Impoverished sociology | Ian Pace | The Critic Magazine
"Jason Arday’s resignation from the position of Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge closes one phase of an extraordinary controversy over plagiarism, fantastical biographical claims, and university governance. Less attention has been paid to the scholarship underlying his appointment...
Rather than adjudicating Arday’s biography, I shall examine the scholarship of his first monograph, drawing upon my own work in musicology, cultural sociology and the sociology of popular music.
Arday’s Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, published by Routledge in 2020, is a sole-authored monograph whose title promises a sociological reassessment of a defining cultural formation and trope within recent British history, but viewed through the experience of a Black British sociologist from a family of post-war migrants. It addresses Britpop and New Labour, Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson Inquiry, institutional racism, national identity and multiculturalism.
I want to consider not only whether this meets generic standards of academic competence, but also whether it satisfies recognisably sociological criteria of the kind developed by many key figures through the history of the discipline. What social object does the book investigate: a media slogan, political project, musical movement or retrospective myth? By what method does one person’s memory become evidence about “multi-ethnic Britain”? Does Arday define his concepts, test alternative explanations and connect cultural representation with institutional discrimination through identifiable social mechanisms?
These are not politically partisan tests. Personal testimony can illuminate social life, as many classic studies demonstrate, but sociology must explain how memories were selected, what their evidential limits are, what other material supports them and what might count against the interpretation offered. Arday calls the book autoethnographic, but that term does not remove the obligation to connect individual experience with institutions, history and patterned social relations. Questions of racism demand especially careful distinctions, reliable evidence and scrupulous attribution. The central difficulty is not that the book is politically committed or autobiographical, but that the sociology repeatedly fails to arrive.
Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain does take an interesting sociological question as its starting point. How could Britain, in the 1990s, simultaneously celebrate Britpop, Euro ’96, New Labour and the growing international perceptions of “Cool Britannia”, while also living with the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Macpherson Inquiry and growing recognition of institutional racism? How could one optimistic national story overlap with another of exclusion, ostracization and discrimination? Viewed historically, this asks how nations remember themselves, whose experiences become representative, and which disappear from public memory.
The question was, however, not new in 2020. Even before the 1990s, Paul Gilroy, in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), had considered in depth the contradictions between British post-imperial national identity and postcolonial diversity. Stuart Hall treated British and Black British identities as historically constructed, internally contested and continually renegotiated. Bhikhu Parekh, in a book on multiculturalism and the report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, asked how common citizenship and shared institutions might coexist with cultural plurality.
Compared with these accounts, Arday’s opposition between national celebration and minority exclusion appears conceptually much flatter.
The cultural history was equally well established. Historian Richard Weight, in his 2013 book Mod!, had traced the revival of 1960s imagery, Mod nostalgia, fashion, journalism, Britpop and New Labour’s rebranding of Britain, and the fashioning of the cultural narrative of Cool Britannia. Arday largely assumes that readers know what Cool Britannia is, rather than analysing the construction of the mythology, who did it, and what social functions it served. John Harris, in his 2003 book The Last Party, used interviews and archival journalism to reconstruct relations among musicians, the music press, record companies, celebrity culture and Blair’s political project. Harris starts with reconstruction before drawing conclusions, whereas Arday asserts the moral significance at the outset and organises the history around what will serve that a priori interpretation.
Rupa Huq, in her 2006 book Beyond Subculture, had already challenged white, guitar-centred accounts of youth culture by bhangra, post-bhangra, rai, hip-hop, electronic dance music and club culture. Other studies had addressed Britpop’s Englishness, class, masculinity and nationalism, popular music and British national identity, Black British popular music (and its exclusions from some historical narratives) and the Asian Underground, while many academic journal articles cover these and other related subjects. Nearly all of this work is absent from Arday’s bibliography.
One need not endorse all of this literature uncritically; only a few writers incorporate into their reasoning rather obvious facts about the UK population being 80-90 per cent white during the periods considered. Nonetheless, beyond such blind spots, there is a level of methodological, historical and cultural awareness, and accumulated knowledge, in most of them which exceeds anything in Arday’s book.
Thus the distinctive element of Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain is therefore narrower: Arday’s experience as a Black working-class teenage Oasis fan who encountered both cultural belonging and racial exclusion. But this autobiography is repeatedly presented as if it could sustain wide-ranging social claims which it cannot in any sense support.
At every level, the book contracts the scope announced by its title. “Cool Britannia” becomes largely Britpop; “multi-ethnic Britain” becomes predominantly one Black autobiographical perspective; and a purported sociology of musical culture becomes a small set of symbolic examples.
The actual cultural corpus is very small and dominated by music. Film, theatre, literature, visual art (and the Young British Artists), architecture, design and publishing receive little or no sustained treatment; television is represented mainly by a discussion of Desmond’s, and New Labour’s wider cultural project is barely considered. Yet contemporary representations of Cool Britannia, including the classic 1997 Vanity Fair article, “London Swings! Again!”, encompassed not only Oasis and Blur but Damien Hirst, Terence Conran, Norman Foster, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, football, restaurants, design and London’s international branding.
Arday makes little effort to reconstruct Cool Britannia as an object of sociological inquiry. The book rarely considers the origins of the term (beyond a short mention of the Vanity Fair article at the outset, also included in the blurb), how it circulated and developed in the media, how it was appropriated by New Labour, why it resonated internationally (for example in writings in Italian, French and German), or for that matter some of the more pejorative responses to it.
A proper sociological study of Cool Britannia would not just assume and name cultural products but examine how government, media, galleries, designers, advertisers and publicists produced and circulated a new image of Britain. Arday largely assumes the formation rather than reconstructing it, using culture primarily as a backdrop for autobiography and political polemic.
The second half of the title would suggest a sustained investigation of Britain’s different ethnic, religious and migratory populations, different histories of migration and settlement, different forms of cultural production, and different understandings of Britishness. The book instead compresses plural phenomena into strikingly broad categories. ‘Multi-ethnic Britain’ consists here essentially of one autobiographical Black perspective with some very generalised references to “ethnic minorities”. The clearest indication of this narrowing is the near-absence of British Asian culture, despite its centrality to debates about British identity during the 1990s. Black Britain, meanwhile, is itself presented with little sustained differentiation by origin, generation, region, religion, class or gender. The subtitle promises plurality but the sociology tends to homogenise.
Music ostensibly organises the book. The subtitle comes from Oasis, the three main chapters are each named after songs (The Stone Roses’ “Love Spread”’; Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger”; and the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet symphony”). Britpop generates the historical framework, and musical taste is used to explore issues of race, belonging and identity. Yet Arday criticises Britpop-centred histories while reproducing one. A sociology of popular music would go beyond artists and songs to examine scenes, audiences, institutions, technologies, venues, labels, forms of sociability and cultural hybridisation — not merely use performers as symbols. There is almost none of this in Arday’s book.
What there is instead is a rather ossified history revolving around Oasis, Blur, the Verve, Skunk Anansie, and the Spice Girls...
Trip hop, the music and cultural world of Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead, is also absent. This emerged from a multiracial Bristol scene shaped by Jamaican sound-system culture, hip-hop, sampling and electronic production...
Nor is there meaningful treatment of jungle, drum and bass, house, techno, rave or garage: musical worlds shaped by Caribbean Britain, pirate radio, clubs, independent labels, new technologies and racially mixed audiences. Equally absent are British Asian musical movements, above all bhangra and the Asian Underground, work which explored migration, diaspora, hybridity and new forms of British identity. Together, these scenes challenged both rock authenticity and simple racial binaries, and used repetition and hypnotic styles to create deindividualizing experiences which were utterly characteristic of the period.
Arday simply provides a sociology of Britpop which is punctuated by a handful of figures as tokens of representation. Readers learn remarkably little about how musical cultures functioned, intersected, or reshaped British social life in one of the most culturally innovative decades.
No book can cover everything, and all books show a bias towards sources from some disciplines more than others. Arday reads predominantly within one critical tradition. Gilroy, Hall, Parekh, Heidi Mirza, Avtar Brah, CRT and critical multiculturalism are legitimate sources; the problem is the near absence of political science, alternative sociologies, cultural history, popular-music studies, media research and competing interpretations of New Labour. Literature appears less as material against which to test an argument than as support for conclusions already reached.
The impression is of predetermined conclusions and then the marshalling of whatever literature best reinforces this. But a strong form of sociology (or indeed most disciplines) would be continuously testing its arguments, and seeing if they can be defended against rival explanations at their most convincing. For all the many differences between Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Mills or Bourdieu, all recognise that explanation requires consideration of alternatives. The explanatory power of concepts or interpretations emerges when they can be distinguished from others.
Arday shows little curiosity of this type. The various politically and symbolically loaded and semantically complex phenomena which are fundamental to his book, like Blair, New Labour, Cool Britannia, or for that matter race, function mostly as rhetoric for assertion of dogma, not critical exploration, leaving not just an incomplete bibliography but an incomplete sociology.
One of the deeper problems with Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain is that the book never properly explains how it proposes to move from individual experience to the generation of sociological knowledge. The research object continually shifts, and the cultural corpus is never properly defined; nor is it explained whether the materials used are illustrative, representative or exhaustive. Arday intermittently describes the book as autoethnographic. The scholarly status of autoethnography remains contested, but the term cannot denote autobiography merely ornamented with sociological language. In my own work I have defined its defensible form as critical self-reflection and contextualisation of one’s own practices and experiences: the self becomes an object of inquiry, not a privileged source of unquestionable truth. Documentation and recollection provide materials for analysis; they do not themselves constitute analysis. Serious autoethnography must test interpretations, consider alternatives, adverse evidence and interpretations that do not flatter the narrator.
Arday instead treats memory as a transparent window onto Britain. Encounters with racism become evidence for the character of an era; musical preferences become evidence about national identity. The transitions are asserted rather than demonstrated. There is also little consideration of whether later convictions have reshaped earlier recollections. Most importantly, there is little evidence of the difficult form of self-criticism that autoethnography should demand: entertaining explanations that do not flatter the narrator, evidence that cuts against the preferred story, or the possibility that later convictions have reshaped earlier memories.
Wright Mills’s sociological imagination connected biography with history through institutions and social structure. Arday supplies biography but seldom constructs that bridge: he does not establish how typical his experiences were, how they varied across populations or what evidence might qualify them. What is missing is an explicit account of representation: under what conditions can individual experience illuminate wider social processes, and where do the limits of such generalisation lie?
The same problem governs the wider argument. The Macpherson Inquiry, which unquestionably transformed public discussion of policing and institutional racism. But the existence of institutional racism does not establish the character of every institution, interaction, or a whole historical period; nor does it explain how the cultural rhetoric of Cool Britannia related to continuing racial inequality. Did it conceal, legitimate or reproduce racism and exclusion, reshape institutions or simply coexist with inequalities whose causes lay elsewhere? Each of these claims requires different kinds of evidence. Arday simply uses the inquiry as a licence for subsequent generalisation, so that concepts such as Britishness, exclusion and institutional racism function less as analytical tools than as conclusions. Assertion repeatedly substitutes for analysis...
Arday is most engaging when writing about first discovering Oasis as a Black teenager in South London; discovering and negotiating ideas about “authentic” Blackness; experiencing both belonging and exclusion within the same cultural moment. Such material might have supported a distinctive memoir and, with sufficient self-criticism and contextualisation, a sociology of musical identity.
But that would have been a considerably more modest book than the one advertised. A small body of personal recollection is required to sustain wider conclusions about culture, politics, racism, national identity and multi-ethnic Britain, which it cannot. At every level its scope contracts: Cool Britannia becomes a thin account of Britpop; multi-ethnic Britain becomes largely one man’s retrospective autobiography; sociology proceeds without a defined object, corpus or method. Even this restricted account is repeatedly assembled from earlier scholarship insufficiently distinguished from Arday’s own.
The controversies surrounding Arday have exposed a wider and uncomfortable possibility: that universities and publishers may scrutinise some antiracist or EDI scholarship with less scholarly rigour (about which Arday has himself been dismissive) than other research, fearing that ordinary questions about evidence, method and attribution will themselves be represented as politically suspect. However, in fields concerned with race, gender or sexuality, the gravity of the subject demands more exacting scholarship, not less.
Here it is relevant to consider Critical Race Theory (CRT), directly evoked by Arday in a range of his writings, and which has fed into many anti-racist programmes. Emerging from American legal scholarship and Derrick Bell’s critique of the outcomes of desegregation, influential strands of CRT became suspicious of traditional ideals of neutrality, objectivity and colour-blindness. While such suspicions can sometimes reveal the exercise of power in the guise of neutrality, in weaker academic applications such arguments can become self-sealing: disparities are proof of structural racism, scepticism is proof of privilege, requests for corroboration can be dismissed as products of “white” or “Eurocentric” epistemology. Arday sometimes treats ordinary evidential objections as manifestations of hegemonic research norms rather than questions to be answered.
There is no progressive purpose served by shielding defective evidence from examination, or using claims of racism (or sexism) to insulate careless argument or unattributed borrowing. Such processes serve to discredit rather than strengthen antiracist scholarship — insulting those scholars in such fields who do marry their political commitments to historical knowledge, methodological rigour and self-criticism, and scrupulous citation.
The problems with Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain go well beyond falling short of its ambition. It does not define its central objects, its cultural range is extremely narrow, it homogenises diverse ethnic populations, it ignores some of the decade’s most socially and musically consequential movements, it treats autobiography as self-validating evidence, and it derives large parts of its argument and language from other writers without adequate acknowledgement.
Judged as sociology, the book is intellectually threadbare, methodologically indefensible and textually compromised. The sociology does not simply fail to arrive in the book — there is no evidence that Arday really began his journey towards it."
