2014 Annual Lord Patten Lecture on Social Renewal
Newcastle University
29 April 2014
“Society as a vocation: renewing social science for social renewal”
Professor John D Brewer Hon DSocSci, MRIA, FRSE, AcSS, FRSA
Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice
Queen’s University Belfast
Abstract
The 20th century witnessed the professionalization of social science by making science its
vocation. The 21st century must see social science become normative, with society its
vocation. The paradox of neoliberalism is that its attack on the public university has forced
social science to advance its public value and the grounds on which it is a public good in its
own right, the outcome of which is that we must shift from science to society as our vocation.
If society is to be the object of our life's commitment as social scientists - a vocation in that
sense - then we pursue it with enthusiasm, sponsor and advance its interests, look to its
renewal and improvement, and continually refine and enhance our understanding of it. This
requires both a value-orientated and scientific approach, making social science scientific and
normative at the same time. This new form of public social science is better suited to civic
engagement and community empowerment as a form of co-produced knowledge appropriate
to the wicked problems facing us in the 21st century. The argument, in other words, is that to
better effect social renewal, we need first to renew social science.
Biographical note
John Brewer is Professor of Post-Conflict Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He runs the
£1.26m Leverhulme Trust-funded Compromise after Conflict research programme, which
focuses on victims in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and South Africa, and has a special
interest in religious peace-building. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Fellow of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Academician in the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow
of the Royal Society of Arts. He was President of the British Sociological Association and is
now Honorary Life Vice President. He is a member of the United Nations Roster of Global
Experts and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Social Science from Brunel University
for services to social science. He is author or co-author of 15 books and editor or co-editor of
a further three. In 2013 he gave the Annual Academy of Social Science Lecture in London
and in March the 2014 Annual Dunleath Lecture. In May he is participating in one of the
Westminster Faith Debates defending the motion that religion can play a positive role in
peace-building, and in June he delivers the David Stevens Annual Memorial Lecture in
Parliament Buildings in Stormont.
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Society as a vocation: renewing social science for social renewal
[Lord Patten], Vice Chancellor, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues and
friends, I feel privileged to be delivering this year’s Annual Lord Patten Lecture on Social
Renewal. This is a University I know well as a former external examiner and Lord Patten’s
contribution to my adopted homeland, Northern Ireland, has been very influential. It is a very
great pleasure to represent him and the University by means of this lecture; even more so in
that I am only the third in a very distinguished line of lecturers, including, as the first, Lord
Patten himself.
It is also a privilege to represent in this way the Institute for Social Renewal. This is an
impressive venture and the University is to be congratulated on having the courage to make
social renewal so central to its global vision and practice.
Last year’s Lecture by the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, on the moral limits of
markets, threw out a challenge to neo-liberal representations of the market. My theme is not
too dissimilar, but I am concerned with the limits of neo-liberal representations of social
science. My point can be made clearly and succinctly at the beginning.
In response to neo-liberal critiques of social science I argue that social science does have
value but this does not primarily lie in instrumental utility or economic value, as neo-liberals
like to see it, but in normative public value, a term I will come back to. But crucially, to realise
this public worth and to make ourselves a public good, social science needs to change to
make itself relevant to the global challenges of the 21st century. This requires more than the
inauguration of a new form of public social science, it requires that we make society our
vocation. By rendering society our calling, we are better able to renew social science to
engage in social renewal.
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Having been educated from a young age by the Jesuits, as Lord Patten is proud to admit, I
suspect he would not find the term ‘vocation’ unusual, but to social scientists it conjures up
the idea of science as our vocation. I must address this idea first to see what it says for my
proposal that society should replace it.
The phrase was first used by the German social scientist Max Weber in 1917. Social
scientists take it to mean that we should be value free. Science as a vocation became the
shibboleth of all the professionalising social sciences, endlessly quoted to reinforce our
demand to be treated with the legitimacy and authority that comes from the appellation
‘science’. Social anthropologists might call this ‘physics envy’. But it means so much more
than we should be scientific. Weber’s use of the term ‘vocation’ is very significant. The idea
of vocation or calling was one used in several different contexts by Weber. His famous
argument about Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism – which had devoted to it a whole
programme on BBC Radio 4 recently as a remarkable example of what the REF calls
‘impact’ – was premised on his understanding of Calvinist notions of ‘calling’.
In describing science as a vocation, Weber imputes to science much the same sense of
devotion, commitment and mission as in its religious usages. The recent controversial
biography of Weber shows him to be a passionate man, and in his lecture on science as a
vocation he referred to people pursuing science with devotion. Pursuing objective knowledge
through empirical value-free facts was for Weber emotional in the passions it should arouse
as a calling – although to our grief such passion is not immediately recognisable to students
on research methods courses. But such pursuit had to be value free in its practice.
This is a significant distinction. Weber felt the commitment to science should be passionate,
but that the emotion thus stirred should not enter into its practice. You could have a moral
commitment to science, but not a morally committed science.
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Note that what Weber is saying here is that the objectivity of science rests on the objectivity
of the scientist. It is partisanship he objects to, not to the idea of values, passions, devotion
or emotions. Indeed, the use of the word ‘vocation’ is intended deliberately to convey these
appeals. It is allowing values to distort the practice of objectivity that Weber condemns.
Indeed, historiography suggests that what Weber had in mind when speaking to his Munich
students that November morning, when the First World War still stood in the balance, was a
rather local issue in German scholarship not the formulation of a universal general rule. His
reference was to compatriots who saw the social sciences as forms of prophecy and
themselves as seers, and who preached a pan-German nationalism that advocated world
domination by Germany. Weber was not so much debating with the ghost of Marx, as
successive generations of first year social scientists are taught, but also with the more local
spectre of German expansionism.
Weber felt very strongly the moral responsibility that fell to him as a scientist to challenge
those who turned science into ideology. This enables us I think to make another key
distinction. Weber was objecting to an ethic of ultimate ends, not to an ethic of responsibility.
Indeed, in the less famous lecture in Munich in 1918, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, he told the
assembled students that political science had to be relevant to the vital issues of the day.
So it was only particular forms of corruption that Weber objected to when arguing social
science should be value free. He did not oppose social scientists bringing ethical
responsibilities to their science; what was important was that the scientific evidence should
not be distorted for the sake of these values.
I have taken a short digression to help us understand what Weber meant by the phrase
‘science as a vocation’ because it is in some small but crucial ways different from how he
has been read in the rush to professionalization. If this lecture were to sociologists I might
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expand further but for my purposes here I would like to draw out the implications of Weber’s
ideas for my proposal that we treat society as our vocation. What does this mean if it is to
parallel science as a vocation?
First, the study of society – like the practice of science – should be something social
scientists treat as a calling. That is to say, we approach both the topic of society and its
analysis with an emotional commitment that is characteristic of vocations. As Weber said in
his lecture on science as a vocation, nothing is worthy of scientists unless they can pursue it
with passionate devotion. Social scientists should feel this towards society and its study.
Secondly, while the objectivity of the analysis of society depends on the objectivity of the
social scientist, we are not required to be empty of ethical purpose and morality, but that our
practice as scientists should not be affected by the values we hold. This is not so much a
value free social science as values tempered by science.
Thirdly, social scientists should feel an ethic of responsibility toward society – but not an
ethic of ultimate ends – not some teleology to which society should be moulded – since
these are relative to the ‘variety of gods’, as Weber put it.
Fourthly, since society is the object of our calling and is something we should feel an ethic of
responsibility toward, we can have a morally constituted social science, the moral dimension
to which is the continual improvement and betterment of society and the amelioration of its
ills. The study of society, in other words, provides its own minimum moral baseline that
objective social science practice is directed toward, namely the social good.
Fifthly, moral phenomena can be studied objectively. Scottish moralists in the 18th century
referred to their work as the science of morals. I am suggesting by making society our
vocation that the social good becomes the object of our moral science. What this means I
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think is that evaluations and judgements of an ethical kind are the outcome of objective
social science as we interrogate the structural processes that promote or hinder the social
good.
Finally, with society our vocation, and its betterment our moral baseline, social science is not
only inherently scientific it is also inherently moral and political at the same time. But ethical
in this one sense, that it is concerned with the global challenges that affect the future of
humankind, challenges which have the potential to threaten the social good. This moral and
political purpose is inherent to social science whether we like it or not or are aware of it or
not.
So, putting all this together, when society becomes our vocation we have a form of social
science defined by the emotion and passion that characterises all devotional callings but
committed to the practice of objectivity. We get a social science committed to the collection
and interrogation of evidence undistorted by the values we hold, but, fundamentally, also
one that is committed to the objective analysis of moral phenomena. It is one that addresses
itself to injustice, inequality and suffering, to the analysis of the structural processes that
promote or inhibit the realisation of social betterment and to meeting human needs and
wants. It is one that rejects moral indifference and moral relativity and one that begins to
declare that good and evil are objective categories insofar as they relate to this minimal
moral baseline that society as a vocation provides us with: the promotion of the social good
and the elimination of social suffering.
I underpin my claim that as social scientists society should be our vocation by the particular
way I envisage the normative public value of social science, a phrase I used earlier but left
undefined. I will not here engage in an abstract debate about the differences between the
three types of value I have elsewhere identified – use value, price value and normative value
– but instead cut straight to the chase and say that what I mean by the normative public
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value of social science renders society into our vocation. The normative public value of
social science is that it nurtures in all exposed to it, a moral sentiment or a sympathetic
imagination, which derives from its ability to show, through its teaching, research and civic
engagements, the social nature of society. This enables us to recognise each other as social
beings, capable of living only with each other in social groups, where we have a common
responsibility for our shared future. Social science thus becomes a public good for its own
sake, for two reasons. First, by cultivating this moral sentiment and sympathetic imagination
through its subject matter, teaching, research and civic engagements; and secondly, by
making itself relevant to our humanitarian future by understanding, explaining, analysing and
ameliorating the fundamental social problems stored up for us all in the 21st century.
Permit me an aside remark before I specify the kind of social science practices that might
implement this normative public value. The paradox is that neo-liberal attacks on the public
university have forced social science to advance its public value and the grounds on which it
is a public good in its own right, the outcome of which is that we must shift from science to
society as our vocation, a vocation that poses a direct challenge to neo-liberal
representations of social science. This is a powerful example of the law of unintended
consequences in social science – which only deepens the paradox by affirming the very
relevance of social science ideas beyond their economic usefulness.
If society is our vocation, what kind of social science should we practice? I have argued
elsewhere that we need a new form of public social science if we are to realise our public
value. This new public social science has teaching, research and practice dimensions but I
will not discuss its teaching agenda today given the focus of this lecture. I will conclude by
referring to its implications for the way we visualise a public university.
Social science is both theoretically informed and empirically driven, committed to developing
evidence-based observations, descriptions and explanations through theoretical and
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empirical investigations. This makes social science explanatory rather than just descriptive,
combining theoretical insight with empirical rigour. The research agenda of the new public
social science is distinguished by applying these scientific skills to the analysis of the
fundamental problems of culture, the market and the state in the 21st century.
This is more profound than it sounds. It has become popular to refer to 21st-century global
challenges as ‘wicked problems’. This is not a reference to their moral quality – although
they assuredly do have an ethical dimension – but to their complexity, as unpredictable,
open-ended and often intractable issues. Since the problems of the 21st century are wicked
in this sense, they have technical features incapable of analysis by a single discipline, and
are not even the responsibility of any one branch of science. Therefore, the research agenda
of the new public social perforce privileges post-disciplinarity in a way that distinguishes it
from traditional social problems research.
I mean by post-disciplinarity more than the ritualized calls for inter- or multi-disciplinarity.
Post-disciplinary social science is problem oriented rather than discipline oriented, with
disciplinary ideas, of theoretical and empirical kinds, used in combination as the problem
determines across all branches of knowledge. Problems are no longer defined in terms of
the received wisdom of individual disciplines, but by the technical features required to
understand, analyze, explain and ameliorate them. I am only too pleased when postdisciplinarity elicits a reaction along the lines of ‘that’s what I and many others do’ – I’m
merely suggesting we want more of it.
This may or may not involve collaboration with others across disciplinary boundaries, as
inter- and multi-disciplinarity usually mean; it may involve instead single researchers moving
outside their intellectual orthodoxies to themselves approach the topic from perspectives
outside their own discipline. Transgendered sexuality, for example, can no longer solely be
understood from within social science but requires biological and medical knowledge.
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Neurological research animates some anthropological studies of culture and sociological
studies of child behaviour. Behavioural economics is pushing the boundaries of our
understanding of market behaviour by returning to social behaviouralist ideas now out of
favour in social psychology that explore the cognitive and affective bases of decision
making. The study of organized violence, genocide, and post-conflict recovery, for example,
now popular in the social sciences in international relations, transitional studies, political
science, social psychology and what is called ‘conflict economics’, sees healing as a medical
and social process, relevant to the human and social body, and not able to be accomplished
properly without also involving trauma studies, cognitive science, medicine, and victimology
studies, amongst others.
As well as being problem rather than discipline focused, there is another distinguishing
feature of the research focus on wicked problems within the new public social science. This
is its collaboration with government, NGOs, civil society, and different forms of publics in
what is researched, the way it is researched and in the proposed outcomes of the research.
Research becomes participative, in which research questions are not defined solely as the
preserve of professionals; it is a form of co-produced knowledge. Public social science
needs to be co-produced with the publics that name it as public.
The key question here, of course, is which public are we to be responsible to? In my view,
there are multiple publics and we require openness to them all, if not all at once, at least in
the round. If ‘big issues’ direct our attention, the multiple interests involved in them require
research agendas that successful tap the impact on all parties and from all their points of
view. This means government as well as powerless and marginalized groups, business as
well as NGOs, policymakers as well as the underprivileged. Of course, social science still
needs to speak truth to power, but it has to engage with power as well.
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Therefore, theoretically driven and empirically engaged research on complex problems
transcends disciplinary boundaries and political ones, and needs to rise above the
‘strangers’ whom social scientists kept at arm’s length in the past. We not only need to
engage downwards to the local publics social scientists feel best represent their more
natural constituencies, but also upwards to government and policymakers, people normally
considered beyond the pale.
The research agenda of the new public social science as I have just described it requires a
further change to conventional research practice. Post-disciplinary research implicates
different modes of communication and language. Inter-working across the social sciences
and with other branches of science, and in liaison with co-producers of knowledge amongst
publics with a stake in the research, requires a common language. This means lessening
the use of in-group, professional vocabulary, and it involves a stylistic change, in which
social scientists write to make themselves understood rather than for professional acclaim.
I want to pursue this notion of public engagement since it is central to the new public social
science. One of the most familiar responses to the neo-liberal emphasis on the need for
universities to be publicly accountable has been the demand to improve dissemination;
dissemination is presented as a form of public engagement, and a method of garnering
impact. It needs to be forcefully asserted therefore that civic engagement is more than
dissemination, more than a communication strategy.
In the new public social science, civic engagement begins with the formulation of the
research problem when different publics can be involved as co-producers of research, and it
also enters into the teaching strategy of the new public social science, when civil society
groups, INGOs, and other publics can be brought into the classroom – and provide
placements and fieldtrips outside the classroom – to lessen the gap between it and the real
world. Civic engagement in the new public social science is thus not left as the final
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outcome, to be done at the end. Civic engagement involves holding conversations with
relevant publics and stakeholders in a problem at all stages of the research process.
Let me begin to conclude this lecture by reinforcing its salient points and drawing out their
implications for the way we comprehend public universities. The contribution of the social
sciences – and therefore of public universities in which social science is largely based –
goes far beyond what is called ‘impact’. The vital role of social science and the public
university is to be a civilising and humanising mirror for societies to see themselves and
learn about themselves, enabling moral debates and judgements about the social good and
social suffering. Inasmuch as post-disciplinary social science is the way for us to realise this
ambition, it follows also that this civilising role is one the natural sciences and the arts and
humanities can also play. But I have championed social science here because it has few
other defenders, unlike the arts and science, which have much more public recognition.
The value social science is that it is capable of teaching and research that is publiclyengaged, driven by global societal challenges, and capable of post-disciplinary practice that
is based on explicit ethical responsibilities, all while still being scientifically rigorous. This
means that public universities must themselves reorganise to reconfigure their teaching and
research landscapes to facilitate post-disciplinarity. Subjects should come out from their
silos; and universities should dismantle their ivory towers. Public universities should
transcend the gulf between universities and society by encouraging an ethos of civic
engagement as well as scholarship. In our teaching and research we should not so much
aim to train minds but to change minds – and change them in a way that changes society.
How? I suggest by inculcating a sympathetic imagination that is sensitive to the social good
and to social suffering. That is, by making society our vocation. This should be the ambition
not just of public social science but the public university itself. I am suggesting therefore, that
to equip us for the 21st century, we need to reclaim the idea of the moral purpose of the
public university as much as of public social science.
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I know that one of the reasons why it is difficult to accept society as our vocation and the
new public social science as our practice is because they challenge the boundaries between
normative and scientific practice. Traditional normative social scientists may well dislike
them because they challenge their preference for the naysayer role of critic, since they know
that in order to have the social good as our calling, and thus to make a difference to ordinary
people’s lives, they will have to engage upwards to powerful publics, rather than just
downwards to the organic publics they feel more comfortable with. Others may well dislike
them because the focus on wicked problems risks their scientific detachment and threatens
to get them engaged with issues that have clear moral dimensions.
However, let me reiterate, in the new public social science there is no disjuncture between
science and normative practice. The ethical responsibility to help realise the social good and
reduce social suffering through our teaching, research and civic engagements, gives us
social science with a normative dimension and moral commitment scientifically undergirded.
By making society our vocation, we can renew social science to make it better able to
engage in social renewal. Thank you.
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