I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to the idea of late modernity. It was the work of Bauman, Beck and Giddens which drew me into Sociology, presenting a till then cynical philosophy student with the possibility that one could meaningfully engage with the world and diagnose the times in a philosophical register. But coming to recognise the conceptual and empirical limitations of these accounts, as well as the methodological dangers which flow from them, profoundly shaped my subsequent trajectory as a sociologist. The first article I ever had published in a journal was a critique of a particularly weak instance of such theorising, suggesting that it was interesting because its ostentatious failings revealed problems that were more deeply concealed in more sophisticated examples of this approach. The broader tendency at work here has been incisively critiqued by Mike Savage as epochal theorising:
The social sciences, and especially sociology, abound with epochalist thinking (see generally Savage 2009). We are seen to have moved, variously, to a globalised, post-modern, neo-liberal, informationalised, cosmopolitan, (and so forth) world order. Such thinking saturates debates about social change and incites an almost constant agitation for detecting new kinds of epochal change and transformation which makes our contemporary times different from anything that comes before.
https://stratificationandculture.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/sociological-ruminations-on-piketty/
This is how I address the issues in my PhD, arguing that the canonisation of this work is something which invites explanation. Why have so many statements of epochal change emerged within British sociology? What was it about Britain and its sociology which engendered this tendency? Why have they proved so influential? Why have have these accounts proved so mobile, circulating across fields and subdisciplines which would likely otherwise prove disconnected? As I put it in the thesis, it “serves as a conduit linking a range of sociological sub-disciplines, ensuring that they can, at least in principle, be reincorporated in a substantive way into the same intellectual typology”:
To this end it takes the work on late modernity by Giddens (1990, 1991, 1992) as its foil, treating it as emblematic of a broader trend within contemporary social theory. Metaphors abound readily within this now canonical literature (Archer 2013a, Outwaite 2009) as all manner of empirical phenomena are incorporated into a dazzlingly panoramic frame of reference and presented as manifestations of the leading edge of social change. However for all its preoccupation with the new, there is something oddly dated about such work, with its apparent prospectiveness belying underlying continuities with long-standing traditions within British sociology (Savage 2010a, Savage and Burrows 2007). In spite of its self-styled epochal novelty, it can easily be read as a peculiarly a priori manifestation of a much broader preoccupation with ‘endings’ within contemporary sociology (Crow 2005). On such a view, the popularity of this work constitutes a puzzle which demands explanation and the opening chapter of this thesis aims to provide precisely this.
In an earlier article, Savage and Burrows describe this as a “kind of sociology which does not seek to define its expertise in terms of it empirical research skills, but in terms of its ability to provide an overview of a kind that is not intended to be tested by empirical research”. This claim is one which can be explored at the level of individual careers: how does a practice with such an obviously rhetorical dimension, in terms of offering panoramic visions of social change that prove persuasive, become a viable career strategy? It’s an argument for another blog post, but I believe the success of epochal theorising can be explained in terms of the incentive to monopolise the intellectual attention space that emerges within the accelerated academy. These attention-grabbing, non-empirical accounts constitute ascension strategies through which theorists ensure their incorporation into the intellectual landscape in a sustained way. Epochal theorising is a way to make yourself a reference point.
When we see it in these terms, the comparison to management literature comes to seem less unfair than might otherwise be the case. This is a summary of one such management theorist offered in One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank, loc 4595:
In 1989, Handy was already comparing the “change” of our time to the experiences of the Incas when the conquistadors showed up. The One to One Future, a 1993 book by consultants Don Peppers and Martha Rogers that hails the rise of individualized marketing through fax machines and direct mail, begins by declaring that “we are passing through a technological discontinuity of epic proportions,” a “paradigm shift” that will unleash “cataclysmic changes.” In 1994, Competing for the Future held that we are on the verge of “a revolution as profound as that which gave birth to modern industry.” In more recent years, of course, the rhetoric has only escalated. The Dance of Change, a 1999 compendium of big thinkings on the subject, has by its fifteenth page referred to “change agents,” “change agendas,” “change initiatives,” “change programs,” “top-down change” (which is bogus change indeed), “inner” and “outer change,” “deep change processes,” “significant change,” and has settled on one term as more meaningful than all others: “profound change.” To illustrate the failure of rival theorists’ “change programs,” the book’s authors offer what may be the most pointless graph in the entire history of business thought: Without benefit of notation, figures, or sources we are shown how an arrow marked “Time” bucks and subsides on its way to the future while another marked “Potential (unrealized)” ascends tragically to the heavens.32
My provocative claim is that the epochal theorising which dominated British sociology in the 1990s and 2000s could be construed as nothing more than management theory. In fact perhaps it could even be regarded as less than management theory, in so far as that management theory enjoys a great degree of influence over the wider world. It could be said that British epochal theorising exercised such an influence over party politics, but I’m reminded of Tony Benn describing in his penultimate diaries how “Anthony Giddens just hovers round trying to put an ideological cloak around whatever is being discussed”. Is epochal theorising often just business bullshit without the social influence?
Mark Carrigan 