outside all tribal land. The dialectical interplay between values, institutions, status positions reaches a crisis point. In a non-capitalist setting, the local group resources can only withstand the external forces if they combine in an effective manner. This does not happen, although the outcomes are played out through the lives and deaths of individuals. Achebe, of course, took his title from Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, using it to point to dramatic change in the life of the community and to suggest that the newly arrived colonial power could be overcome. The novel ‘shows’ rather than ‘tells’ us how such interrelations operate. It marks a contrast with Mills’ text because it shows rather than narrates a sociological imagination.

In terms of C-SAP disciplines, literature has always been a field of interest in politics courses, while, in sociology, literature has become a distinct field – the ‘sociology of literature’. However, teaching through literature did not become a mode of teaching in sociology until the 1990s. We begin to find US-based exemplars published in Teaching Sociology from the late 1980s, which to some extent parallel the successful US-based ‘Law in Literature’ approach that began in the 1970s. Here literary texts were used for legal analysis because at the heart of both law and literary study lie questions of interpretation. This was then taken forward through using such analysis as part of legal training. For the disciplines of sociology and politics, the direct use of the imaginary in teaching in the UK is usually developed through simulations, internships, placements. Of course, the use of literature, art, science as sources of ideas and stimuli is found in many undergraduate and postgraduate social science courses in the UK. In most degrees where I have acted as an external examiner there has been explicit use of literature, as well as the use of scientific projects and works of art.

‘Showing’ allows the scene, the text, to speak for itself in its own way for the reader or audience. DH Lawrence captured this in his dictum, ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale’. Perhaps our social sciences have become too fond of telling. Perhaps the work of imagination depends rather more on ‘showing’. But there are problems with organising social science provision with assessed work that focuses directly on showing in literary or artistic ways. How do you assess such work? What balance should there be between the sociological and the literary-creative? Are they the same? How can the imaginary take forward social science analysis? We will return in some detail to these questions in our next issue where we shall publish social science students’ creative writing. But here we can raise the general issues as a means of framing the sociological imagination for our papers from criminology and sociology.

Papers in this issue

The papers we publish here were not written against a specific concern for the sociological imagination and this was not given as a brief. The term only appears in one of the papers and in one of the book reviews. But if we see the sociological imagination as both a process and an outcome we can see some of the difficulties tutors face in supporting learners. The imaginative is often realised through a novel combination of methods or the bringing together of different theoretical approaches to a question. We need to go further and explore how ‘showing’ can be part of what we do in social science teaching.

The project report in this issue by Andy Pilkington takes a vocational course and shows how a scene created for an equality and diversity training event with police officers brings out issues of equality, gender relations and assumptions about sexual orientation and work. It is a direct use of the sociological imagination for two reasons: the scene is open-ended and the resulting outcomes for participants are non-predictable and have to be worked through participation in a scenario. Second, the report brings out some of the tensions and difficulties that arise in developing this way of working. There are tensions for scriptwriters and for others. This enacts the sorts of difficulties referred to above. 

Teaching and learning is not a single or indeed separate event or aspect of higher education – it exists in and through diverse complex relations with groups of different people. The presentation by departments of the proposed student experience in their areas at open days is often so wide of the mark that it would be laughable if it were not always set in thrall to the gods of consumption measures! To try to limit learning and teaching to something that happens between tutors and students in classrooms or online is to delimit and over-simplify teaching; so too is to deny that it is often painful and sometimes threatening, particularly if the teaching is good. It is equally as problematic to subsume learning and teaching as a bit-part player in the overall drama of ‘the student experience’. With the latter, we have a welcome cast of characters from all over the institution, a plot determined by outside agencies, while props and accessories are provided at their own cost by academics. The result is often an avoidance of the genuine complexity that underlies teaching. It is this that strong and challenging literature such as Achebe’s novel (and other forms of cultural life) provides: a meaningful complexity. Pilkington shows us this complexity directly. We have to make some assumptions until we look at the dvd extract he provides. What we have is an example of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’.

If Pilkington’s paper illustrates some of the differences that occur between different professionals in ways that bring out how conflicts may surface, then the paper by McGarry and Keating illustrates a tension over using autobiographical methods with first-year undergraduate students. Some tutors were keen on this activity while others felt it was problematic. Those in the latter group tend to see creative approaches as being no substitute for the ‘real thing’ of sociology. This is part of the dilemma raised above about the use of creative approaches in teaching. McGarry and Keating usefully point us to the use of testimonials in their teaching on modules taken by criminology students. These are short pieces that provide a first-person perspective. As with Pilkington’s paper, we have an explicit use of creative approaches to teaching. But what McGarry and Keating do is to develop an approach to identity so that students can complete a 'biographical continuum', a piece of work about themselves. This very personal approach allows students not only to explore the sociological imagination but to do so through reflection on classic texts in the field as well as the testimonies they have read.

If there is a tension between the ‘real’ work of the discipline and the creative approaches used to articulate it then there is as much tension within the thinking of students themselves. This quality is illustrated by Bufton and Woolsey in their study of undergraduate social science students undertaking personal development planning (PDP). For some students, the device is an irritation; reflection is not the same thing at all as ‘actual studies’. Bufton and Woolsey point towards Bernstein's distinction between horizontal and vertical knowledge structures in this regard. The students are seeking vertical structures, possibly through being in contact with so many subjects that have vertical knowledge structures, such as psychology. They have to come to terms with a discipline based on horizontal structures and with no hierarchy between sociological approaches. This is particularly challenging for students on joint degrees where the subjects involved have different knowledge structures. To insert the demands of reflective learning into this area is a challenge. PDP is one means of stimulating reflection and can be a key means of developing the sociological imagination within a formal course. The work of McGarry and Keating and of Pilkington also provide possible ways of helping with the dilemmas of what to include in a course and what difficulties may be faced.

Social scientists cannot claim to hold a monopoly on critical thought or the practice of critique. As the review of David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital makes clear, social scientists have failed woefully, not only in not predicting the financial crisis but also in failing to provide adequate approaches to valuing learning and scholarship within the university now that cuts are here. This does not invalidate the nature of critique or devalue its use, far from it. Simbuerger conducted a detailed study through 30 interviews in ten sociology departments in the UK. She brings out the different interpretations of critique and how it has formed the identity of her respondents. The link between critique and academic vocation is clearly brought out. Her study traces the impact of Enlightenment thinking on her sample and how debates over its significance guide what teachers do. She brings out the rise of different departmental/university cultures and the shifting patterns of research and teaching. This in itself requires a conceptualisation of the sociological imagination.

Our papers in this issue have different origins. We have data that were originally collected for a PhD (Simbuerger), particular courses in criminology and sociology where the lead tutors have considerable experience of teaching the courses (McGarry and Keating; Pilkington), and data collected from a UK social science department for a national study organised through a USA-led international coalition on e-portfolios (Bufton and Woolsey). For Pilkington, McGarry and Keating, the use of creative approaches is a part of life, an articulation of the sociological imagination. The role and development of critique and its ‘light bulb moments’ for some of Simbuerger's respondents also attest to the value of the sociological imagination. But Bufton and Woolsey remind us how difficult it can be to achieve this. Their work shows how the honesty of good teaching enables students to articulate what they feel and believe rather than hide behind a smokescreen of skill lists.

There is much more to be done to consider how we bring ‘showing’ as well as ‘telling’ into the social science classroom. All the papers in this issue from criminology and sociology reflect on how social science can be ‘told’ but they also give us more than a glimpse of how the disciplines can be ‘shown’.

A general debate that I hope readers will wish to contribute to is: how does the sociological imagination operate in your social science discipline and in the place of social science in your institution? What have you done to successfully move the sociological imagination out of the department or programme so that it is known more widely?

Specific initial questions which I hope readers will refine are:

1. How can critique become both a means of reflection and a guide for action?
2. How can biographical approaches, which may be messy and difficult, be valued by students and tutors?
3. How can the impact of drama and simulation approaches be maintained after the activity is over?
4. How can formal student reflections be promoted effectively and known as widely as possible?

References

Achebe C (1958). Things fall apart. London: Heinemann.

Harvey D (1973). Social justice and the city. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

Keating M (2008). ‘Using auto/biography to develop the ‘sociological imagination’’ in P Frame and J Burnett (eds) Using auto/biography in learning and teaching. Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) papers. London: Woburn House.

Mills CW (1959). The sociological imagination (1970 edn). Harmondsworth: Penguin.