Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University
Dr Stephen Mugford, Managing Director, QQSR
Scientists often explain phenomena by looking across different levels of analysis. By hierarchically integrating “higher” and “lower” explanations, our overall accounts become richer and more robust. According to Pinker (2002), hierarchical reductionism “consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying them” (p. 70, italics original). Hierarchical reductionism is a proper goal of science since an explanation at one level of abstraction will inevitably lead to questions that are better answered at other levels[1].
This seminar [aka ‘provocation’] will consider the need for sociology to become more familiar with and rely more upon robust research and theory in the fields of psychology and cognitive science.
Ever since Durkheim enjoined us to treat ‘social facts as things’ [with social explanations], the discipline has been increasingly unwilling to integrate with other ‘levels’ of explanation. I suggest the result today is unhealthy. Phenomena that are well understood and well explained in other disciplines are ‘explained’ in sociology by reference to folk theories (e.g. of the mind and self) that are simply not tenable but are sustained inside a bubble in which there is a tendency to talk only to other sociologists and read only sociology.
It urges sociologists to pay (as it were) less attention to dead French theorists and more to living researchers; emblematically a move from The Archaeology of Knowledge to Panksepp’s The Archaelogy of Mind or from Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ to Bargh’s ‘unbearable automaticity of being’.
It will examine a few key examples and, along the way, perhaps make [possibly cavalier] attacks on such things as ‘the affective turn’ and what I see as the ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless social scientist’ (a tendency to forget perfectly good research and breathlessly re-discover the ideas and findings all over again.)
BIO: Stephen Mugford studied sociology in London in the late ‘60s [BSc (Hons)] and Bristol [PhD, 1974] and lectured the subject from 1970-1974 in NZ (VUW) before joining Sociology at ANU where he taught from 1975-1997. Since then, he has run a consultancy company specializing in social-psychological capacity building ranging from executive coaching to team dynamics and change management. He recently co-authored a major study of senior leadership in the Australian Defence Force: THE CHIEFS: A STUDY OF STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP, Australian Defence College, 2013 (http://www.defence.gov.au/adc/docs/Publications2013/TheChiefs.pdf)
[1] William J. Becker, Russell Cropanzano and Alan G. Sanfey Journal of Management 2011 37: 933