Sociology as a vocation: Moral commitment and scientific imagination

If there is one lesson we have learnt, it is that public sociology is not easy; it is a discipline in its own right, requiring fortitude, flexibility, persistence and above all commitment. It is, indeed, a precarious engagement. It is precarious because of the time it requires, the sacrifices it demands and the professional hostility it can arouse, all of which can jeopardize an academic career. It is precarious because on entering the political field, the academic faces a game with very different rules and sometimes no rules at all. It is playing with dynamite. Finally, it is precarious because in disturbing common sense it can incite vicious attacks, public humiliation and even death threats. So why do people risk so much for such uncertain and limited outcomes?

Sociology as a vocation and, perhaps, scholarly life more generally, is not simply the pursuit of an instrumental career. It is infused with moral purpose, which can be temporarily repressed, but never disappears. How else can one explain César Rodríguez-Garavito’s and Nandini Sundar’s resolute defense of the rights of indigenous people, their right to have rights, their rights to consultation about the fate of their land and their right to government protection? How else can one understand Karl von Holdt’s and Sari Hanafi’s challenge to vested interests, withstanding reprisals in order to improve health care for blacks in post-apartheid South Africa or the conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon? How else can one regard the uncompromising commitment of Frances Fox Piven and Pun Ngai and her colleagues, in taking on the most powerful economic actors – corporate banks and transnational corporations – condemning the powers that create life-long debt peonage and unbearable deprivation? How else does one interpret the risky and painstaking interventions of Ramón Flecha, Marta Soler and Michel Wieviorka, seeking to reverse stigma and counter deep-seated prejudices? How else can one comprehend the bold pursuits of Elena Zdravomyslova, Anna Temkina and Walden Bello in the face of hostile publics – pursuits that bring calumny upon their heads, and endanger their safety?

At its core, sociology recognizes and defends the humanity of others as it must also recognize the humanity of its practitioners. Sociologists are social actors, something they share with the people they study. Pursuing their sense of vocation, sociologists feel bound up with the fate of the people they study. As Bourdieu (1998: vii) himself writes, almost surprised by his own public interventions, ‘So I would not have engaged in public position-taking if I had not, each time, had the – perhaps illusory – sense of being forced into it by a kind of legitimate rage, sometimes close to something like a sense of duty.’ This ethical moment is part and parcel of being a sociologist, even touching those, like Bourdieu, who had once felt inoculated against such temptations.

But sociology is also a science. Moral commitment without science is blind, just as science without moral commitment is empty. What is this science? For Marx it was a theory of capitalism built on the critique of alienation; for Durkheim it was a theory of the division of labor based on the idea of solidarity; for Weber it was a theory of rationalization that threatened individual freedom. Today, I believe we need a theory of the market built on the idea of commodification and dispossession. ¹

If we look behind the public issues that define the projects analyzed in this monograph we find manifold ties to the expanded encroachment of the market into everyday life. We can deploy Karl Polanyi’s (1944) idea of fictitious commodities to capture these developments. Fictitious commodities are factors of production – labor, nature and money – whose commodification destroys their use value. Thus, today, the commodification of labor makes life precarious for ever-larger populations; the commodification of nature is making the planet less inhabitable for more people; and the commodification of money has led to the accumulation of debt that paralyzes human life. These processes are at the heart of the precarious engagements examined here.

Pun Ngai and her colleagues describe new strategies of the commodification of labor – from migrant labor to student labor – that leave them without access either to rural support or to urban services. As commodities without protection suicide is a mark of their desperation and entrapment. Karl von Holdt describes the post-apartheid hospital as a double commodification, both of labor and of health care, draining life away. Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova give centrality to the changing character of male domination under the commodification of women’s labor, found in their limited access to the labor market and the commercialization of care.

Sari Hanafi writes of the Palestinians’ right of access to the labor market and to education in Lebanon, just as Ramón Flecha and Marta Soler are concerned with similar rights of the Roma people in Europe. The problem here is not so much commodification but ex-commodifiction, that is, the expulsion of people from the market and the creation of a surplus population. César Rodríguez-Garavito and Nandini Sundar are dealing with the double consequences of the commodification of land and water: the displacement of human beings on the one side and the concentration of speculative landholding on the other. Frances Fox Piven dwells on the commodification of money, the way money is made to produce more money through credit and thus the extension of debt.

Commodification does not exist in a vacuum; it is a process that has antecedents and consequences. On the one hand, a factor of production can be subject to market exchange only after it has been forcibly removed from the social relations in which it is embedded; this is a process of dispossession that often involves violence. This ex-commodification is very different from de-commodification that protects the commodity from unregulated exchange. On the other hand, the operation of the market leads to a variety of inequalities. The commodity labor power is created by denying people access to their land and forcing them into a labor market, which then, through the productive process, generates inequality. But often land dispossession not only creates a dependent and impoverished surplus population but becomes a valuable commodity in its own right. When money moves from a medium of exchange to a source of profit through the extension of credit, in the context of an ever-more precarious labor market, it generates defaults and dispossession and thus great inequality. For any given commodity, there is a dynamic between dispossession, commodification and inequality. These processes become far more complex once we introduce relations among fictitious commodities, that is, the articulation of modes of commodification. On this as a foundation we can develop theories of state intervention and cultural domination. Only such a political and cultural sociology can explain how and why people put up with the destruction of their existence.

This is not the first time that markets have invaded everyday life, destroying the fabric of human existence. Indeed, we may say that this is the third wave of marketization since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Each wave digs deeper and spreads more widely than the previous one. While the commodification of labor dominated the first wave of marketization in the first half of the 19th century, the commodification of money and the recommodification of labor dominated the second wave of marketization after World War I. In the third wave of marketization that began in the 1970s and shows no sign of abating, the commodification of nature combines with the commodification of labor and money to produce devastating results. These waves of commodification not only call for a theory of accumulation that explains these cyclical dynamics of capitalism on a world scale, and a theory of politics and culture that contain or dissipate discontent, but also a theory of social movements that addresses the question of whether and how these waves are reversed, or what Polanyi called a counter-movement. The counter-movement to the first wave of marketization in the 19th century revolved around the labor struggles whereas the counter-movement to the second wave of marketization centered on state regulation of the economy. The question we now need to pose is the possibility of a third counter-movement that would reverse the wave of marketization that began in the 1970s.

We might inquire into the relationship between the possibility of a counter-movement and the social movements that began at the end of 2010: the Arab Spring, Occupy, Indignados, land struggles and student protest against privatization. Certainly, these movements are very different from the movements of the 1960s and 1970s that appeared at the tail end of the second counter-movement and had expansive visions of emancipation, still with the state as their object. Today’s movements are defensive, concerned with human survival and in retreat from the state. Can they be the harbinger of a counter-movement against third-wave marketization? To contribute to such a counter-movement, they will have to assume a global scale – to counter the global character of finance, environmental degradation and the precarity of labor. Transnational movements, however, cannot be built from nothing. They are only likely to be built on the shoulders of local and national movements whose existence is often antithetical to transnationalism.

If this is not frightening enough, we have to recognize with Polanyi that even if counter-movements are successful, then they are as likely to assume a reactionary as a progressive form, contracting rather than expanding freedom. We have seen evidence enough of such reactionary movements in the case studies presented in this monograph. Such a threatening view – one that is consonant with the studies in this monograph and defines a scientific research program – sheds light on why sociologists might want to make the sacrifices they do and enter such precarious engagements.

The outlook is far bleaker than Karl Polanyi ever anticipated. He not only missed the possibility of multiple waves of marketization, thinking that humanity would never play with fire again, he not only missed the importance of ex-commodification, that is the production of waste, alongside commodification and de-commodification, but he also did not reckon with a fourth fictitious commodity – knowledge. As institution after institution caved into the forces of commodification, one institution sustained its autonomy: the university. Now we see that the university has succumbed to the assault, turning the production and dissemination of knowledge into a commercial proposition. This has inexorably led to the competitive search for funding from donors, from research entities and especially from increases in student fees. It has involved the institutional transformation of the university into a corporation, subject to national and global ranking systems. Alongside the search for revenue there is widespread cost cutting through reduction of the number of permanent faculty, increased employment of casual labor (adjuncts, part-time lecturers, etc.), online education and outsourcing of low-paid service work. The university is effectively instrumentalized with professional and policy work emphasized, because they pay, at the expense of critical discourse and public engagement.

In these circumstances, which find their expression all over the world, the vision of public sociology is at once threatened and made more urgent. On the one hand, the sort of projects described in this monograph become even more out of favor than before, as social science is supposed to serve the immediate needs of credentials and corporations and as social science, in danger of losing its legitimacy, becomes ever-more concerned with distance and a spurious objectivity. Public sociology and inconvenient truths have an ever-steeper mountain to climb. On the other hand, the situation is so dire that precarious engagements have a new raison d’être – to build closer ties with other communities and organizations suffering the same fate from the collusion of market and states. Only in this way can the university retain its public and critical functions, by becoming a political player in civil society. Only in this way can the university begin to tackle the problems that it has in part produced and continues to produce – not least in the form of neoliberal ideology. Here, sociology has a leading role to play, as it has always taken the standpoint of civil society against market and state encroachments. More than ever, the world needs sociology.

Today, sociology shows us that humanity is destroying itself by unleashing waves of marketization, waves of wanton destruction. This provides the rational basis for the extraordinary moral courage of public sociologists, such as the ones presented in this monograph. Theirs is no blind commitment but one informed by sociology as science. Today as never before, sociology as a vocation means walking on two legs – science and engagement. This is not easy, as we see in such phrases as amphibious sociology, schizophrenic sociology and critical engagement. Learning to walk on two legs takes time; it is a process of mutual education that requires discipline, persistence and above all, collaboration. Once we learn, however, we will be so much more agile and effective, better equipped to meet the challenges of third-wave marketization – if it’s not too late.