Structural change begins with performative acts

Disclaimer: my blog is always more polemical than I would like and the posts herein are always written when I'm tired, frustrated, and exasperated. I am not usually this screechy and I'm always open to a good faith conversation about the things I write here. 

Sociologists (all critical theorists really) are always going on about the need for ‘structural change’. Yet they take huge steaming dumps on the first little growths of structural change. They deride them as performative, that structural change has been coopted by neoliberalism, that they’re ultimately extractive, or numerous other critiques. ‘Critical theory’ is an endless font of cynicism about earnest efforts by strung out, scrambling people trying to make the world better whose capacities are limited and whose thinking isn’t quite as sophisticated as those of academics. Meanwhile, the academics publish impenetrable texts about ‘the aestheticization of numbers in public governance’ and other ideas that make no sense whatsoever to the agents who might actually generate structural change. All it does is breed cynicism, bad faith, demoralisation, and hostility. I’m sick of it. Sociology is its own worst enemy.

I do a lot of work on ‘coproduction’, both in theory and practice. Anna Alexandrova and I wrote one of the more influential texts on the subject in the philosophy of science, I’ve worked with anti-poverty charities to coproduce theories and policies for thriving in financial hardship, and I’ve published reflections on how to make coproduction in spirit compatible with neoliberal public management in practice (with the ultimate goal of infiltrating neoliberal public management and structurally changing it). Coproduction is about bringing together people who will be affected by policy (i.e. people with ‘lived experience’), practitioners who deliver policy (i.e. ‘practitioners’), and people with technical expertise who understand it in terms of models, measures, and theories (i.e. ‘academics’), to codesign that policy and how to evaluate it.

I think coproduction has tremendous potential to bring about and constitute structural change in policymaking. My perception is that getting coproduction institutionalised in policymaking is actively undermined by the way sociologists discuss the method and what they expect from people doing it.

When sociologists deride coproduction efforts as performative, they’re failing to understand the viral nature of structural change. In order to get something like the overthrow of communism, the imposition of neoliberalism, or any other structural change, it is necessary to get a large number of people bought into something ideologically. That requires performance first and foremost. It requires people to dip their toes in something without fully committing so that they can acclimatise to it. People so rarely make ‘revolutionary’ changes to their life because it is so high risk. They gather their energies and then take small, tentative, exploratory steps in new directions.

The same is true of structural change. So when a government department or a large charity or a school or whatever institution does its first coproduction, even if it mucks it up and it ultimately ends up being a consultation, they are engaged in the beginnings of structural change. What matters is the intention, whether it was in good faith. If the experience works, they will commend it to their peers and others might try it. There is now an opening for agents to come in and improve or deepen the methodology, and to grow the practice.

If you just immediately come in and say “this was shit because it didn’t create structural change” then you demoralise the practitioners involved and discourage them from ever trying something like this again. It is well established in the science of motivation that a feeling of insurmountable challenge defeats any enthusiasm for effort. By critiquing a small effort for not being structural, you prevent viral forces from getting started, ultimately inhibiting the very structural change you supposedly want.

The irony for me is that the vast majority of academia, and sociology in particular, is performance. Read a typical PhD dissertation and tell me that the person isn’t ‘performing’ the role of academic. They’re learning to speak the jargon, to write in a way that vibes with their community, saying the mantras (e.g. “xyz is actually just capitalism again”, “decolonial, intersectional, patriarchal…”, “positivism poo poo”) to demonstrate their loyalty to the hegemony. People want a cookbook – that is why sometimes reviewers pull me up for not formatting papers by the conventions of their discipline. They have an intuitive vision of a role that is meant to be played and they try to fit that role performatively. When someone doesn’t play by the conventions that take it as a sign of incompetence.

Think about how structural change gets started in academia. It’s not like one day the sociology establishment snaps its fingers and says “from now on we will take (de)colonialism more seriously as an idea” or “from now on, we want a lot more quantitative rigor in methods” (both things that have happened of late in sociology). Thousands of actors were slowly pressing for these changes until there was a tipping point.

A structure, especially an ideological structure, is substantially constituted by the performances that are expected by it and that reinforce it. So deriding something as ‘merely performative’ fails to appreciate that performance is the beginning of structural change. People are not performing the old routines faithfully, they are performing new routines, or at the old routines with a new flourish.

The immediate response here from critical theorists is to say “no, the old routines have coopted the new ideas”. That’s not right, at least not in the case of coproduction. I’m on the front lines of this stuff in the UK (which seems to take it more seriously than other English-speaking jurisdictions, perhaps because its government is so centralised and so broken). The bureaucrats involved are earnest, trying their best, committed to making things ‘better’ and optimistic about the potential for coproduction to achieve that.

But they’re also tired, under-resourced, barely informed, pressed, responding to the whims of even more harried politicians, and mostly operating on enthusiasm and grit. So of course a lot of their efforts appear fumbling or inconsistent to academics.

I am reminded of a conference recently where a woman from the Scottish government spoke passionately for 10 minutes about the efforts she and others in the government had made to institutionalise coproduction in policymaking. She complained that often the efforts were ineffective, that there wasn’t enough follow through, that there was too much emphasis on process and not on outcome and so demonstrating the value of the exercise to cynical politicians and citizens was difficult, etc. The first question she got was whether she was operating within a naïve ‘rationalist’ view of the policymaking process. She understandably looked dumbfounded. I mean for fuck sake if you can’t meet someone like this, who is earnestly trying to generate structural change, where they are at we’re doomed.   

A crucial point here is that most bureaucrats, even those committed to coproduction, even those pressing for system change in welfare and other highly ‘progressive’ spaces, aren’t ideologues. They just want to get shit done. They want to make people’s lives better.

In contrast, so many sociologists come to this stuff politically and ethically pre-committed to ‘anti-hegemony’ (i.e. whatever they don’t like), ‘anti-capitalism’, and Marxism, and also deeply sceptical of representative government and whatever is currently considered ‘common sense’. I suspect that the ‘structural change’ that they want isn’t the structural change that the citizens in question want, in many cases.

If you arrive at a process defining desirable structural change as taking the situation in political directions that only a minority of the nation endorses then don’t expect to be successful!

It is ironic to me that a methodology meant to capture the values of the citizenry (participatory action research) only thinks that has happened successfully if the citizens become Marxist. Like, fuck off. If we were really committed to emancipation through education (i.e. Paolo Friere) then what we’d be doing is helping citizens to make sense of their world with whatever tools are available. They might find many ideas in neoliberalism, for example, very compelling, as much of the world does! Notably, in my coproduction work with people and practitioners in anti-poverty spaces, people constantly tell me about the central role of personal responsibility in existing poverty. They have a much more sophisticated, empathetic, and collaborative understanding of what personal responsibility means than the average Tory voter or politician, but it’s still the case that these ‘neoliberal’ attitudes are everywhere among the most well-meaning actors in this sector. This does not constitute coproduction being ‘coopted’ by neoliberalism because the citizens make the value judgements with their eyes open.

An irony for me is that so often I find it is the anti-hegemony people who are most incapable of listening to the people with lived experience. All that talk of reflexivity really is super necessary because they can’t shut up and listen, and their questions are always preloaded with political baggage. In my first coproduction the person who was worst at interviewing was the person with a PhD in social work. He just constantly cut people off.

My impression is that for most academics, their job is that just a job. And it is easier for them to write a paper every now and then in which they performatively go about saying ‘this isn’t structural change’, ‘this is performative’, ‘this is just neoliberalism’, etc. than to spend two decades slowly building structural change. A paper that hits the high notes will publish fine and they can keep their job and live their life. A two-decade effort won’t lead to as many publications because you’re so busy with the network and institution building. It will require you to think outside the box of contemporary academic fads and deal with the messy reality of society’s moral and political pluralism. And it will require you to cultivate stuff that is very underwhelming and even demoralising at the beginning. Much easier to just engage in endless ‘critique’. Indeed, if you were successful in generating structural change, the relentless goal post shifting of the critical theory misery vortex would just start critiquing what you’ve achieved. As Contrapoints said: