Lord Dahrendorf

Ralf Dahrendorf died today, aetat 80.

Death, thou hast lost thy sting

In the strange and wonderful world of PoMo critique we find that even death has lost its sting. The Times Higher Education Supplement tells us, in an account of the fabulous world of Facebook:

 Facebook initiates unintended consequences or messages. Introducing innovations that disembody interpersonal dynamics, it is changing the public attitude not only towards death and mourning, but also towards friendship and interaction. The stark immediacy of the form affects our very processes of thought and imposes different ways of seeing, of understanding and of being in the world. Facebook is a medium whose very characteristics distort relationships by creating an environment and a conversation that is as elusive, transient and disembodied as death itself.

So. Death is transient, elusive, and disembodied. There's some news that we're going to have to get our collective heads round! 

Howie plays jazz

Howard Becker - one of the greatest of America's sociologists - has a great website too. It's filled with intereesting things, including links to a a fair number of his papers and also to a recording of him playing jazz piano. As personal websites go, it's a work of great modesty.

Final versions of Normalization Process Theory papers now published

Two key Normalization Process Theory papers have now been published in final form, and the manuscript versions previously available on my academia.edu page are going to be taken down soon. The published articles can be found at:

May C, Finch T: Implementation, embedding, and integration: an outline of Normalization Process Theory. Sociology 2009, 43(3):535-554.

May C, Mair FS, Finch T, MacFarlane A, Dowrick C, Treweek S, Rapley T, Ballini L, Ong BN, Rogers A et al: Development of a theory of implementation and integration: Normalization Process Theory. Implementation Science 2009, 4(29).

both are made available on an open access basis - if you can't get to them through these links let me know and I'll email you a copy!

A bear

Here's a family sitting down to watch television with a bear. That's not something you see very often......

Telecare, ethics, aging

Maggie Mort and Celia Roberts have edited a special edition of Alter, with papers exploring the socio-technical and ethical problems of telecare in an aging population. It can be found here - and it's an important special edition because so few studies of telecare and telemedicine seriously engage with the people who use them. This has been a longstanding problem, one where the 'patient satisfaction survey' has tended to be a substitute for genuine engagement between service providers, designers, and the citizens that use telecare systems. It's a mystery why service providers don't take it more seriously, when it's long been established that genuine involvement and engagement are predictors of successful service interventions.

Objects and subjects

In the social sciences subjectivity is critically important. One of the key achievements of rational choice theory in economics has been to use the language of calculus to present highly contingent and subjective constructions as though they were real objects. Other social sciences, especially sociology, have centralized the notion of subjective meanings and torn away at the ‘taken for grantedness’ of everyday life. Peter L Berger writes in Facing up to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1971), that these subjective meanings are useful precisely because they are buried and taken for granted – it would be intolerable, he says, if we had to search for the meaning in everything.

Before the late 1800s the notion of ‘objectivity’, as we understand it, at least, would have been incomprehensible. Mid-19th century scientists sought to be truthful, dispassionate, and disinterested – but do not seem to have drawn a clear distinction between objectivity and subjectivity in the way that we do today. This is a distinction that plagues the social sciences, and especially sociology, in a quite unhelpful way. Positivism, false objectivity, and objectification are now constituted as some of the sins of the sociological universe. Interrogating subjectivity – and subjective self-identity – are now central to the sociological project. Everything is contested – in the practices of knowing, and in the practices of representation. It is this problem that Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison’s wonderful book Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007) takes as its topic. They chart the history of the ebb and flow of object and subject in science over the course of a century and a half – from Arthur Worthington’s observation of water droplets to images of nano-tubes. At the centre of this book is the problem of the retreat from personal observation and subjective knowing that underpins some of the natural sciences in the 20th century. The account is framed with scholarship and modesty. It figures prominently in the CBC Radio series How to think about Science, which is available on-line here.

Publishing in open access journals is the way of the future. Indeed it's difficult to see a future in which academic publishing looks the way it does now. I'm writing a book for Palgrave at the moment, but I wonder whether - if I write another book - I won't prepare and format the manuscript myself, and then publish it directly as a pdf through scribd or as kindleware. That way I get to own not only the whole product, but also the whole process, and the timetable that governs it. But not only that, the product itself ceases to be fixed. The manuscript can be amended, on the go, in the light of new thoughts and findings, and authoring processes can be shared in new ways using google wave or wikis like those provided by pbworks. How cool is that?

Another advantage of open access journals is that one can have a sense of the frequency and density of readership - simple data about numbers of accesses are provided by BioMedCentral.com for articles published in BMC journals. I knew Normalization Process Theory was worth pursuing when the first paper was accessed more than 1000 times in the month after publication in the on-line journal BMC Health Services Research. Taken together, the NPT papers on BMC have now been accessed more than 15,000 times through the BioMedCentral portal alone. 

Readership data is interesting because of what it tells you about trends, but it's hard to make more sense of this. I'm on the editorial boards of Sociology of Health and Illness and Nursing Inquiry, and publishers' data for those journals distinguishes between most cited and most read. This kind of data is available on the web for many journals. I find that some of my papers that have hardly been cited have been read in large numbers, suggesting that they are more useful to students than researchers. Which is great. It would be interesting, wouldn't it, if readership, not citation data, was used to assess research quality?