 The dualism that I want to address to talk to the theme of the conference is the one between social constructionism and essentialism. And that's an important issue for me because it came up in thinking about the new approach that we took to academic tribes and territories in writing and editing the 2012 book around that. So I'm going to be talking a bit about disciplines and the essentialist approach towards disciplines. I'm going to be concentrating on essentialism rather than social constructionism because that's the key issue and the key change in thinking about disciplines that's come up in rethinking the original Beecher thesis. But just to say from the start that actually that duality is a bit of a false one because social constructionism itself can be essentialist. Some socially constructed features such as language for example do have the characteristics of essentialism and those characteristics are that there are some core characteristics, some core features of a phenomenon, and that those features have generative characteristics in other words that they change other things and that's of course true of language. It's socially constructed, it does have characteristic features and it does have influence. So it's a bit of a false dichotomy or dualism but it's one that I want to address. Some of this talk is indebted to work by Andrew Sayer also here at the University of Lancaster who's thought quite deeply about essentialism and its characteristics. Sayer says that an essentialist view or an essentialist approach to social science closes down ways of thinking and alternative ways of thinking and it creates a kind of ontological tunnel vision which inhibits nuanced explanations. And I think that's absolutely true of some approaches to thinking about disciplines in general and particular disciplines and their characteristics as well. So I'm arguing against an essentialist view but what I'd like to argue is that a moderate form of essentialism is actually necessary so not to move away from essentialism altogether but to say that a kind of moderate essentialism is actually absolutely vital in thinking about social science in general. So the original proposition of the tribes and territories thesis written by Tony Beecher and published in 1989 was and I've argued this in various places an essentialist view. It argued that academic disciplines have particular characteristics, core characteristics that have very significant influences on other factors. So the academic territories, the epistemological characteristics of disciplines had a strong influence on academic cultures so that for example you could see that sociologists behaved in one way in their teaching and learning for example, practices in their research, historians in another way, philosophers in another way. And that approach, that essentialist approach arguing for these key characteristics, core characteristics of disciplines and the generative influence of those in particular culture and practices was followed up and applied by other people so for example Janet Donald and Ruth Newman argued that there were very clear teaching and learning practices that one could identify associated with particular disciplines. But for my money that approach sees disciplines in a rather static way, sees them as very homogenous and sees them as really overstates the power of disciplines in determining or at least conditioning other features. And you can see that in a lot of this trend of work so for example Donald says, psychology professors talked of developing students' capabilities through a series of courses which focus on different methods. In education case studies are seen as important instructional methods to aid students in making complex situations coherent. English literature professors paid attention to the analysis of text to determine the underlying assumptions and they were concerned with the development of argument in their courses. So generalisations, even stereotypes of psychology professors, education professors, English literature professors and the different characteristics are stated here. But what we argue in the latest version of the tribes and territories thesis is that actually practices such as those in teaching and learning and other practices too are driven by multiple forces and these reshape the kinds of practices that are going on in universities across all the fields of practice. So it's really difficult and in fact probably rather rash to try to make those kinds of generalisations. So what kinds of forces are we talking about? Well the stress on evaluation for example, both in research and learning and teaching. Technological forces have an effect on practices and so on. So disciplines are now only one of many factors that influence practices in universities. So let me just elaborate a little bit more on the nature of essentialism. I've already indicated that there are two characteristics, two key characteristics of a phenomenon that is portrayed as essentialist. One is that it has core characteristics, very identifiable characteristics which if they're not there then the thing is not that thing. And the second is that the phenomenon has generative effects, in other words causes other things to happen. So essentialism ironically is by its nature essentialist itself, that description of it is an essentialist description. And you can see essentialism in the way that people try to define disciplines. So for example again to quote from Janet Donald, she says that a discipline is quote, a body of knowledge with a reasonably logical taxonomy, a specialised vocabulary, an accepted body of theory, a systematic research strategy and techniques for replication and validity. So for Donald then those are the key of the core characteristics of a discipline. And as Beecher argues, those characteristics have effects in other areas, research practices, teaching practices and so on. But I think if you look at that definition you'll see that it's a kind of disemboddied abstract notion of a discipline. It kind of floats in the ether. Where is the university in that for example, it's absent. So a discipline is seen as some abstract entity. And in fact it's problematic as well. Astrology for example you could say fits into that definition quite well. So it doesn't do terribly much good in terms of a definition either. And in fact I would argue with Anthony Giddins that if you look for disciplines in an abstract way like that, you won't find them just as Giddins argues that if you look for social structures you won't find them. They're only visible if you like in their actual instantiations, in their playing out in the world. If you compare Donald's definition to a social constructionist definition to go back to this dualism, let me take Turner's so-called definition of disciplines he says. Disciplines are cartels that organise markets for the production and employment of students by excluding those job seekers who are not the products of the cartel. So Turner is arguing for a socially constructed nature of disciplines. But what he's saying is this is what they do. It's a statement of what disciplines do, not a real definition at all. And it really doesn't give us much analytical purchase on disciplines themselves. So we're left with a bit of a problem, I think, taking either the social constructionist or the essentialist view. We have no real way, for example, of distinguishing disciplines from hobbies, let's say. So let's move then away from the core characteristics to the generative power of disciplines. As I said, that was very evident in the original tribes and territories thesis that the epistemological and knowledge characteristics of disciplines had effects in other areas of life. In fact, Beechard took that quite far, he took it beyond research characteristics which were his main focus into the world of hobbies. So he says, for example, physicists were inclined towards an interest in the theatre, art and music. Whereas the engineers' typical leisure activities included aviation, deep sea diving and messing around in boats. So that's a very strong view of the generative power of disciplines. And for my money, a mistaken one. But one shouldn't go to that other poll, to the social constructionist poll of this dualism. As Michael Young argues, that takes you into what he calls the voice argument. In other words, the disciplines are whatever somebody says, a practitioner says a discipline is. And again, I think you then begin to lose the analytical power that we need to actually do social science. So where does that leave us then? Well, I began to, I argued at the beginning that what we need is a moderate form of essentialism that doesn't take us all the way to the voice argument of the social constructionist poll but doesn't have the closing, the closure of a strong essentialist position. So I'd like to argue that there aren't a set of necessary core essential characteristics to a discipline and to disciplines in general. And that in terms of generative power, yes, there is some generative power but it's more like the power of a wind turbine than a power station. In other words, it varies over time according to context and so on. And I would argue that we actually need a moderate form of essentialism that we can't go to the social constructionist poll. Firstly, because without that ability to do some categorising, we won't be able to, as Starr and Bowker say, sort things out. We won't be able to distinguish one thing from another, hobbies from disciplines, for example. Secondly, it really is the task of social science to establish some kind of, I hate the word, but some kind of causality, in other words, to link one thing with another thing. Without that, we have no explanatory purchase. So that's necessary too. And if we go to the strong end of social constructionism, we begin to lose that, as I would argue postmodernists do. So in terms of being critical, seeing where, for example, structured inequalities lie and so on, if we go too far down to the social constructionist end, we lose the purchase to be able to do that. Fuchs, for example, says that the social world is, quote, a turbulent system where order and consensus emerge locally and for the time being, if at all. So that's a kind of postmodernist approach. And it doesn't really give us the purchase on what I think is inevitably there, structured inequalities, which it's the job of social science to investigate. OK, so what we want then is a nuanced depiction of academic tribes and territories that recognises that those territories don't singularly and directly cause other behavioural change, but is able to get some kind of analytical purchase. Now that's the conundrum, and that's what I've been tackling over the last few months and thinking about how to change, how to bring about a more nuanced approach to thinking about disciplines and their power. OK, well what I'd like to do is in fact to draw on Wittgenstein's argument about familial resemblances and I think Wittgenstein gives us a clue here about how we can think about disciplines. And what Wittgenstein says is that if you think about a class of things, for example games or a family, all members of that class don't necessarily have the same set of characteristics they draw, if you like, from a set that we recognise. So that we're able to recognise members of a family, we're able to recognise chess as a game, but it's different, the person is different, the game is different from other examples of games or families. So what we're learning is a set of characteristics that aren't necessarily present. And I'll come to the question of how we do that learning, how that learning occurs in a minute. So to use that argument about disciplines, we could say that we learn to recognise the characteristics of academic historians, for example, even though the articulation of academic history might be very different from one university to another. We can still recognise them as historians just as we can recognise drafts as a game and chess as a game, although they're quite different and of course there are many other games that are different too. So this notion of familial resemblances I think is quite useful as a way of thinking about disciplines and the way they're differently articulated. Another point associated with that is that they can be different at different levels of analysis or what Seir calls different ontological strata. So that disciplines viewed from a distance, from the helicopter if you like, look to have a set of characteristics that one can identify, but when one lands the helicopter those characteristics crumble away in the analytical hand. So the level of analysis, the ontological strata that you're looking at becomes quite important. The granularity matters. That's a problem, that's an issue that's been identified before, but again I think Wittgenstein's notion of familial resemblances