No such thing as sociological excuses? Performativity, rationality and social scientific expertise in late liberalism

Abstract

This article examines a frequent assumption of sociological accounts of knowledge: the idea that knowledge acts. The performativity of knowledge claims is here analysed through the prism of ‘sociological excuses’: the idea that sociological explanations can act as ‘excuses’ for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. The article builds on Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects to discuss the relationship between sociological explanation, sociological justification and sociological critique. It argues that understanding how (and if) sociological explanations can act requires paying attention to social and political conditions of performativity and their transformation in late liberalism.

Regimes of participation: theorising participatory archives from the outset of archivists' views on archival institutions and user participation in Scandinavia

“…A major rationale of turning to Boltanski and Thévenot in theorising participation is to turn attention from describing the diversity of participatory actions, to inquiring into their underpinning values and how they are justified. As a consequence, as Bacevic (2021) notes, inquiring into justifications turns attention to what can be evaluated but even more so, emphasises that acts, like participation in the present study, can be evaluated to begin with. Discussing Boltanski's On Critique, Stones (2014) underlines the testing of imagined worlds through colliding them with experienced worlds, as a key aspect of the making of the social life.…”

“…This opens up possibilities a lieux Miessen's (2010) proposal, to pursue a reflexive rather than politically correct consensus through critical interventions, debating the regimes and their implications and the notion of participation in general. It can facilitate a shift, from a risk of engaging in a hollow ritual of pseudoparticipation (Miessen, 2010) and essentially what Bacevic (2021) describes as the predominant neoliberal political epistemology of focusing only on how people do things and pushing (or nudging) them to act in particular ways, to consider why certain things are done and what the doing implies. Rather than assuming that archival participation, or the consensual underpinnings of the dominating ideas of participation, are inherently good and desirable, they need to be questioned, challenged, and as Boltanski and Thévenot (2022) and Stones (2014) emphasise, they have to be tested.…”

Liberal fatalism, COVID 19 and the politics of impossibility

“…Similarly, when the government decided to lift the lockdown in June 2020, Fergusonwho opposed the liftinghad his reputation tarnished after the media 'revealed' he had broken lockdown to see his (married) lover. This made his opinion seem less valid, despite the absence of a logical link between the credibility of models and the moral 'scorecard' of the modeller (Bacevic, 2021a). This would suggest that, rather than being 'guided by the science', the UK government was actively involved in shaping public perceptions of 'the science'.…”

“…Within political theory, there has been some attention to gradual loss of meliorism as a political and policy goal, notably in the work of Judith Shklar (1969Shklar ( [2002), who explored how the deployment of scientific reason for mass destruction in World War II helped to shake early Enlightenment faith in science as an inevitable good. As Nicolas Guilhot (2022) puts it, building on Skhlar, 'liberalism had not only forsaken its earlier claims to progress, but now looked with diffidence, if not hostility, to any perfectionist strivings' settling instead on 'damage control' in lieu of grand schemes for societal betterment (see also Ashenden & Hess, 2016, Bacevic, 2021a, McGoey, 2019.…”

“…Drawing on critical discourse analysis of the reports published by SAGE, and guidance circulated by international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), we show how the UK government used 'the science' to justify or oppose interventions that often had very little to do with scientific knowledge or evidence. Contrary to the approaches that focused on the role of SAGE and, in particular, epidemiological and mathematical modelling in shaping the government's response, we focus on the government's use of public opinion research as a way of assessing possible reactions of the public (Bacevic, 2021a(Bacevic, , 2020a(Bacevic, , 2020b(Bacevic, , 2020c. This provided a sufficient 'knowledge base', but one that was primarily oriented towards managing the population, rather than the virus.…”