A stranger at the table: Reflections on law, society, and the Higgs Boson

Law & Society Review, 2002 by Dingwall, Robert

The observation that Great Britain and the United States are two countries separated by a common language has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas, and Winston Churchill. The Law and Society Association's (LSA) Presidential Addresses tend to be one of the occasions when this overworked observation clearly rings most true. More precisely, since language is but one dimension of culture, an equally widely credited truism, it is always the point in the Annual Meetings at which an alien tends to feel most alien. For me, the achievement of Kitty Calavita's Address lies in the way that it helps me to define that feeling of strangeness.

In his essay on "The Stranger," Alfred Schutz (1964:91-105) explores the experience of "the adult individual of our times and civilization who tries to be permanently accepted or at least tolerated by the group which he approaches." That group is characterized by its ability to use "the ready-made standardized scheme of the cultural pattern handed down . . . by ancestors, teachers and authorities as an unquestioned and unquestionable guide in all the situations which occur in the social world." The stranger, however, cannot take this scheme for granted and use it in the unreflective fashion of a true member. "Hence the stranger's ... distrust in every matter which seems to be so simple and uncomplicated to those who rely on the efficiency of unquestioned recipes which have just to be followed but not understood." Schutz concludes that, for the stranger, the cultural pattern of the approached group is "not an instrument for disentangling problematic situations but a problematic situation itself and one hard to master."

Presidential Addresses are one of the occasions on which the cultural pattern gets explicitly specified. P.M. Strong and I once drew attention to the way in which analysts of organizations dismissed this kind of ceremonial event as irrelevant, unworthy of attention, or purely symbolic (Dingwall & Strong 1985). We argued that they are actually important occasions where the organization's charter, its official goals, values, and feeling rules, are evoked. Presidential Addresses are rather special in the way that they annually celebrate the LSA institutional community. The stranger's reading of that occasion may throw some interesting sidelights on the "unquestioned and unquestionable guide" to which LSA insiders refer in determining both their cognitive and their affective response to the event. What do strangers have to learn to take for granted about what they should know and how they should feel?

Kitty Calavita helpfully begins with her own metanalysis of some of her predecessors' addresses. These lay out three explicit themes: asking big questions; commitment to engaged research; and the role of the engaged intellectual. In the process, she also reveals quite a bit about LSA feeling rules. Like quite a number of Presidents, she has been moved by Felice Levine's imagery of "goose bumps," the mixture of thrill and awe that might be felt in front of the challenges of law and society scholarship. She elaborates this in a comparison with the search for the Higgs boson, one of the most fundamental, and most elusive, particles of modern physics. (It is perhaps unfortunate that the December 8, 2001, issue of New Scientist reports a growing suspicion among physicists that this particle does not exist, a point to which I shall return.) She notes the decline in our confidence that universal statements might be made about the structure and functioning of human social organization and the way that this has made it more difficult to engage with the big questions. Physicists may talk about the "God particle" and the origins of the universe, but we do not appear to have any grand narratives left, although we still have the emotional impulse to produce them. The rest of the Address explores the various ways in which this impulse may be expressed. This involves three kinds of engagement: policy-- driven research; social justice or "engaged" research; and public intellectualism.

Kitty's comparison of the debate about policy-driven research with Woody Allen's complaint about food and portions deserves wide and shameless plagiarism. It is striking to a UX observer how part of the U.S. academic cultural pattern is the low status afforded to policy-driven research. The people who do it may come to enjoy wealth and influence, but are still expected to sit below the salt at professional meetings. (The reference is to status gradations in medieval dining halls, when salt was a scarce commodity and not to be enjoyed by those who were not permitted to sit at the lord's table-such invitations depended, of course, on birth rather than wealth.) In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, there is not much else. As a poorer country, we have had to learn to live with the view of successive governments that if they are committing public money for research then they will influence what might be researched and how this might be done. Recently, for example, several government departments have discovered that they cannot recruit enough quantitative social scientists on civil service salaries. The message is passed to our equivalent of the National Science Foundation, which then decrees that its graduate scholarship competitions will be explicitly biased towards quantitative skills training. The counterarguments, that British social scientists are actually rather good at qualitative work, with an international reputation for excellence in this field, and that the civil service might consider offering pay rates comparable with those in the financial and consulting sectors to attract the skilled labor it claims to need, are simply not expressible, as Kitty notes for criminologists and drugs policy. Our major foundations have tended to copy this philosophy, so that most of them now have very explicit agendas-sometimes in support of counter-policy research, that might look more like the social justice type. The result, of course, is a challenge to the ingenuity of the social science community: How can we take the money and still do good science? However, the tacit abandonment of the idea, clearly still powerful in the United States, that a certain base of support for curiosity-driven research and scholarship is a precondition of a lively democracy and an innovative academic community, does leave its mark on the possibilities of scholarship. The disdain for policy-driven research may be counterproductive in terms of its scientific quality and the caliber of the people who are attracted to it. The celebration of curiosity-- driven research may lead to a certain measure of social irresponsibility on the part of the academy, an indifference to the taxpayers and students who pay its costs. Nevertheless, it can sustain a diversity of ideas and voices that is harder to achieve elsewhere.