Idea of Research-Writing in Sociology: Polemics on the Loss of a Transformative Practice

Trapped in Evolutionary Logic

A profound apprehension began to haunt the Greek pundits, as history informs us (see Connors, 1986); the apprehension was that oral is too fluid to be retained in the limited human memory. Hence, written overcame the spoken. Not to say that the spoken disappeared altogether. The scholastics depended heavily on the spoken. The ‘spelt out’ however conquered the spoken and the heard in terms of significance. Writing and reading preceded speaking and hearing in larger value orientation. And hence they all wrote. Since it was still in elementary stage, when they wrote, they wrote as if they were talking. We get this sense when we read the classical texts. In a way, it was interesting that they could not sever the relation of the written with the spoken. They wrote in aphorisms, nuggets, verses as if they were coming straight away following the way of communication that was prevalent amongst the conversationist folks. They were all homo-narrans (see Niles, 1999; Pathak, 2018), inclined to narrate, though some took to pen and paper, while others, a larger mass, stuck to their tongue. Sooner, despite the prevalence of the writing culture, they also took up the styles and genres that people used in their conversation. Say, for example, polemics, a genre of writing that yielded a maximum of critical understanding, and also possible growth of science ⁴ ! But this all began to change very soon, followed in the end by the disappearance of the art of polemics in which we show little confidence today. The change has come to the point where one wonders whether it is related to a Faustian fear of uncertainty, ignorance, and intellectual vulnerability. The change leads to a mode of writing that cannot take the risk of ignominy, vulnerability, and a creative play with raw and cooked. Hence, mostly we get served, cooked. It is perhaps so desperately cooked writing that it invariably tastes, over-cooked. The juice of vegetables dried up, the pulp of materials dead. The research universe emaciated, dehumanised and acultural. An otherwise pulsated human worldview degenerates into an intellectually assassinated carcass in a large number of research-writings. The academic writers, who dwell upon research for the premise and details as part of the craft of writing, seem to nurse and perpetuate the similar Faustian fear. They want to research and write in such a manner that leaves little respect for even inevitable kind of ignorance. It connotes intolerance to the creative play of raw and cooked in written narration. The clinical, crystal clear and confident writing discloses the irredeemable fear of the playfulness in research and writing. After all, the teachers and trainers, advisors and supervisors, often caution the young researchers against the risks of playfulness in research and writing. Teachers train, and students religiously learn the tricks to look clear and confident in the courses related to method and techniques. They train the young scholars to metamorphose the messy social world of meanings into dystopian make-believe of a researcher.

Well, there could be another aspect of the evident confidence in writing a clearly communicative piece. It may be said that it is an ideal condition in which the lucid thought finds equally lucid articulation in writing. But, that is not the case since lucidity is at the price of the intellectual liberty to take risk; it is clarity due to the avoidance of writing against the grains; it is a writing that does not defy the familiar formulas of writing. The clarity of academic writing today suggests, on the contrary, an irrevocable conquest of an industry of ‘predatory’ ⁵ as well as quite a few reputed journals. This is an orchestrated clarity for the sake of survival, in an evolutionary scheme that prevails upon the teacher and taught, trainer and trained, supervisor and researcher. The practice of reading a text in order to reduce it into useful endnotes, footnotes, or a quote, is commonplace. With a heavily compromised tendency to think through the texts, our young scholars get ready for research and writing.

Seemingly, this is a natural consequence in an evolutionary scheme of thinking. ⁶ The Neanderthal would be replaced by Homo sapiens, the species of a bygone age would become extinct, and new types will begin a new race with a unique set of skills at work. Ghastly, as it may seem, the idea of evolution operationalises the scheme of stages. This has appeared in our thinking on the development of societies, as much as about the development of humans. And hence, in a sinister sleight of hand, some exorcists tried to separate childhood from the adults. If you ought to be esteemed with your achievements, you must not be naive, sentimentalist, playful, reckless, adventurist, risk-taking, negotiating children. You must not dwell upon raw stuff, bold thoughts, and even confident conjecturing. A successful man, or a woman, must not be like those children who are yet to join the technically rationalised madness called success. ⁷ If this is the case with humans in general, how could those ‘special’ humans called writers be immune to it? How could the tribe of self-congratulatory scholars, also called research-writers, stay untouched by the generic disease called successful research and writing? On every occasion when we hear a presentation of a research proposal, or academic writing such as research paper, thesis, dissertation, presented to the ‘august’ gathering of scholars, we wonder, whether scholars really allow themselves to wonder anymore!

The new standard of writing is no longer the old tenets, say, a slow and steady process fraught with the humane vulnerability of a researcher-writer. It is fast, furious and ultimately fabulous writing, in Ninja mode! ⁸ Like sabre rattling of ferocious warriors, the samurai of the best calibre, a writer has fingers stomping on the keyboard of the computer. Words gush out confidently, meanings soar ceaselessly, logically set to conquer, formula assured to triumph, and all done. It may sound like an ideal dream come true. After all, every writer would cherish an uninhibited flow of ideas, words, phrases, propositions, questions, arguments, and so on. There are ready-made structures of all sorts, which you can select as a practitioner of Nija writing according to your requirement. There are softwares, online-tools, and inbuilt auto-correction by Microsoft Word that would ensure ‘correct-standard’ prose. So, what is wrong with the Ninja mode? Is it not a dream come true? Let us have the guts to daredevil the comfortable resolve. No, it is not a dream coming true; instead, it is dream metamorphosing into mass hysteria. Since this essay is mostly a polemic on research-writing, a curious combination, it ought to be starting with a squinted glance through the building block, research. And in doing so, it reflects on the teaching-training programmes which are in the premise of the research. And since it is a requisite squinted glance, methodologically, it allows one to communicate through barbed sarcasm. At times, it works better to use high decibel words, strong meanings, than mincing words at the cost of the straightforwardness. The issue, the trouble with research, solicits this stance for a diagnostic understanding.

Research, the Enigma of Something and Nothing!

What do we do when we intend research? A somewhat phenomenological process unfolds. One begins to contemplate the most viable, saleable, and feasible issue. Innocently, we call it a selection of topic or area of research interest. This is the selection of ‘something’ that is there, but one has to labour to show its relative absence. It is ‘something’ that one has to research on. Hence, it better be something that is acknowledged as such by peers (teachers, trainers, advisors and senior colleagues) in the first place. Let us call this ‘something’ a name. It is a philosopher’s ‘a-priori’ that the philosopher receives from ‘somewhere’, from ‘someone’ who has already proven his or her competence to inherit the same. And the peers don’t operate with ‘nothing’, either. They have clarity about what is more acceptable, what works better in the worldly-wise calculations. Various agencies ranging from the funders, fellowships, and administrative bodies of higher education seem to be in the background of the choice of a chosen researchable issue. Curiously though, this issue would be called, with all due ingenuity, the researcher’s issue! ⁹ However, the challenge is about how to conceal this bluntness! How to show that this issue, ‘something’, is yet to be explored, and that it is distinguishable from ‘nothing’, a non-issue. Intellectualism comes to be an aid. Making this sound, profound, simple stuff become complex, and a language-game of some sort at work, follows the choice of the issue. A problem is called a problem since it is a problem according to the larger standard set by the peers. There is little personal consideration in the acceptance of the issue, and thereby defining a problem, for the sake of research. Except that the doer, the vaunted seeker of knowledge, knows that it will please the immediate authority, be it the senior peer, the supervisor-advisor, research agencies, university, or in the final analysis, the state. And yet, the researcher will live with a skewed thinking and wishful feeling, it is my issue!

Intellectualism of this sort is like that age-old scientism against which many philosophers and historians of sciences unleashed their respective criticism. Be it Popper, or the sociologists from the Frankfurt school, or others such as Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, they all seemed to have accepted the problem of scientism. Hardly did they anticipate that there will be a similar anomaly to guide the researchers who would employ concepts, theories, language, jargons, technical terms, merely to conceal the vulgarity of the choice and surrender of free will. There was nothing against science, as Popper informed us. It was only science’s belief in its own supremacy, scientism that was the bone of contention. Likewise, there is nothing against intellect or intellectual activities. It is intellect’s belief in its own supremacy that is the bone of contention here. Researchers intellectualise, not because that helps in adding nuances to the issue, topic, questions, assumptions. They do so since they are keen to conceal that the choice that they float as their own, is actually not an outcome of the independent thinking of a young researcher; nor is it a consequence of critical readings of the texts and researches of the predecessors. It is someone else’s ‘something’. This issue is ‘something’ since it belongs to the ‘to-do’ list of a senior peer. It protects the younger scholars from the vulnerability of their own questions, choices, issues. The youth is made self-doubtful, so as not to independently think aloud. Who would risk intellectual credibility by pursuing a vulnerable path particularly when ‘somethings’ around are sure and certain? Who can play with ‘nothing’, a non-issue, which may actually be a starting point to frame an issue, anew? And despite the genealogy of something, teachers tend to judge a student for originality, innovativeness, and so on. If any of these are true to be judged, the researcher should be playing with nothing, the seeming non-issues from where the missing threads could be ferreted out.

Within this ‘something’, then, unfolds a good drama. It is supposedly a proposed ‘something’, in a research proposal. An a priori that is being proposed as possible posteriori! It means research is merely to empirically prove a selected theory, concept, hypothesis, assumption, right, or rarely but in some cases, wrong. How wonderful, every research proposal seems to wax eloquent about its familiarity with something, a priori. Then it eventually says that this a priori is going to be posteriori too. And to say this, the research proposal employs the theatrics—framing of questions, hypothesis, clarity of constants and variables, and some kind of exclusive section called ‘literature review’. The real-life world of the people to whom the question pertains would be marginal. The socio-political context, let alone historical trajectory, would be seldom to shed light on the research universe. Some would do it smartly, and some others shabbily! But how does it matter? The point is that there is unanimity about this basic formula. The aim of the formula invariably is to prove the given, right; prove the a-priori, a posteriori; prove the god, a god; prove the devil, a devil. Popper had elsewhere ridiculed this practice of sociologists. So much of sociological energy is spent in stating the obvious that we are trying to preach the convert; that we are trying to convince, with an arsenal of data, those who are almost convinced. More often than not, this is the case, with exceptions few and far between; in a lot of research proposals, this is what we get to see. The proposed work is yet another attempt to prove the might, right, as it were. By proving the right, right, you do nothing more than proving the might, right. This is resonant with the prevalent practice of re-canonising the canons. You are, in more simpler words, serving to the status quo, be it university, or funding agencies, private clients, collaborative partners, or in the ultimate analysis, state. This is, however, a practical thing, would say many defenders of the formula-based research writing. That this all is too subjective a complaint, and hence non-issue. So, let us look at it from a distance, or in other words, get a little too closer to it. And either way, we stay unsure of the observation.

Whenever this formula is applied, a couple of crying casualty surface for attention. We suddenly see that the best pursuit of this formula provides such self-confidence in the seeker of the knowledge, the researcher, that there is no space left to admit vulnerability as an innate attribute to the basic idea of research. No vulnerability, no seeking, and obviously no step forward from the cold cave of the chained Platonic men who knew no retina shattering light of truth as long as they were complacent with the shadows. When the cavemen turned to the sunlight, first-ever, they instantly felt the discomfort of stepping out of their comfort zone. Which means, you do not know how to swim until you are pushed into the pool without much help. You cannot sense that you know something, unless you have a taste of ignorance of something. Playing with this Socratic idea, Popper (1963) came up with an insight; ignorance, and acknowledgement of it, is the vital strength of knowledge. Sense of absence makes it possible to feel its conspicuousness, and hence the vicarious feeling of presence. Though Popper’s interest was to show the critical rationalism-based humanism in discussing the idea of ignorance, it opens up other possibility as well. No ignorance also means no chance to wonder at even the most grotesque, let alone the world of ordinary, mundane, where absence and ignorance, inequality and vulnerability, inclusion and exclusion, revolt and reconciliation, all are the most usual. From outset, it seems hijacked by the notion of success, perfection, feasibility, framing, and eventually smartness of presentation and articulation. There is no room for goofing up, everything from the word go to the word come back is determined at the very moment you utter the word research. This is a dreadful clarity, cogency and coherence that characterise the clinically curated show called research. Some may score higher in the performance of this spectacle, some lower; some, yet not there, and the other, an accomplished metropolitan master of the trade. They all hate uncertainty, doubt, vulnerability and overall, intellectual risk. And tell me frankly, could there be research without risk? All our effort in the research proposal, and through the process of research, is to annihilate any possible risk. No risk, in the selection of topic aka area of research, no risk in the way and the kind of questions framed; no risk in the anticipated, ever expected hypothetical assumptions. And hence, we and our students accomplish an intellectual emasculation of something called research imagination. Mills (1959) may have cried hoarse, after hoarsely decrying the grand narratives of Parsonian kind, for a return to something as basic as ‘intellectual craftsmanship’. The latter is not rocket science. It just requires us to step down from the weakly constructed ivory towers. Intellectual craftsmanship summons from us playfulness like a craftsman and take into account every minute details of what goes in the shaping up of our research plan. There are some basic minimum given fundamentals, which the craftsman follows. Then she/he wanders, to explore a new curve, to chisel a new angle, to construct a new stance, to construe a new notion! It entails a lot of cumulative documentation. A memo, a personal ledger, a diary wherein we can willingly note everything from consequential to inconsequential. Craftsmanship of this kind demands us to meditate upon the mundane. And thus, we see how everything seemingly nothing, can become something. It enables us to translate an unrelated episteme into a related one. It transforms a fragment into a piece of the whole. Could this happen in a formula-based research, starting with certainty and ending with the same? There is seldom an intellectual headway in proving the a priori, a posteriori. And, thus, in this process, research seems to be all about finding, the finding. There is no utopia stemming from it; no vision on the offer, nor any sharp logical argument which can make the seeker of the truth troubled, no dispute as a result of this research! This research is as apolitical as an extraordinary Prime Minister eating an ordinary mango, so to say!

And Everyone Still Asks: What is Sociological about It!

Every formulaic research proposal presents the whole idea about the fundamentals— what, why, where, how etc. step by step. Charting a very certain path, it arrives at uncertainty, or so does it pretend. The proposals end with a paragraph on ethics and validity. Both ethics and validity evoke instant vulnerability of the whole draft proposal. Could ethics be something so rock solid, as immune to temporal-spatial influences in the field? If we cannot expect our politicians to be free from corruption, how could we ever be so sure of the ethics of sociologists to be so perfect? This is truly a hysterical proposition since we know that we have not been able to find an answer to the probing question: who will guard the guardian! None of the proposal writing workshops held at ranks and files of universities ever venture in this troubled water. Seldom do the teachers teaching the courses on methods and techniques to postgraduate and doctoral students bother about the intricacies of ethics. But it is difficult to ignore the insightful philosophers ¹⁰ who framed the question for us, who will guard the guardian? We are asking the most cunning creatures called sociologists to formulate for all of us the holy book of ethics in a paragraph, long or short, in a research proposal! It only vindicates that we have killed, ironically, the basic minimum research imagination of the most coveted place, field. If we had used it, nourishing with our mind and emotion, thorough thinking and extensive readings, we could have known what volatile world it alludes to. A world out there, beyond the control of the most divine, glamorous, know-it-all species of sociologists, operate with tentativeness, adhocism, uncertainty, the mythology of past and present, and socio-cultural politics. ¹¹

There is a cartoon ¹² on social media doing rounds. It shows a tribal community living in huts, watching TV, perhaps drinking soft drinks, and enjoying all privileges you don’t imagine available to the tribe. And then, news about the arrival of anthropologists breaks out. All get alerted. They look out of the window of the huts to verify. And it seems true as they can spot the brooding-boorish characters walking in. The hustle and bustle ensues, as everyone from the tribal neighbourhood starts hiding the commodities, the privileges, the insignia of transformation, if any. They know how they should look to the visiting anthropologists, what to say to them, and when to welcome them and when not. This is more than a technical phenomenon called the Hawthorne effect ¹³ in research discourses. Since, unlike Hawthorne, this suggests far deeper a divide between the field and the researcher. This is about the epistemological positions of the two worlds, of the field and the researcher. From each position, one knows how to pretend, and persuade, and perform according to the wishes of the other. Both, the researcher and the researched oblige each other, answer the way it is expected, behave the way a sociologist would like to behave. The cunningness of the field and the field workers immaculately reciprocate to each other.

Someone would say it is just a dubious cartoon with spurious meaning. Why to take it so seriously and go to this extent of reading between the lines? After all, sociologists have been averse to anything seemingly ‘less serious’ to them including visuals and humour (see Perera & Pathak, 2019). And anything intellectually challenging has been ‘less serious’ for them. They do not want to admit how the world is, and that they are not too far away from the messy world. Hence, we are as happy about consuming the latest goods, as is anyone else. If it sounds too precocious, let us turn to Husserl via Schutz (see Wagner, 1970), who tries to unravel a lifeworld for us. A province where meanings are engendered by all of us, educated or otherwise, extraordinary schizophrenic sociologist or the ordinary bulldozer driver of Rampura who practised black magic at home. ¹⁴ It begins to change when some of us, from this lifeworld, shift to another province of meaning where scientists, theorists, and if you labour efficiently, you can even include sociologists, act and constitute meanings. The phenomenological understanding would be that these special folks called sociologists are only partially involved in this job of the scientific meaning-making process. For their substantial half is left behind in the act of translation, from the ordinary folk of the lifeworld into extraordinary folk of the science. Following this translation, you are only a part of yourself when you are in this, or, that province of meaning. You only operate with certainty, intellect, and risk-free tools and techniques, questions and ideas, plan and execution. This may not be however so in the ordinary phenomenologically woven lifeworld. Your research is to find the finding, whereas in the ordinary world the accomplishment of meaning is as much a product as it is a process. Then, how can you be so sure of ethics and validity, particularly when you are dealing with a world fraught with certainty and uncertainty at once? That is, how can you impose your idea of certainty onto the lifeworld of the people who operate with uncertainty though they do have their own notion of certainty too! How could you say so conclusively that the man out there is a demon or a god for sure! In the same breath, how could one be so sure that as a sociologist, one is an infallible superhuman? Our practice of teaching and learning, courses and transactions, dialogues and deliberations hardly persuade our young scholars to take a dip in this messy world.

The cap to this, who pretends to be all too perfect, hence surely on the path of certainty, is the idea of ‘sociological’. They all think that they, as formal sociologists, know something called sociological. Do they know for sure the meaning of this intrigue? Methodologically speaking, and not necessarily pertaining to methods and techniques, there are many varieties of the ways of being sociological. We may all parrot the textbook notion, all or if you are modest, most, of the classical sociology is positivist. But would we refuse to see that each theoretical perspective had an inherently different sense of positivism to offer? There is a Comtean way to be positivist which was itself, in large part, a plagiarised version of Saint Simon’s ruminations. Then, there is a more robust variety, the Durkheimian one, duly supported by systematic practice with the elaborate procedure. Indeed, Durkheimian variety formulates the first-ever set of rules for doing sociology and being sociological. And then, there are many other varieties including Marxian, geared toward a more nuanced transformative politics surmised in the Thesis Eleven in The German Ideology. And there is sufficient evidence that Weber’s interpretive turn maintains the positivist tendency, to fight against the phantoms of mind. The trinity in the classical sociology shows enough tendency to perpetuate the fear of phantoms, the Baconian idols of the mind. Within positivism itself, one can safely summarise, there are many ways of seeing, and hence many ways to be sociological. This even gets better, as we hear the exciting orchestra of the positivist dispute in German sociology. Not only scientism gets disputed, so does positivism, and what to say of sociology! A veritable postpositivist turn haunts sociology, scary ideas from the realm of postmodern gape at them, and we begin to hear the complaint abuzz that sociology has been de-philosophised and de-historicised at once. And return to history and philosophy after the Dispute smashes open very many new ways of seeing in sociology. Then, what version of sociological they hurl, when they ask this ultimate, most frequently heard question—what is sociological in a work? It is more than obvious that the idea of sociological is basically a way to guard the territory called sociology akin to the military of a nation-state guarding the whole province with a unique version of curfew in which all the means of communication gets suspended. Unfortunately, teachers and students in various departments of sociology across universities have become the ominous ill-informed lieutenants ensuring disciplinary curfew.

A sinister scheme unfolds at spurious sites of sociological presentations. Looks like Kuhn’s (1962) community of scientists, or our epistemic community or what we also call a department, a centre, or a faculty of sociology, are all same in behavioural tendency at such sites. Each from the herd of senior peers would say a few similar things as their respective comments. Each would mean something else, again as per their respective orientation, pride and prejudices. For example, one would say, why are you looking at the night-hunting process in Bhutan, instead, look at the gender relations! The student would whimper, ‘Madam, night-hunting connotes gender relation’. But the commenting sociologist would not hear. She would go on and on, almost like someone trapped in a tunnel where one heard only one’s own voice. In another instance, someone would say, ‘why are you looking at only three films for your analysis, make it ten; and someone else will add, ‘why are you so sure about any number of films, don’t mention any number’; and yet another person from the herd of senior peers would conclude, ‘you seem to be too confused about your proposed research; you have no clarity about the number of interviewees’. Someone seeks for clarity, and some other peers demand suspension of clarity. A student tries to argue, ‘I can’t have such clarity at the onset of the research, since I don’t know as to how my field in Bangladesh will unfold to me, and hence I operate with some clarity while I know I cannot anticipate everything in advance’. But this will fall on the deaf ears of the monstrous peers who seem to have got aural diarrhoea of some sort. They would instantly declare such research proposals invalid, implausible, infeasible, undoable and so on. The herd of peers would frown away, saying, ‘should not you have some idea since you come from that place’! One student proposed to do a research on emotional responses to death in urban Kolkata, and a professor instantly observed, ‘but you have not cited my work on the death of garment industry’; the student muttered under her breath, ‘perhaps there is a difference between the death of industry and death of humans, madam’! The saga entails more fascinating details. Some faculty members would suggest that engagement with theories is essential in a research plan, and some others, particularly those trained in the universities across seven seas, would emphasise, all these are dead theories; instead of these, engage with only contemporary theories and concepts! A good amount of cluelessness characterises the community of senior peers, and no wonder, most of the young scholars mostly learn strategies to steer clear of these belligerent academic peers. The young scholars seldom dispute anything coming from the commenting peers. They mostly say, I will revise in the light of your very ‘valuable’ comments. Perhaps, it is a thing of past when young or old, scholars disputed each other since they were so steeped in their works and so confident about what they had reasoned with that they could retort, ‘Professor! I don’t think you have got it at all as to what my research plan is!’

On any such site, one thing is as clear as anything vulgar and beautiful. The herd of senior peers seems to have never discussed as to what research could primarily mean! So, no wonder that the young apprentices are equally foxed. Perhaps, as they would say, it is not within their ‘interest-area’. Like an ophthalmologist will say, it is not his or her interest area to reason with the heartbeats! How ridiculous, an urban sociologist says, ‘the sociological theories are not her interest area’, and yet she passes all kinds of loose comments about the theoretical significance of proposed research, and most of her comments would be related to what she considers her area of expertise! How interesting, a professor trained in one of the universities in the United States would publicly pass a judgement that engaging with theories is a waste of time. And yet, there would be no consequences. There would be an evident missing link between the supervisor or research advisor and the students. The interactive collaboration between teacher and student is crucial in a young scholar’s research. That collaboration has probably disappeared altogether. And hence, the teachers have resigned to the idea of a workshop which, presumably, will remedy all the problems with a student’s research skills. One never gets to hear whether writing a research plan, executing, and subsequently writing the draft manuscript is all about the acquisition of some technical skills, or there is something more to it.

It is in such a curious condition that researches are planned and executed these days. We witness it every day, in academic spheres across universities, and hence, we ought to be hardly surprised about the maths and aftermath of the publication of research writing. Lately, most of the articulations about the problem of academic publishing has been with regard to spurious journals, or merchandise of publishing companies located in some part of Delhi or Europe. These journals and publishing companies send email invitations to almost everyone in academia, for easy and guaranteed publication. Many youngsters fall prey to them; even many established university-based professors pay and get published. The issue is indeed far graver than the common sense allows to capture. And hence, the need to continue these polemics.

Research Writing, the Mathematics and Aftermath!

There is more to the experientially substantiated polemic above. The prevalent practice of research does not kill the thing called an exception. But then, who cares about exceptions in the society of the spectacle, ¹⁵ where exceptions too are invariably transformed into some kind of spectacle. Just like Upendra Baxi once said, reflecting upon the activist-academics, they tend to become ‘indignant entrepreneurs’. ¹⁶ There is a vivid tendency to conjure frightful future, and show with a conclusiveness that your finding is the best finding; this too is an offshoot of the whole phenomenological process of research discussed above. You have a utopia, perhaps too long forgotten to be guiding your crisis mongering called research. If this is one kind of mathematics geared to accrue right brownie points, for you to emerge as the representative of a select mass (along the lines of ethnicity–community–identity), there are other equally interesting varieties of mathematics too. Continuing with the cunning calculation of the research process, is the mathematics entailed in research-writing. This is a writing that would not leave any sign of the creative intellectual mess which one may have encountered and recorded in a diary or elsewhere, if one was honest about the encountered accounts. Research with inbuilt uncertainty would not get a plan and simple finding. It would lead to a discursive terrain, fraught with challenges and full of possibilities. On this terrain, a researcher would take a bold guess, try out hunches, logically develop arguments, provoke debates, and posit new pathways for future research and transformation of the world including oneself. But research which was about ‘something’ against ‘nothing’, certainty against vulnerability, finding against discourse, would seldom deliver anything more than data. As method begets method, such researches beget findings and data. Following the scheme of empirical Shudra, inferior to theoretical Brahmins, ¹⁷ it seems most of the research writings become a testimonial of the flawed research-intentions. Since there is no element of vision, utopia, alternative ideas involved in the prevalent paradigm of research, we do not get vision, utopias, alternatives in return. We did not invest anything other than what we got. We invested ‘something’, we got ‘something’; this almost vindicates the common-sense theory of ‘no risk-no gain’ despite teachers harping on the distinction of sociology from common sense. There is little room in there to accommodate anything counter-inductive, as it were. Then again, paradoxically, we ask our students, what is original in this research, what is new about this finding, and how is this more refreshing than others? We did not throw the baby in the pool, and we are asking them to learn how to swim. We failed as research advisors, and we are offering them various palliatives, such as research writing workshops and author-workshops conducted by experts with dubious credentials. We are roping in the professionals from the publishing companies to teach our young scholars and academics about the basics of academic writings. One wonders whether some of our best teachers wrote so badly without doing any such workshops!

Getting back to the trouble, such clinical research writings are for various stakeholders. Publishers, funders, bodies and agencies that regulate universities, all kinds of ranking agencies, market, and of course, state. The most formulaic researches yield the most formulaic research writing that gets space most successfully in the formulaic journals. There is a new breed of the formulaic journals, called predatory journals. But then, the so-called non-predatory journals need not be devoid of their own formulas. The doubly blind peer-reviewed journals are no less. They proclaim that the proof of their quality and standard is the rejection rate. The more they reject, the higher their quality and standard. This is something we learnt from an unusual work of Zukerman and Merton (1971) in the sociology of science on the structure of refereed journals. Or did we? We need to ask from the editors of the various journals. Any discussion on academic publishing tends to celebrate the idea of quality and standard and laments any mediocrity. Who can contest this? But the point is that in the euphoria of the celebration and unison of the lament, we mostly forget that quality and standard could be a logical correlate of the formula-based research-writing. Some colleagues are very good at following the formulas, while the others, not. Who can ask for the kind of arguments, quality of debate, and merit of hunches and bold guesses that underpin a research-writing? Everyone in the professional academics is more than willing to get measured by the measuring tape, scales, determined elsewhere. At times, we hear that the marketing team of reputed publishers determine the title, as well as some part of the content, of a book. The copy editors suggest what should be added and deleted from various parts of the manuscripts. And if you do not abide by, you are in for irresolvable limbo. Even though the blind-anonymous reviewers of your work, commissioned by the publishers, have recommended the publication of your manuscript, the publisher may decide to quietly sit on it. For a simple reason, the author does not look like an abiding-type, or the author does not have explicit loyalty to the eminent peers in professional academics. The way risk was avoided at the onset of the research, it shall be done in the aftermath when one is preparing the manuscript for publication. No bold play of ideas allowed, no liberty to say that this work is never a finished one. It is so difficult to read a work which could say openly that sociological research is a big scam in our time. And hence, there need not be an anxiety about the sociological status of a work. We adequately train our young scholars in intellectual timidity and submissiveness at universities; we keep reminding them through the phenomenological process of research discussed above that they should not walk the unsafe terrain; our whole stress, during their research-writing, is to weed out any sign of intellectual ambition, adventurism, and risk-taking. A common comment on most of their manuscript we generously give, and so do the anonymous referees of the journals and publishing companies, is ‘tone down’. The supervisors, or interchangeably research advisors, become academic editors during the process of research itself. This is, unfortunately, an academic editor, rather than the ideal imagination of a research advisor who could be an interactive collaborator, in research work and research-writing in the aftermath. The academic editors ensure that the mathematics of acceptable and unacceptable, right and wrong, good and bad, publishable and unpublishable, is at the forefront in the whole process. They don’t enable a researcher to cope and deal with the inevitable vulnerability of the seeker of the knowledge. Nor do they orient the academic writers to contest a reviewer’s mistaken judgement, if any. Instead, they ensure that any sign of acknowledgement of the vulnerability is removed from the beginning of the research to the publication. If at all, there will be a fashionable articulation of the difficulties one faced in doing research. There would be hardly any relation between the difficulties faced and the arguments developed. For, the arguments, if any, would be too conclusive to be in tune with the vulnerability. In order to hide such vulnerability of the researcher, and volatility of the field, they would add more canonised titles in the literature review, a few more names dropped, and the bibliography growing humongous. From the first sentence to the last sentence of the monograph, what we read is some or other citation. It is a series of references that make an ‘academic referenced’ work respectable. Seems ironies such as this characterise academic referenced’ work.

Thus, In Lieu of Conclusion

A polemic ought to be an aid in the recognition of what we have become and where we are headed. This essay is a modest attempt in that regard, and in that spirit, one can recall Bertrand Russell’s ridicule about the problem of writing in sociology. He says that sociologists might write like the following:

Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner. (Russel, 2009, p. 35)

This whole humbug can be simply put, without a care for political correctness, as Russell does in the following:

All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing. (ibid., p. 35)

The philosopher’s dig is indeed to be dug deeper, and then perhaps one goes backwards in this essay to fathom the reasons why the dig makes sense. This is what the essay has tried to do, though with careful avoidance of the names of individuals and institutions. At times, through acrimonious polemic laced with instance-based reasoning, the essay has dared to call a scoundrel a scoundrel. And at times it lets loose the rawness of energy, emotion and intellect in recounting the experience of the issue, trouble, problem or as we may like to put it. The essay presents the entangled aspects of the practice called research-writing with particular attention to what we observe among sociologists. The aspects of teaching-training, reading-thinking and various stakeholders in the process coalesce in the discussion to facilitate due sarcasm, hilarious ironies and witty barbs. These are inevitable devices for a moving polemic. There is little sense of self-righteousness in doing so since the author of this essay is equally a butt of ridicule, as it were, belonging to the same historical milieu and prevalent practices as anyone else. However, through all this, the essay summons to perform a joyous job of ‘recalling the forgotten’, ¹⁸ the ideals and values associated with research-writing and critical thinking in sociology.