Burning Platforms

In June 2004, I was invited to discuss two texts at the first of a series of annual meetings in the relatively new Said Business School, Oxford. The new Professor of Marketing had been a distinguished Sociologist in the field of Scientific Knowledge, and he had engineered this meeting to bring together the interesting and incisive work from the various fields of sociology of science to see if ideas could translate or transmit to the new business sector (where many sociologists end up working). 

One of the papers was written by prize winning PhD student Stephen Cole who had been honoured by the Society for the Social Studies of Science for his work on finger-print evidence in US courts of law. The other paper was credited to about 8 or so different people, but was in fact written by Marc Berg, a much published author on the way to becoming an independent health consultant in the Netherlands. The practice of including a range of multi-disciplinary stake holders as authors of the paper is a practice that has grown in popularity, alongside the rise in audit culture in some parts of academe. 

Both of the authors were successful in their field but neither had remembered the classic foundations of their chosen disciplines. My essay (on the blog side) put back some of the social staging that makes medicine and law understandable as a human activity. I anchored the action back to its base from a social science point of view and then went on to judge the value of the pieces. Both, I thought, were alarming. Both were highly ambitious. They each wanted to intervene and cause change at the heart of their chosen host field. Cole's pretension was to collapse the value of finger-prints as valid evidence in court. Berg wanted to collapse the practice of medicine in order to make managerial change. The Burning Platforms of my title were his preferred method of practice.

The challenge I faced was that of any scholar: to be true to the principles and knowledge of my discipline, so that the outcome would be an accurate analysis of the papers. If I succeeded then the benefits would accrue all round; witness to my personal worth as a scholar, witness to the knowledge base that I draw from, and an adequate exposure of the strengths, weaknesses and substance of the papers without having to set anyone on fire or collapse a whole tradition.

The meeting itself was set up as a kind of auditing, or auditioning perhaps. Where scholars at different stages in their careers, at different levels in their fields, come together to give a good listening to each other, to rectify wayward practice, argue important points, and learn from developments in adjacent fields. 

Looking back on this with hindsight I see the current regime of audit as extremely out of step with this kind of academic, scholarly, disciplined and learned tradition. One mechanism of auditing a discipline is this very meeting itself. It is one of many ways that academics organise themselves and regulate their practice. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it might not always succeed, but at least it has the virtue of being true to its knowledge, disciplined in its practice, and efficient in the exchange of ideas.