Abstract
Michael Billig is concerned that his book will not be widely read. He expresses concern that his words will be merely whispers in the wind or mutterings at the side of the road. Yet he chose to write the book anyway and I hope it is read. The central argument of this witty and entertaining book is that modern-day social scientific writing no longer describes what people do. His argument focuses on two elements: firstly the conditions under which academic social scientists work and secondly, ‘the linguistic nature of what we produce as writers of the social sciences’ (p. 5). Billig suggests that the two are connected and that whilst many would agree that the first is familiar, the second will be less comfortable for some to accept.
A Marxist analysis underpins Billig’s contention that social scientists write in conditions which are not of their choosing. Certainly the world has turned since the days of the 18th-century polymath. Billig charts the changes leading to the 20th-century expansion of higher education provision (I hesitate to use the term ‘massification’, which Billig dislikes due to its imprecision). His analysis of the rise of academic capitalism on a grand scale highlights that institutions typically reward and even boast about research activity, despite the fact that institutional income comes largely from teaching. Academics are expected to write, publish more (and more often), even when they have nothing important to say, and sufficiently frequently enough to satisfy external pressures. In the earlier days of the university, it was possible for a scholar to know everything about their discipline. The increase in social science publications in the 21st-century results in a reader ‘working a forty hour week for fifty weeks of the year, would need three-and-a-half years to read all the core sociology articles for any single year’ (p. 27). Ask yourself how many journals you read last year and consider how wide or narrow your field of reading. Are you living on one of Klinenberg’s segregated ‘informational islands’ (2005) where reading habits, far from being wide-ranging, are narrowly limited to what is perceived as ‘relevant’? As we move from an age of mass media to one of social media, are we replacing global communication with methods more similar to oral narratives shared among distributed communities? This segregation is held together by what Billig describes as a federation of subdisciplines and sub-subdisciplines.
Billig’s second key argument is prefaced with the backhanded compliment that ‘No one is born with the ability to produce the convoluted sentences that academic social scientists regularly write’ (p. 40). In other words, we learn to write badly. Repeatedly through the central chapters of this book, Billig argues that social science writing can be pompous, obscuring and highly nominal. This last point, that academic writing suffers from an excess of noun words, is seen as having its genesis during undergraduate study, where the student is required to demonstrate a certain fluency – mimicking the professor – with the accepted jargon of the discipline. Postgraduate students will be expected to write as ‘professional social scientists, rather than ordinary people who happen to have wandered in from the rain’ (p. 63). From there, the budding academic is given opportunities through a range of academic contexts to use the language of the discipline ‘to impress others’ (p. 57) and ‘to draw attention to their own professional skills and importance’ (p. 64).
He criticizes the use of jargon for jargon’s sake and makes the point that academics are fond of using big words. He takes as his example the use of the word ‘methodology’, frequently used instead of ‘method’, and we are all surely familiar with this misuse. But of course there is a conceptual distinction between the tools of research (methods) and the principles that determine how such tools are used and interpreted (methodology). However, I generally agree with his argument that ordinary language is capable of being precise without the need for unnecessary jargon and I welcome Billig’s documentation of how scholars of sociology came to adopt the concepts ‘governmentality’ (through the role of Rose and Miller’s 1992 article), ‘cosmopolitanization’ and ‘globalization’ (by reference to articles by Beck and Sznaider, and John Urry in 2010). These journal articles each tackle the issue of power but Billig is critical of how they are dominated by ‘things’ rather than people. He demonstrates this through deconstruction of a selected quote from the Beck and Sznaider article and makes his point, ‘people are doubly absent, for they are even absent when they are being written about’ (p. 158). Billig is quite clear that he is not seeking to ban words such as governmentality or globalization but he is trying to challenge the hegemony of such terminology and reduce the perceptual gap created between theoretical concept and lived reality. He is calling for caution in the use of agent-less, ‘objective entities’ (p. 138), or, in the words of Hundt (2007), the ‘mediopassives’ that obscure the realities of human action.
This book is an indictment of how sociological writers can use a parade of nouns to remove people from analysis. Sociology is centrally concerned with human action but Billig contends that this style of writing, coupled with the demands faced by academics working in the present higher education system, puts sociology at risk by depicting the social world as ‘out of human control’ (p. 160). Billig accepts the limitations of this single book and he does so with honesty, pragmatism and humour. He offers a set of recommendations in the spirit of Orwell, imploring us to break any or all of them rather than write something ‘barbarous’ (p. 214). Michael Billig, you might be muttering at the side of the road, but at least you are using your voice. Learn to Write Badly is a thought-provoking manifesto for good writing. I hope it is read widely because, to paraphrase not from the canon of sociological writing but from the film Jerry Maguire, you had me from hello.