The rich ambiguity of political sociology in Canada.

Carroll, William K.

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY IS A SUBDISCIPLINE closely articulated with all four of the sociological genres distinguished by Burawoy (2005)--the professional, the policy oriented, the critical, and the public. Political sociology, in Canada and elsewhere, comprises a rich but ambiguous area of inquiry. In this rich ambiguity lies its promise.

There are (at least) three compelling reasons for this rich ambiguity. First, political sociology's intrinsic interdisciplinarity makes for perennially fuzzy boundaries, cutting across the neat borders we may delimit for scholarly purposes. Human practice exceeds disciplinary silos. Consider as one example the symbiotic relationship between movements (political) and media (cultural). Within contemporary capitalist democracies, movements and media are interdependent actors. In a media-saturated world, the political and "politics" are "articulated through, and dependent on" media that both reflect and constitute social practice (Dahlberg and Phelan 2011:4-5). Media, no less than movements, comprise "a pivotal site for broader political and cultural struggles" at the seam between system and lifeworld (Hackett and Carroll 2006:203). That seam is itself the object of an ongoing border dispute that comprises one of the constitutive dialectics of capitalist modernity (Pusey 1993). By implication, political sociology occupies a border zone. Seen as a silo-bridging (or breaching) operation, political sociology's richness, and the challenge it poses, stem from the need to take the political, cultural, and economic all into account in doing political sociology.

Despite the fuzzy boundaries, it is possible, with thinkers such as Gramsci (1971) and Bourdieu (1991), to distinguish "the political field." Broadly, the political field is a socio-historical construction; it tags the practices and relations that are socially recognized as political, and although the state figures as an important reference point the political field extends well beyond its formal institutions.

Significantly, and this is the second source of ambiguity for political sociology, the political field is continually in the process of emerging; it shifts shape--as issues, identities, and practices become politicized. In the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of relative quiescence at the high tide of organized capitalism, the political field was structured around the state and tightly bound institutionally to it. Within mainstream sociology the political field was bound within a complex of state/policy/lobbying/elections, and "collective behavior" lay outside the domain of rational political choice.

The political field--the bundle of practices and relations that are "publicly" recognized as political--not only changes shape and shifts, but the political as a construct for social science is itself polysemic. For political sociology, its many meanings present a third source of analytical ambiguity, and richness. Conventionally, politics is seen as centered upon the state, but as Warren Magnusson (1997) argues, an alternative, Aristotelian perspective centers politics on the problem of judgment. In this view, politics is not a special kind of activity, but a ubiquitous facet of human existence. Unlike a state-centered view, a judgment-centered concept of politics has no built-in spatiality, and applies as much to the local as to the global. Many of the so-called new social movements, whether they be termed struggles for recognition (Fraser 2013) or life politics (Giddens 1990), instantiate this sense of the political. Although the political is identified with the question of power, we must ask, "power in which sense?" Power over; power with; power to? Microphysical power; biopower; constituent power; hegemony/counter-hegemony?

These sources of ambiguity may be analytically distinct, but in practice they are implicated in each other. Processes of politicization (or alternatively passive revolution) are as diverse as is the meaning of politics. From a judgment-centered perspective, initiatives that open a previously depoliticized practice (say, industrialized agriculture) to the question of how we should live are politicizing; but equally, from a Gramscian perspective, movement practices that go beyond immediate instrumentalities of resistance, to pose ethical-political challenges to the ruling historical bloc, are of particular interest. Not only does the political field as a socially recognized terrain shift shape and scope, and not only does the very term political bear multiple (and changing) meanings, but, to develop our first point diachronically, distinct social-science disciplines also shift shape as scholars strive to comprehend emergent (political) realities. How, we may ask, have these three sources of ambiguity, nuance, and complexity shaped contemporary political sociology in Canada? I can only gesture toward an analysis. Below I consider two key areas of scholarship.

In its first rendition, from the 1920s through 1950s, Canadian political economy brought a close analysis of economic history to conventionally liberal conceptions of the political, spatialized in relations between center and margins. The new Canadian political economy of late 1960s, itself inspired by the movement politics of that era, unsettled some of the liberal conventions, as politics seeped into economy via the critique of dependency and class. In the process, the meaning and scope of political economy shifted. From the 1980s into the early twenty-first century, there was a sea change in the meaning, scope, and practice of Canadian political economy. The emphasis shifted from structural issues (e.g., regionalism, resources, class, and state) to political transformations such as state restructuring, decolonization/recolonization, globalizations, and creative resistance. An important recent theme in political economy has been the complex phenomenon of neoliberalization, which in Canada has occurred incrementally in a three-decade passive revolution, punctuated by contentious hard-right initiatives at the provincial level (Brooke 1999; Carroll 1990). Concurrently, political economists have taken up issues of space and scale, further expanding the interdiscipline into the domain of geography. Among the many themes in this political economy of neoliberalism have been "reforms" to Canada's Medicare system, the deep integration of "Third Way" politics that fuses public and private sectors, the limits to protest politics, and the rollback of environmental regulation to name but a few examples.

We can see in these developments how an expanding political field, an enlarged conception of what counts as political, and an expansion of political-economic thinking into other social-science disciplines have contributed to political economy's continuing vitality while reducing its centrality within Canadian sociology per se. Canadian political economy may have evolved "away from sociology" and into other fields, but it remains indispensable as a framework for political sociology.

A second area in which we can explore the rich ambiguity of political sociology is social movement studies. In Canada, this work has evolved from early research on regional and ethno-religious movements to a quite diverse domain sustained by a range of scholarly venues that extend beyond sociology. Here too we find a plurality of understandings among social scientists of what comprises the political, of its articulation with other themes and of the ways in which movements redefine the contours of the political field. Against this backdrop, the scope of social movement studies seems to be widening further.

This expanding scope is evident in recent Canadian social movement research that deals with the transformation of the political field in the advanced capitalist democracies. It recognizes that social protest is a permanent feature of contemporary life, rendering contentious collective action increasingly common across a wide range of actors and leading to a certain institutionalization of movements that both professionalizes them and places them within the realm of conventional politics. The Canadian political field has been shaped and reshaped through the interactions of movements and the state, movements and media, and everyday political mobilizations and ephemeral incidents that, if publicized through low-cost digital technology, can quickly shift scale from local dispute to public issue. In the process the meaning of politics has become pluralized, so that, depending on context, it includes deliberative processes and struggles for power through the state, prefigurative practices that construct alternatives, and politics of the quotidian.

A significant recent movement, Idle No More, problematized the conventional idea of political power as sovereignty centered upon the state. Idle No More inspired thousands of Indigenous people to become politically engaged, redirecting Indigenous politics away from passive revolution and toward stronger ties with other progressive currents. Framing its project in this way, Idle No More has continued an uneven process of politicization that has reshaped the political field at least since the militant response to the 1969 assimilationist White Paper, yet it has also widened the struggle by articulating it with other movements while calling for broad popular participation. At stake are the material and cultural conditions for sustaining Indigenous communities, amid threats posed by the incursion of corporate capital into contested land bases and the continuing legacy of state-centered regulation under the Indian Act.

In this setting, a major challenge for political sociology is to combine insights from continuing advances in political economy with social-movement studies that highlight the relations of forces through which "emergent publics" (Angus 2002) form, interrelate, and/or dissipate. In tandem with that explanatory project, political sociology is well positioned to make reflexive contributions to public discourse, problematizing and clarifying the meaning of "democracy," "security," "rights," and of course "politics" in dialogue with the emergent publics whose collective agency might open pathways toward a better world.

Indeed, if the current state of political sociology in Canada can be described as one of rich ambiguity, my analysis suggests that this is not a temporary condition. The three conditions that make for rich ambiguity-fuzzy disciplinary borders that perennially unsettle where "the social" ends and the political begins, the shifting shape and scope of the political field itself, and plural conceptions of what counts as political--are not transitory moments on a path to "better science." By recognizing rich ambiguity for what it is, as intrinsic to the study of politics, political sociologists can help fulfill what Mills (1959) saw as sociology's democratic promise, particularly as they conduct their inquiries in dialogue with movements that resist domination while prefiguring an emancipated future.

References

Angus, I. 2002 Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy. Winnipeg: ARP Books.

Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brooke, J. 1999. Hard Right Turn: The New Face of Neo-Conservatism in Canada. Toronto: HarperCollins

Burawoy, M. 2005. "2004 ASA Presidential Address: For Public Sociology." American Sociological Review 70:4-28.

Carroll, W.K. 1990. "Restructuring Capital, Reorganizing Consent: Gramsci, Political Economy, and Canada." Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 27:390-416.

Dahlberg, L. and S. Phelan. 2011. "Discourse Theory and Critical Media Politics: An Introduction." Pp. 1-41 in Discourse Theory and Critical Media Politics, edited by L. Dahlberg and S. Phelan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fraser, N. 2013. The Fortunes of Feminism. London: Verso.

Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Hackett, R.A. and W.K. Carroll. 2006. Remaking Media: The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication. New York: Routledge.

Magnusson, W. 1997. "Globalization, Movements and the Decentred State. Pp. 94-113 in Organizing Dissent, edited by W.K. Carroll. Toronto: Garamond Press.

Mills, C.W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pusey, M. 1993. Jurgen Habermas. New York: Routledge.

William K. Carroll

University of Victoria

William K. Carroll, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050 STN CSC, Victoria, BC V8W 3P5, Canada. E-mail: wcarroll@uvic.ca