Chapter Five - Sociology and Style

In this chapter I want only to begin a discussion of one of the methodological issues that continually crops up in this examination of Bernstein's codes. It concerns the place of semantic notions in sociological investigation. In the previous chapter I suggested that one should seek to observe types of reasoning, types of explanation and justification, and also seek to uncover a person's grasp of the deeper, often elided structure of what he or she is saying.

We have seen earlier that the methods Bernstein decided upon for the SRU work (like those used by Craig) were not able to deal properly with such questions. Bernstein has acknowledged his responsibility for many of these decisions which "took the research down some very blind alleys" (1971b, p. 13), and one can see why he was lead to make them. The positivistic ideology that has influenced sociological work in the English-speaking world for many years and which was virtually unchallenged on the English scene when Bernstein did most of his sociolinguistic work made it imperative to find things that could be counted, preferably by a mindless automaton. Pronouns versus complex nominal phrases, hesitation phenomena (Bernstein, 1962a), "uncommon adjectives" or the use of the passive voice (Bernstein, 1962b) fit such demands reasonably well, but it is sad, I think, that Bernstein never used the data upon which these counts were based to look straight at the kind of reasoning his informants used, its relative frequencies or its validity - he had in fact taped groups of adolescents discussing the abolition of the death penalty.

Even as late as Holland's work reported in chapter three, one is struck by the concern for quantifiable data, especially in the light of Bernstein's own recognition of the signal contribution of ethnographic research to the sociology of education in Britain: "this body of work provides us not only with crucial points of reference and key concepts, but also has formulated the parameters for empirical research" (1984, p. 4). Of course, there are several different styles of ethnography to be found in the body of work Bernstein refers to, and some of the practitioners are as eager as any one else to count data. But given the typical willingness of such researchers to rely on familiarity as much as exhaustive counting to give a picture of what is going on, and to rely also on modes of description that often do involve large scale and nuanced judgments of that reality, it is perhaps surprising that Bernstein's own research team continues to try to de- semanticize its data as much as possible. (Of course, this might now be as much a matter of the funding agencies as of their own commitments.)

Part of the explanation, perhaps, comes from Bernstein's early involvement with Halliday's grammatical theories, in which this kind of linguistic analysis is supposed to reveal in fairly direct ways the more subtle semantic matters I have mentioned. Very crudely, Halliday expects different language functions (speech act cum cognitive) to use different grammatical elements, so that a count of the latter should tell us something reliable about the former. It is not the place here to enter into the merits of Halliday's linguistic theory; suffice it to repeat the kinds of point quoted from Adlam in an earlier chapter - you cannot count examples of giving reasons by using counts of special "reason words" like because. But while this ought to be obvious, it clearly runs counter to the habitual practices of many linguists. One recent investigator has demanded an even less extra-linguistic account:

a purely linguistic definition of the different modes of an elaborated code would need to break from this tradition by specifying the semantic criteria by which elements of speech could be allotted to one mode or another without the addition of extra-linguistic criteria. It would need to offer a functional explanation of how individual modes of elaboration might differ in the form of their realization in speech (Young, 1982, p. 81).

Just as I have argued that a more fruitful investigation of the codes would require attention to the cognitive acts embodied in the language use and the cognitive awareness displayed therein, so others have argued that serious investigation of analogous themes requires a broader empirical basis. Harker criticizes the Oxford Mobility Study's attempt to test Bourdieu's ideas about cultural capital (which can be seen as an even wider extension than mine of the components of elaborated code) by operationalizing it as simply the level of parental education:

For Bourdieu cultural capital is style, language, taste, disposition, social grace, etc. which one acquires from family through socialisation as part of the habitus.... To do justice to Bourdieu's theory requires an analysis beyond the acquisition of credentials (1984, p. 124).

It is one thing to criticize existing attempts to operationalize complex theoretical notions; as I admitted earlier, it is another to replace them with anything better and more appropriate. I have put the word style in the title of this section, not because I think Bernstein's codes are merely matters of style in the usual acceptation of that term, but because the kinds of category that Harker and I are wanting to be used in the empirical testing of Bernstein or Bourdieu behave in some important ways like stylistic characterizations.

On the one hand, and very disturbingly for the positivisticly inclined, such categories are at a considerable remove from the innocent eye of idealized positivistic science. However much philosophers may now celebrate the "theory-ladenness" of all observation terms, scientists continue to note that at least some such terms are much less committed than others. (This is also admitted by philosophers, but their characteristic tendency is perhaps to stress the other side of the coin.) Granted degrees of partial commitment to controversial theory, it is a sensible precaution for a diffident science to prefer the less exposed observational term when it is available. The point Harker is making regarding Bourdieu and that I argued earlier regarding language and educationally significant cognitive processes is that too often, the less committed term is simply too far from where the action is to be of any use in evaluating theory. If so, one must accept the risks of the more theoretically committed description.

There are obviously risks here; but again the philosophers are now virtually unanimous that it is a matter of degree. No observational terms are guaranteed incorrigible application, so it is a matter of judgment to assess what risks of error or revision to tolerate in any particular enquiry.

What is equally important in arguing against ingrained positivistic beliefs is that such theory impregnated terms are not "subjective" or arbitrary. Wine tasters and art historians can make mistakes, but they can also arrive at impressive agreements in judgments of taste or style that are several degrees more sophisticated than any available to the lay observer. Their categories have to be deliberately learned after people have acquired the basic concepts which seem so much more secure and objectively available, but this does nothing in itself to impugn the objectivity of their discriminations. (It does, however, mean that if you want such data you may not be able to employ graduate students to gather them for you - a connoisseur's categories call for the expert witness.)

This quasi-philosophical discussion has been conducted, like most such discussions, at a very rarefied level. At that level, the argument perhaps goes through that there need be nothing objectionable about the kinds of concept I have wanted to import into discussions of Bernstein. But perhaps when we note at least one fact about the intended subject matter, namely ourselves, things are not so clear. The fact in question is that we have already conceptualized ourselves, we have a "common sense" account of ourselves, and the concepts I have been arguing about are either parts of that conception or closely related to such parts. There is here a whole set of questions, which are almost certainly not simply philosophical questions to be settled without empirical investigation, about the theoretical adequacy of our self-conceptions, the anthropocentricity or otherwise of the best view of ourselves. But while these ought to be empirical cum theoretical questions of what might be the best explanation of human existence in its various facets, it is by no means easy to suggest what could count as adequate empirical answering of them. I have mentioned work on critical thinking skills, for instance, but while we can easily talk of such things (as Bernstein does in saying that he "never believed that there was any difference between social groups in their tacit understanding of logical rules" 1974, p. 243), it is much harder to establish the scientific appropriateness of such entities (cf. Norris, 1984). And the difficulties that exist for entities we can easily suppose to play a part in explaining our behaviour are probably going to be considerably worse for those specifically invented in sociological theorizing of Bernstein's type.

Some of these problems, taken together with the undoubted fascination of many of the accounts that are offered in structuralist social science, contribute powerfully to the often expressed belief that the most we can expect from the social sciences is something that can be called a perspective or a kind of insight, which can take several conflicting forms simultaneously, rather than the cumulative movement towards greater verisimilitude we might still hope for from the physical sciences. It is not appropriate to the nature of this study to enter into the deep questions I have just raised, but I think it is only right to acknowledge that the human sciences may well have complexities beyond that endemic to any human cognitive endeavour. In resisting the appropriateness of stylistic and analogous concepts, orthodox sociologists might be tacitly reacting to some such difficulties, difficulties that an appreciation of the exaggerations of standard positivism would not remove. But difficulties do not disappear if you don't look at them; if sociology is to provide illumination, it must, I think, be prepared to deal in these more exposed areas.