Research in Sociology

 

 

We as Sociologists usually start our enquiries by way of curiosity. As social persons, we notice something that we find interesting, odd, or plainly spectacular. Then we throw some concepts at it (Willis 2000: VI), and see what happens. Sometimes the thing stays the same. Sometimes it transforms itself and shows a different side of itself. In the process, we, that is, our perspective on the world, ideally changes as well, and we learn something about the world and the concepts we use.

In this blog post I will tentatively throw some concepts at German garbage bins. Later, I will extend my goal to something much bigger, but equally messy: everyday public language. I will try to make sense of what I think is a quite fundamental shift in everyday language during the recent decades by throwing concepts by two Sociologists at it. This short practical exercise gives an idea of both the advantages and weaknesses of the Sociology in question.

Unfortunately, I am not the youngest anymore. As my hair gets greyer, however, I now also have amassed some experience of how minute things changed over time. One thing that keeps on catching my attention is the change of much official language. I think I noticed it first when cycling through German and British cities, which I did, and still do, a lot. I noticed street advertisements on placards, on cars and trucks, in shop windows. They were different from what I remembered from the 1990’s and 2000’s. There were casual, metaphorical words. There were jokes. There were sayings and allusions. Institutions and businesses were no longer advertising to buy their products or to consider visiting them. They were referring to bigger things than themselves in a way.

 

View into a shop window in Germany: The six-case of beer is called a ‘men’s purse’.

 

One particular example I encountered again and again was with garbage bins. When I stayed in Berlin some time ago, I noticed this with particular clarity. Instead of simply denoting the purpose of the object in question, the berlin Garbage bins creatively displayed allusions that used metaphors from elsewhere to motivate people to put their litter into it.

 

Berlin Garbage bin with ‘Wurst Stand’ label

  

On one it said: ‘Wurst Stand: bag dog business, insert, done’. Another one partially mimicked the traditional call of the ticket controller ‘Tickets, please: small litter also in’. Elsewhere in Germany they title their bins as a ‘CO2 penny bank’.

 

‘Tickets, please: small litter also in’

In earlier days a litter didn’t have these labels put onto it. And even if Glasgow may not be as creative as Berlin when it comes to inventing them, it, too, puts stickers on its bins asking ‘people [to] make Glasgow cleaner’.

 

 

Other examples can easily be found: advertisements (physical and TV/online), google search (I’m feeling lucky!’), public toilet hand driers, etc.. In short, official language has really changed during the last decades. It has become much heavier in cultural allusions and metaphors. It has become more informal, bringing formerly disassociated things like dog poo and wurst, ticket controllers and garbage, or slogans and garbage, together – sometimes only in our minds, sometimes for real.

What’s going on? Obviously, there are various theoretical paths one may take to make sense of this. I like taking on even small things from a holistic perspective, so therefore I will present an approach that came to my mind when being puzzled about current official garbage bin language (the graffiti of them have to be dealt with another time).

This is Norbert Elias’ theory of civilization which would frame this change as a ‘civilisatory push’ (Elias 2000[1939]). This may be called a more ‘optimistic’ view on things. People in society are, Elias holds, caught up in a web of tightening interdependencies, both economically and morally. The interplay of individual interests competing for power creates a state in which this power is shared and, in time, shared with more people. The moral-psychological counterpart of this is what Elias calls ‘self-constraint’, a kind of enlightened self-interest engendered by things like fancy speech (as in Berlin) or threat of financial punishment (often in the UK). Sometimes, there are also famous people engaged to persuade the public. Sometimes, a council also invents its own campaign, including puppet mascot, to make their point. Generally, the social force against littering has become ‘softer’ (which doesn’t mean less forceful), relying on the good will and self-constraint of people to bin their stuff.

Thus, this language functions a bit like a puzzle-piece. They provide one puzzle-piece, and you complete the puzzle of society by adding the piece that was deposited inside of you, your ‘self-constraint’.

 Litter Loathing Puppet, Screenshot taken from the Newry, Mourne and Down Fly-tipping page

https://www.newrymournedown.org/fly-tipping-and-littering 

 

Indeed, Litter-loathing puppet could tell us a story of how ‘external constraints’ are transformed into ‘internal’ ones, and how this creates ‘foresight’ through rationalisation and creation of embarrassment - who likes to be called out for littering by friends or police-officers? Who wants to be called out as a fare-dodger? I don’t. In theory society enacts and enforces, through hard and soft means, a specific behaviour that creates what economists call a ‘common good’ for everyone. We all benefit from clean and tidy streets like we do from clean air and a healthy, vaccinated population.

But then that is the theory, and that doesn’t always work out in practice. It remains to be seen whether people today actually litter less than, say, 30 or 40 years ago. At least with some public issues persuasion and appeal to ‘self-constraint’ in light of a greater public good does not fully work, as resolute anti-vaxxers show us in so many ways and countries each day right now. So, this public-official language and rules can trigger a certain embedded social and moral conscience in us, but they don’t have to. Why not?

Elias is aware of this problem which he calls ‘de-civilising spurts’ (Elias 1996[1989]). For him, certain aspects of internalised constraints – those that have become part of our psychological everyday feeling – can get into conflict with new constraints (like not to litter, or to get vaccinated). This is a socio-psychological explanation which spurs us to look for specific conditions of earlier times that inscribed certain drives in us which now can be destructive. There are, for example, the apparently ‘violence-prone’ and ‘serious’ Germans – descending from a long-term precarious and violent warrior civilisation - that can only partially kept in check with civilisatory norms and self-constraint, and whose inert tendency to violence is liable to break out, especially in times of crises and sparked by agitators. Likewise, then, people that defy littering rules and anti-vaxxers may likewise have certain ‘inert’ aspects of their psychological heritage that conflicts with the new rules (an authoritarian upbringing perhaps), or are in such a bad condition that this heritage breaks out of the civilisatory cage.

 And here is a problem of Elias’ approach, as others have remarked already (Goody 2002, Fulbrook 2007) – it is too optimistic and does not really have an answer if ‘civlisatory pushes’ are not coming along or are even reversed (as it happened in Nazi Germany). It somehow assumes an automatic link of economic advance and moral-psychological advance which cannot always be empirically shown. Why not? Not because of some Freudian destruction instinct taking over, but because of the more complex relationship of the economic conditions and the consciousness of people. In short, there can be different puzzle-pieces, different, even competing (‘alternative facts’) kinds of self-constraints in different people. How and when? Too much for this post.

What can this sociological dumpster-diving tell us? Sometimes, the ‘civilising process’ just doesn’t work. But what both litterers and non-litterers, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, have in common today, is that they must refer to some norms, some puzzle-piece somewhere that fit their preferred self-constraints. And we do well to study that carefully, potentially throwing other concepts at the garbage bin in the process.  

 

 

 Bibliography

 

Elias, Norbert. 1996[1989]. The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Cambridge: Polity Press.

Elias, Norbert. 2000[1939]. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fulbrook, Mary. 2007. "Un-Civilizing Processes?" In Preliminary Material, i-vi. Brill.

Goody, Jack. 2002. "Elias and the anthropological tradition."  Anthropological Theory 2 (4):401-412. doi: 10.1177/14634990260620512.

Willis, Paul 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination: Cambridge: Polity Press.

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First published: 24 October 2021