Words from writers: An interview with Edward Webster

Thank you for agreeing to share your views about how you see sociology with readers of ISRB. I’d like to begin with your work.

On your home page you say that your research interests are three: (1) democratic transition, (2) changing workplace representation and its relationship to economic performance, (3) changing the role of labor in the consolidation of democracy in South Africa. Do you see these themes as a synthetic research orientation or do you see them as separate ideas to be treated in different ways?

I see them as very much linked. I’m not sure that these ideas quite capture how I see my work now, but they have a similarity and the connection is there. My central interest is the changing world of work and how, particularly, globalization is impacting on the world of work and creating growing insecurity and what some people call precariousness. In fact some people talk about the rise of a ‘precariat’, a global class of people who are increasingly vulnerable and insecure under the impact of transition to a global economy.

And you see that as connected with democracy?

Yes, I think the democracy theme is one that’s more particular to my South African interests where we’ve been through this period of transition from authoritarianism and the apartheid system to a more democratic order. I argue that we experienced a double transition, a transition to democracy in 1994 that involved a whole range of factors – institutions and actors – but at the same time as we won our democracy we also opened up to a very competitive global economy that was increasingly driven by the market. I call that a double transition. I think this is a global phenomenon, you see this double transition in all the countries that were under authoritarianism and won their democracy in the age of globalization. But they won it in a world in which the economies are open. This has an impact on social relationships, particularly economic relationships and work relationships. And that’s where you find the impact of globalization on work and labor.

What do you mean by ‘changing workplace representation’?

Well I think the central focus (at the time – it’s changed somewhat since I wrote that; I would classify it now as the representational gap) is that with the growing pressures of an informal economy, with the growing informalization of work, there are growing numbers of workers that don’t have a voice, that are not represented by any institutional form. I’ve looked at countries where you find attempts to provide a voice for this growing marginal workforce, and I think the most appropriate term is the representational gap.

What led you to the concern with labor and the workforce as central to your research? What keeps you interested in the field?

I can go back to the beginnings for this one. I spent a number of years studying in England at Oxford University and York University. And when I returned to South Africa, in 1973, it was at the height of a mass strike of black workers. I was interested in how one could actually change the apartheid system in a strategic and effective way. This pointed me towards what one could almost argue was a non-violent way of doing it – simply by workers withdrawing their labor and making demands in their workplaces. It became my life passion really – how to give a voice to these excluded workers. What happened then is that they became the central actors in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, that is, the labor movement. They formed themselves into trade unions, and became organizations as well as movements. These movements became the de facto leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle. They were at the center not only of the origins and the development of the transition, but the key to shaping the post-apartheid order in terms of its sensitivity to the rights of workers. So that was how I became interested in it as a research subject. Of course, the key question was, on the one hand, to try to understand a social movement and how it becomes an organization. I suppose one would call that ‘social movement or labor movement studies’; and the other question was how the workplace itself was changing – the sociology of work. Initially it was a very despotic order and there were old-fashioned almost Taylorist-type workplaces. My initial interest was in the gold mines. Our gold mines go four kilometers underground – more than two miles. Because of my interest in work, I got drawn into trying to understand that social world underground: problems of safety and how they are organized underground.

On the one hand, I was interested in the responses of people to this movement, and, on the other hand, in changing organizational forms and how the work becomes increasingly precarious over a given period. There is a move away from the standard employment relationship towards increasingly part-time, temporary, out-sourced kinds of work. Some people chose self-employment – working on the streets, working from home. My current research, in Gauteng Province, where Johannesburg is located, is about how workers are increasingly displaced. We have a very cosmopolitan workforce because we draw workers from all over Africa, and a multiplicity of types of work. At the moment, what I’m looking at is private security guards. Because of the high crime rate in South Africa, a lot of companies have commoditized security and it’s quite a dangerous job. It’s also very insecure, an unstable type of work. So what I’m trying to capture is the working experience, what the working experience is, the daily life of a security guard, and the kinds of conditions under which they work. That’s one thing and the other one is clothing workers. In the inner city of Johannesburg you’ve got a growing number of sweatshops in the buildings that have been abandoned by their owners and people are working in very precarious conditions. I’m starting to work on a comparison between conditions in Johannesburg and Mumbai, in India, and Johannesburg and Sao Paulo, in Brazil, and comparing the conditions in these three Southern countries.

You were inspired to go into this field of research when you saw that workers were able to influence change by withdrawing their labor and making demands for change. And now there seems to be a different situation altogether – where withdrawing labor has no impact at all. Am I right in understanding that?

I wouldn’t say they have no impact, but the key issue now – that is in the context within which I’m working now – is long-term unemployment. And I’ve sort of switched my interests. On the one hand, I’m trying to understand the conditions of work and how they are changing. But on the other hand, I’m now also working on how to create employment – and that’s taken me into a new field, public policy. In countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa , for many people, a bad job is better than no job. And of course in India, you have 93% of your workforce in the informal economy. Here [in South Africa] we’re most probably looking at something like 30%. But you also have at the same time massive numbers of people without any employment at all. So the question now, I think, the really very difficult sociological challenge, is that you have to start thinking about how to understand public policy and the economy, and ways in which you can create secure income for people. The two types of work I’m looking at are what we call green jobs. There is a lot of potential here for people to start growing their own vegetables, for us to create solar heating, and for us to manufacture solar technology goods. And there is also care work. There are ways in which you can get paid for doing care work, so you start bringing income into a household in which there is no income at the moment.

Was there anything in the way you grew up that led you to these research and policy interests?

Well, my parents were schoolteachers on a Christian Mission in the Eastern Cape where I grew up. They saw teaching as a mission. My father had come from England to South Africa in the 1930s, and I think they instilled in me two different things. One is the importance of knowledge. Knowledge is power; but knowledge also carries with it a sense of public responsibility and a need to get involved in building the capacity of others. (I think it is interesting, by the way, that one of the students in my parents’ class, in the late 1930s, was Nelson Mandela.) So I was brought up in the context where I understood that study was not just about trying to advance knowledge, but also that in some way your knowledge had to be made socially useful, to have an impact on society. That kind of link is something that I’ve always kept in mind. But increasingly as I’ve grown older, the passion has become the research. I’m trying to understand issues and how to explain the phenomena around us.

Another influence was studying at Oxford University in the late 1960s when there was a strong New Left presence. I think that the emphasis on participative democracy and a kind of New Left project that wasn’t communist but was radical shaped my intellectual thinking. So it was both my family background and the way in which sociology was taught to me. The tutor who influenced me most was Stephen Lukes, who wrote a great deal on power. So when I came back to South Africa, I found myself being drawn, almost without questioning, into this set of problem-solving issues. I’ve never seen problem-solving – policy-type work – in opposition to theory. I’ve always seen them as intimately linked; I believe that it’s through social engagement that one actually develops theory.

Forgive me for asking in this way. But I wonder if, by centering on issues in labor you haven’t neglected some of the salient problems of South Africa: crime, violence, race, the AIDS pandemic.

Well, now you’ve triggered something. It’s interesting that each of the examples that you’ve given me, I’ve actually looked at, but through the lens of work. Let me take AIDS. I first looked in 1988 at what were the beginnings of AIDS in South Africa. At the time there were only 200 certified cases. I was made aware of the fact that there was this growing epidemic in Central Africa, which was coming into South Africa, and was coming in via migrant labor, because our mines are run by migrants. So I started a study on sex work amongst migrant workers in the gold mines. And I found that the women were practicing unprotected sex with multiple partners. We wanted to publish the research in 1989 – that was before the pandemic – but we had a lot of opposition to doing it. People denied the issue. They said that we were being racist because we were looking at black people’s sexual activity, and so on. And we eventually published the article in a Washington-based journal, arguing that we had to start to address the question of casual sex, of unprotected sex. The way that we suggested was to have the men living with their partners in the hostels on the mines. That would mean they that would not be continuously visiting sex workers. As things were, if one sex worker picked up the virus, that would spread throughout the mine because they were having multiple relationships, and then the men would go back to the rural areas and spread it to unsuspecting women. That is exactly what happened, exactly what happened. This was 23 years ago. We did the research for the National Union of Mineworkers, and they said you can’t publish this. You can only publish this outside South Africa; you can’t publish things like this in South Africa because of the sensitivities around this topic. So I haven’t avoided looking at that issue. The issue of AIDS is very central for me and it became an industrial relations issue.

On the question of violence, that’s also a fundamental issue that I look at in the world of work. What’s happened is that because of the large numbers of unemployed, when they’re on strike you get scabbing, you know people taking over the workers’ jobs. That leads to violence. So the question of violence came up in that context. And of course, the topic of security guards that I’m looking at is all about crime. That’s why you have security guards.

So I don’t look at work in isolation; my interest is the relationship between work and society – how it impacts on society and how society impacts on work. That’s how I got interested in the work of Karl Polanyi and his notion of the double movement, the idea that unregulated marketization leads to the disruption of society, and society protects itself. That’s how we framed the book Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity, published in 2008. At the center of the book was the idea of how work impacted on society. So I think there’s another way of looking at these issues. There’s a much broader way. I’ve tried to understand social relationships through the particular lens of work. As I say I’ve looked at sex work, I’ve looked at mining work, I’ve looked at violence and strikes – always as part of the same theme. I’m not too concerned about how you categorize this focus. I’m more interested in how the world of work impacts on all aspects of our social relationships. And that is what led me to argue that you can’t understand globalization by looking only at the workplace; you’ve got to look at what happens in the household. I’ve tried to move beyond the hidden abode of production to the hidden abode of reproduction. By interviewing people in the household we find that if there’s instability in the workplace and you don’t have a regular job or there’s stress, a shortage of money; you can get domestic violence in the household. So it’s a much broader lens, as I should have made clear at the beginning, that isn’t really captured by the three ideas you quoted.

And despite the fact that you deal with such depressing phenomena, it seems that you come to optimistic conclusions. In papers written three to five years ago, you write about progress through ‘democracy from below’, the international networking of labor unions. Do you still feel in 2011, that there is a basis for optimism about the world of work?

That’s a tough one. If I could go back to 1973, when I started my work in Durban. It was the height of apartheid in South Africa and the general view was that nothing could be done to change the system, that strike action was not possible. The apartheid state would simply bring in its repressive apparatus: detain, arrest, and there were no credible outlets for political organization. It was a time of deep pessimism, of left pessimism as well. And I think what really changed my view and changed my thinking about society was ‘agency’, the fact that under any circumstances there’s a possibility of people acting and making choices. Choices are quite fundamental to freedom. So if you want to put it in formal terms, ‘agency’ became a central theme. And if you go into human history – even if you take that classic study of the Nazi concentration camps by Bruno Bettelheim – people do try to make a social world around them. What I saw then in 1973 was the capacity of people to make choices, to decide to act, to act collectively sometimes, to act strategically, and to effect change. I’ve seen that in my lifetime – how people have, through strategic thinking and organization, gradually transformed their lives and transformed society around them.

When I look at work now in Johannesburg, I’ve studied these women who get up in the morning at four o’clock, collect paper, waste paper. They generate an income by making a livelihood; they have livelihood strategies. They do the same in Mumbai. They do the same in Sao Paulo. So even in conditions of desperation, there’s always a possibility, and there has to be a sense of choice that people have. If the allegation is that I am too optimistic, then my response is that optimism has to be part of the condition for any kind of social progress.

My colleague in the US, Dan Clawson, speaks of successful failures. You know you learn from your failures. The example he gives in American social movement studies is the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott in the 1950s. But people neglect the fact that there were dozens of bus boycotts before that, or strategies for changing patterns of race relations in the United States. It’s only the Montgomery Bus Boycott that people focus on. Still, I think that this is a difficult question – how one actually distinguishes between optimism and advocacy, political advocacy. And I think that the answer to that would be that the optimism has to be rooted in the actual experience and analysis of social conditions. Erik Wright of course has developed this idea of ‘real utopias’. He’s made an argument for this as an essential feature of sociology, a sociology that looks for alternatives and that’s part of the imagination of being human – alternatives to the current system. But you have to root that optimism in a careful sociological analysis. It’s a moot point as to whether I’ve achieved that. Michael Buroway was critical of our book, Grounding Globalization. He said that there was a chapter at the end that talked about the necessity of utopian thinking that he felt wasn’t rooted sufficiently in the data that we’d gathered in the book. I would take that as saying there is a disconnect between that utopia and the analysis; I think it’s a problem. Still, optimism and hope are for me something that the intelligentsia bring to our understanding of progress.

This has to do with your approach to writing, doesn’t it? In your paper of 2006 about sociology in South Africa, you take Michael Burawoy’s category of the public sociologist as appropriate to your type of work. What, for you, is it to be a public sociologist?

I think there are different kinds of public sociology. Before Michael talked about public sociology, we had spoken about what we called ‘critical engagement’. That meant that you are taking your social knowledge to non-academic audiences and engaging with them through the media, writing articles for newspapers, or more directly with movements themselves; he calls that organic public sociology. I’ve consistently tried to draw the subjects of the research into the research process in some way or other. And sometimes I’ve been able to work in very close collaboration with, say, mine workers, where they identify the problems and we draw up the actual research questions partly with them. Sometimes we draw on them to implement the research. Of course we have to train them, and we, as social scientists, do have the final control over the intellectual process, reserving the right to interpret the data in our own way. That kind of collaborative research – I would include that as part of my understanding of public sociology.

What does it mean in practice to be a public sociologist? How does it influence how you spend your days? How you choose a specific topic? How you choose who to work with in doing the research? How and with whom you decide to write up the research? Could you sort of flesh out how this affects doing research – from asking the question to publication?

OK. I would like to mention a qualification or clarification in the way you’ve posed the question: Michael, in that typology, distinguishes between four different types of sociology. He talks about professional sociology, policy sociology, critical sociology, and public sociology. I would argue that I am doing all of those things at different times. It depends on the project in a way and it depends a bit on what stage in my own life you’re talking about. If I could go back to an earlier point – when I said that for me problem-solving is not separate from theory. In doing policy sociology, for example, I turn the problem I’m dealing with into professional sociology as well. It’s a slightly different activity. Let me give you examples. When we looked at the problem of underground safety in the gold mines – it’s a really big issue because you have rockfalls, people get maimed and become crippled. It’s a major question in the mine because of its depth. And that was a kind of public sociology in the sense that we worked with the union, the National Union of Mineworkers, and we tried also to educate them about safety. And we turned the research that we produced into local indigenous languages. So in that sense we were being organic public sociologists. But at the same time we turned the data we gathered into an academic article which was published in Geneva in the International Labor Review. So that’s professional sociology. I don’t see that as an either/or. In fact it’s quite a contradictory position to be in which I don’t think Michael’s categories really capture because they are typology. You’ve actually got two different audiences. You’ve got the audience of the people that you’re studying and you’ve got your peers. And one is caught between them. So I would want to nuance the question a bit by saying that you can be engaged in the same project by doing part of it in a public way and also retaining a professional sociologist’s role as well. Of course, Michael makes the distinction between public sociology and policy sociology. Policy sociology is sociology that you do for a client. Now at the moment, the sociology I’m doing is for our provincial government. So it’s different in this sense. I’ve got to say: What does the user want? What is their question? Now the question that they’ve formulated for me is: How do we integrate decent work into our economic growth plan? That’s their question. So I’ve got to come up with a way of answering their question. At the same time I am also a sociologist with my own understanding of these issues and, as I say, an understanding of how things should be done. I’m given the autonomy to do that. I’m assuming that down the road I will come up with a way of trying to understand decent work and development that allows me to present a scholarly paper on this in Japan in 2014, at the next ISA World Congress.

What about how articles get written. Almost every paper of yours that I’ve seen is written with somebody. Do you especially enjoy writing with colleagues? Or students? What’s the difference for you between writing by yourself and writing with others?

That’s an interesting question. I think it’s partly a philosophical approach I suppose and it’s partly necessity. I’ve been running, since 1983, a research unit on the sociology of work, SWOP. It started out as the Sociology of Work Program. It is now called the Society, Work and Development Institute because we’ve expanded it to look at these broader questions. Because it’s a research unit, you get projects that involve cooperation with other disciplines or with other countries. In the book on globalization, I worked with Rob Lambert, a colleague from Australia, so to do the study it made sense to draw on people from other countries. My cooperation in writing is partly because collaborative large-scale projects require working with others. But I think it’s more a philosophical – philosophical is not quite the word – it’s personal choice. I like working with a team – with people; I’ve often tried to work with younger colleagues who haven’t published before. This is a way for them to get an opportunity of being published and then going off on their own. I also find that working with people is a way of deepening one’s own understanding. Different people bring different perspectives to the research question. So it’s partly giving opportunities to younger people, but it’s also a way of doing things in a collective way. Some people have the craft view of sociology, the view that you have to work as an individual. I think the pressures today are for that increasingly. People are saying, ‘we want single-authored publications only’. And I have done – I do that. But if you are in a research unit and are expected constantly to have outputs, it’s quite difficult to make that quantity of output if you try to do it all on your own. I think that pressure on people to work on their own rather than work collectively is undermining the reality of knowledge production. Knowledge is produced collectively and if it is appropriated by one person only, it can be quite distorted. But you may have noticed, the attribution quite often is not necessarily alphabetical. In other words, my philosophy in the unit was that people’s names would appear according to how much they contribute to the article. It can get a bit ridiculous because I published an article with people from nine different countries! But there is a danger in academic work of people possibly neglecting the contribution of others because it isn’t the central contribution but it is absolutely vital. I would also add it as an ethical point. We need to acknowledge where other people have been involved in the project. A lot of our research is collective and others should be properly acknowledged. But they have to be acknowledged in terms of their contribution, so not necessarily alphabetically and not necessarily with the senior person first as they tend to do in the natural sciences. If I put my name first that means that I think I’ve made the greatest contribution.

How do you feel about teaching?

It’s a vocation. Maybe this is an unusual way of putting it, but I believe in teacher-driven research. In other words, I think that there is a close synergy between teaching and research, particularly at the graduate level. My greatest pleasure in my career has been working with young minds, seeing them develop, and being enriched by them. We had in our program, our research unit, a mentoring program which became quite central to our work because it was focused on black students. Even today, at universities in South Africa, although the students are increasingly black, the faculty are still largely white. That’s because of the history of South Africa where knowledge was monopolized by whites. But what it means is that many black students, who are almost always first generation at university, find the university very intimidating. They see it as a kind of institutionalized racism. It’s partly because the language is different, many of them don’t have English as their home language. So they feel very alienated. What I did was to introduce a mentoring program where students were given an opportunity of working with senior researchers in my unit, in developing their research proposals. Originally this began at the third year (undergraduate) level, but went on to the master’s and the PhD levels. It is one of the most satisfying experiences that I’ve had in my career. You know – young working-class women from Soweto whose parents are unemployed get the opportunity, and have true academic ability. I’ve seen more than one – numbers of them. It was only because I was able to connect with them at the teaching level that I was able to develop a relationship with them at the research level later on in their careers. So I’ve always seen the two activities as closely linked. Going back to Burawoy’s typology. You know, he talks about critical sociology. Well my first public, talking about public sociology, would be the students. So if you ask, what makes you a public sociologist, I would say, ‘because I take my students seriously’.

Is that what you meant when you said there are different kinds of public sociologies?

Well, that’s your first public, but obviously not the only public. I have audiences outside the university. That’s usually what people mean by that and that’s also what I mean by public sociology. I’m just suggesting a more nuanced understanding of public sociology.

In closing, Eddie, what kind of advice would you give to a novice sociologist?

That’s a difficult question. I think that I would say two things. I think that in choosing your area of research specialization, you shouldn’t only think about what is most beneficial to your career. You should think about what drives you – where’s your passion. I think sociologists make the best contribution if they follow what really gives them a sense of meaning in their work. If questions of sexuality are your passion, then find your mission in that area. I think it’s a mistake to follow only what you think will advance your career.

Secondly, I think that you should look upon students not as a burden, but as the greatest area of satisfaction in your career. In some ways the longest, the most enduring legacy that you have is the impact you make on other people. Also (and you haven’t asked about research methods), I would encourage sociologists to make themselves proficient in a variety of sociological techniques and not to concentrate on one only, whether quantitative or qualitative – using those simple distinctions – so that you have a variety of research methods on hand.