I’m so excited to be launching this project. I’ve mentioned it a few times (just a few) over past blog posts, but here we are… it’s live! You can visit the site here, and I’ll be posting more about the processes involved and how I’m approaching it here.
Copyright Clare Williams 2021, images reproduced here with the kind permission of tl;dr.legal
This project has been a long time in the making. I first started sketching out what my “journey” might look like in 2019, right after passing my viva and feeling that I could give myself permission to step away from the core content of my research for a bit. It had been a long 8 and a half years. In hindsight, it was worth every step. But there had been moments along the way where I’d sworn blind I wasn’t cut out for this and was going to quit.
Fortunately, for me, I had a wonderful support team of supervisors and mentors who made sure that the nuclear option never happened. But I’m not alone in having moments like this – any long research project has its ups and downs. Sometimes we want to give up. We don’t feel we’re good enough, or can make this lifestyle work.
So, the Mountains of Metaphor project is a way for me to share my story and reach out. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar? Maybe you’re considering a PhD but aren’t sure how to approach it, mentally?
There are some supplementary materials on the site that you can download and play around with – why not try creating your own map of your research journey? Where are you on the map? What’s going on around you? Can you still see your eventual goal?
A little heads up on a current (soon to be revealed) WIP: I’m visualising the PhD journey using digital paintings, maps and interactive story-telling. It’s an exciting project and I can’t wait to share it when it goes live. This means that I’ve been thinking about metaphors and ways of storytelling. And it turns out that once you start looking for visual metaphors, they turn up everywhere.
My own personal metaphor for undertaking the PhD was pretty mainstream, despite being invaluable. For those who don’t know, I’ve been climbing a mountain whilst doing the PhD. Passing the viva was effectively reaching the summit, but on the way were a whole bunch of added extras, from being caught in an avalanche (loss or illness), so taking shelter in a cave while storms raged (fighting my university for access and not feeling able to go on), to getting stuck in a swamp and totally lost (doubting that my work was valuable, relevant, or particularly insightful).
Whatever was happening in my life at the time, there was a convenient metaphor for it, and one that helped me put my problems into a tangible frame where I could appraise their significance (objectively), figure out a plan, and then refocus on my goals. I think this is why I found the metaphor so helpful, and why it was it one of the keys to me completing the PhD after 8 years of hard slog. Having that mountain in the distance meant that, regardless of what happened along the way, I never lost sight of my goals and was able to appreciate the storms for what they were; temporary blips that would not permanently interrupt my progress.
Sky: Children of the Light
While my forthcoming project is designed, painted and written by me as a visual representation of my metaphorical journey, I stumbled upon a different version of the metaphor… scrolling through the latest games on Apple’s App Store, I came across a game called “Sky: Children of the Light”. Here are some screen grabs from the App Store, mainly so that you get an idea of the beautiful artwork in this game.
Screen grabs from “Sky: Children of the Light” on Apple’s App Store. The game, created by Thatgamecompany, combines a simple story with stunning graphics and visuals that also work well as a metaphor for other life journeys.
The aim of the game is to get to the top of the dangerous and dark mountain (sound familiar?) and this is best achieved by working altruistically and making friendships (also familiar – no one ever finishes a PhD by working alone). The graphics are undeniably beautiful, and the challenges include decoding glyphs and meeting ancestors to gain their knowledge as you go along (also, very relevant for a PhD journey, although less literal when those ancestors are in book form in a library).
The blurb about the game states that “with your trusty candle, you’ll illuminate the world bit by bit, pushing back the darkness and igniting beacons to open doors to new areas”. This might be a little poetic, but is a comforting thought to those of us trying to develop new knowledge that might just make the world a better place, one day.
“You’ll meet dozens of ancestors who will teach you new expressions – like setting off a dazzling fireworks show – or offer items like capes, hairstyles and musical instruments”. While no one offered me a hairstyle throughout the PhD, learning from ancestors, mentors and peers is a central part of the process. Despite the journey being solitary and even lonely at times, the most valuable resources are the people around you – your cheerleaders.
“Although you can play Sky alone, the experience truly comes to life when you connect with friends, family or strangers. Can’t reach a hidden cliff? Signal to a passer-by who has a more powerful cape and perhaps they’ll take your hand and escort you up. The desire to help others is woven throughout the game’s fabric.” There have been many occasions when I’ve benefitted from the generosity of others in my field. Progress doesn’t happen through sheer slog in the library, but from friendships, kindness, and solidarity. And some beautiful metaphorical scenery.
Who doesn’t love a meme? And when a couple of these come along that just happen to sum up your doctoral thesis, it’s both impressive, depressing, and a funny feeling of having come full circle.
Thanks, internet.
Elon Musk, king of many things but also of the art form that is The Meme, was widely panned for his early laid-back response to the pandemic, preferring to worry over the economy instead. And then there was this:
Admittedly, this is open to interpretation, and Musk hasn’t clarified how many layers of sarcasm are at play here but judging by more recent tweets, he seems to mean this literally. The image, of an astronaut on the moon watching the destruction of the planet earth while worrying about the fate of the economy is perhaps a fitting metaphor for some of the narrative around the Covid19 pandemic. Some have suggested that Musk was actually referencing the real role of the economy in human health, and the mutual dependence of the two rather than the “lives versus economy” binary that has defined the pandemic discourse. Alternatively, the image could beg the question of whether we are sacrificing the planet to satisfy the gods of economy. More on this later. In the meantime, the internet responded magnificently:
Humorous, yes. But there are two points to note here that relate to the relationship between economy, society, and the planet.
Memes are metaphors
Firstly, these make great visual metaphors for our preoccupation with the economy at a time when lives are being lost to a virus. James Geary cites metaphors as essential for framing a subject, which in turn defines how we think about something. His book “I is an other” notes that:
“We think metaphorically. Metaphorical thinking is the way we make sense of the world, and every individual metaphor is a specific instance of this imaginative process at work. Metaphors are therefore not confined to spoken or written language.” (Kindle Loc. 219-221)
Perhaps the originator of work into metaphor and its effects on framing and cognition, George Lakoff highlights the importance of metaphor and its role in how we perceive, conceive and understand something that then gets wired into our neural circuitry. See “Don’t Think of an Elephant“, as well as Lakoff & Johnson’s “Metaphors we live by“.
A metaphor is a way of likening one thing to something else. In this case, the pandemic is represented by the destruction of the world, with the distant astronaut concerned over the fate of the economy. Is the implication really that the pandemic is a looming apocalypse? This would probably strike most people as extreme, but the similarities include the fact that we have not faced a global pandemic in living memory, that our way of life or “normal” probably has met the same fate as the meme-planet, and that the fate of the earth and the climate crisis has been unceremoniously bumped down the order of global priorities.
Much of the discussion about our responses to the pandemic seems to have polarised debate into a “lives versus the economy” binary. Of course, the world is not as simple as this. In previous posts I’ve emphasised the need to bring economics back into the social science and reorient it around people, highlighting the fact that without humans interacting, there is no economy. This fact seems to have been largely ignored in the discourse – if people are sick, the economy suffers. If the economy suffers, people will too. They are two sides of the same coin – another metaphor for trying to explain that the economy (itself a metaphor for a collection of human behaviour) benefits when we are fit, healthy, and productive, and vice versa. Pitting the one against the other is, admittedly humorous but erroneous and ultimately unhelpful.
Metaphors frame our thinking
Secondly, how (you ask) does Elon’s meme sum up my PhD thesis? Interpreted literally, it’s wide of the mark. But seen ironically, the meme captures a Polanyian interpretation of the economy-society duality.
We use metaphor to think, and our ways of thinking about the law and the economy are as steeped in metaphor as any area of life; in fact, possibly more so. We attribute human qualities to the economy (it’s “gathering strength”, it’s “taken a tumble”, etc), and neoclassical approaches have tended to prioritise the free market as a self-regulating mechanism that can regulate human behaviour accordingly.
This encapsulates Karl Polanyi’s assertions about the relationship between the economy and society. In more recent debates after the 2008 financial crisis, the question tended to be “is the economy embedded in society, or is society embedded in the economy” (both of these are readings of Polanyi’s thesis, and yes, they are contradictory). The point is, when we use “the economy” as a metaphor to start talking about collections of human behaviour, we can begin to personify these, and start talking about the economy as if it were a living, breathing thing. While we might think that “economy” should function for the benefit of society, there are those who argue that society now functions for the benefit of the economy. Some commentators have argued that the metaphorical aspirations of the economy have taken over the narrative, to the extent that society works to serve economic goals. We strive to increase GDP, growth, productivity, and so on.
And so, Elon’s meme neatly sums up the subordination of society, and the earth, to economic goals. At the same time, it hopefully asks us to reconsider the relationship between the economy and society, economy and the planet, and how we can move forwards in a mutually beneficial manner.
Is the economy embedded in society? Is society embedded in the economy? Is the law embedded in society? Or is society embedded in a set of rules and regulations?
Have the law and economy become “disembedded” from society, and is this why the financial crisis in 2008 came as such a surprise? Would it help to “re-embed” the economy?
This post explores the use, misuse and abuse of the concept of embeddedness in the context of econo-socio-legal interactions.
Coinage of the term in the context of economic sociology and ESL is attributed to Karl Polanyi in his 1948 book The Great Transformation. Polanyi had reportedly been reading about the coal mining industry in the UK, and had taken the term “embeddedness” from descriptions of coal embedded in the walls of a mine. Thus, to Polanyi, the term was likely a relational descriptor and metaphor. Interestingly, despite earlier documented usage, Richard Thurnwald’s use of “embeddedness” has gone largely unremarked, enabling him to dodge the bullet of origination foisted on Polanyi. The term only appears twice on page 60 of Great Transformation, and then on pages 68, 73 and 135. There is no great overarching theme of embeddedness. Nor is there a definition offered. It is probably safe to assume that the word was a throw-away term of description that came to hand, and was then never given much more thought.
Little did Polanyi realise that 70+ years later, scholars would be puzzling over his meaning and even writing doctoral theses on the matter! One catalyst for the development of embeddedness into the core concept of sociological lenses was Mark Granovetter’s accidental revival of the term. Granovetter’s theory of networks, published in 1985, described the actor as embedded in networks. He has since admitted that at the time of writing, he had forgotten Polanyi’s usage of the term. Nevertheless, the success of Granovetter’s paper revived the career of embeddedness, but at the same time created confusion. Polanyi had been referring to the macro-level embeddedness of economy in society, although his “always-embedded economy” is more a theoretical proposition than empirically-proven reality. Conversely, Granovetter had used the term at the micro-level to describe the embeddedness of the individual in networks of interaction. Thus, development of the concept of embeddedness already straddled the micro and macro, giving rise of the question; “what are we talking about”?
Here’s the rub. When discussing the extraction of coal from a mine, for want of a better example, “embeddedness” is a perfectly adequate relational descriptor. It implies the co-existence of two conceptually separate phenomena in time and space; the coal, and the rock from which it is hewn. There is no problem with saying that one is embedded in the other.
Where difficulty arises though is where we also want to investigate the possibility that the two phenomena described not only share characteristics but might even be two aspects of the same phenomena. For example, we can say that the economy must be re-embedded in society if we accept that the economy and society are two distinct entities. This is clearly nonsense. An economy cannot exist outside of a society. An economy necessarily implies human interaction of a specific nature (economic). The same is true of law. We cannot imagine a legal system without a society behind, underpinning, and performing it. A legal system implies human interaction of a specific nature (legal). Therefore, stating that one is embedded within the other – whichever way round you phrase it – clearly does not make sense.
My research puts this in the context of ESL, which aim to reintegrate social science dialogue and which ultimately takes a constructivist approach. In other words, economic and legal phenomena (the econolegal) are performed through social interactions. All social interactions have econolegal aspects or flavours. There’s no escaping this, just as there is no way to have an economic exchange without it being between people (I’m excluding high frequency trading between computers here for argument’s sake, but will return to this in a future post).
Why is this important? Well, the response to the 2008 financial crisis is something we, in the UK, are still living with. Austerity, as the main policy response, was based on a particular understanding and framing of the economics that led to the crash. This is an economics that sees the discipline as somewhat ‘apart’ from society. Neoclassical economics sets out a version of ‘economic man’ on which complex economic theories are modelled. There has been recognition of the limitations of this approach. But in turn, those who criticise mainstream neoclassical economics frames tend to (with or without the help of Polanyi) argue that we need to “re-embed” the economy in society.
If we take this approach, we deny the possibility of ever seeing the economy as an aspect of society, the same as the law. We cannot hope to reorient the economy and its regulation (the law) towards real people if we talk about society, economy and law as separate entities. Speaking of one being embedded in the other simply reinforces their difference, their separation, and their disunity. It reinforces existing ways of doing, talking and thinking, which are predominantly shaped by neoclassical economics. It prevents us moving forwards.
So, what to do? We need to move beyond embeddedness, and how to go about that is the subject of a future post.
Copyright note: animation by me using ProCreate 5 on iPad Air 3. Please ask before you take!
One of the biggest challenges for anyone working on conceptual issues is making their research relevant to everyone else. After all, the first question any researcher should be asking themselves is “who cares”? This is not the passive-aggressive, somewhat depressing question that it could be, but rather a positive nudge to any researcher to bear in mind why you’re doing the research, and who is going to benefit from it.
My research is primarily conceptual, but has three main audiences: academics engaged in sociolegal research, policy makers working in international development, and a lay audience seeking more innovative responses to the financial crisis. Using designerly approaches to make the research tangible and visible, this post puts a face to each of these groups. Let’s meet each in turn.
Introducing Academic Ann…
Ann works at a university as a law lecturer. She is researching the importance of the legal system for any country wanting to attract foreign investment. She is planning a trip to Sri Lanka – her target country for research – and is going to talk to government ministers, business people and investors, and local communities around investment zones. But how should she frame her research? How can she hold the interests and views of such a wide range of people in one frame at the same time?
Introducing Policy Polly…
Polly has been working at an international development institution for several years now. Her job requires her to use existing research to make policy recommendations for foreign governments, international agencies and charities. She wanted to work in development to reduce poverty, but has become disappointed by the lack of tangible impact her work has, and has been wondering whether there is an alternative approach to understand the causes and ways of addressing poverty.
Introducing Lay Lillian…
Lillian is not an academic. Nor does she work in development or policy. In fact, she is a retired dinner lady and pillar of her local community. She doesn’t know much about “the law” or “the economy”, but she cares about her community, and knows that something isn’t working properly. The economy crashed in 2008, and a decade of austerity was rolled out. She was told that there was “no more money” and that budgets across the country needed to be cut. But while her community saw centres close and support disappear, she noticed that the rich continued to get richer. So, she began reading about the crisis, and noticed that there were a lot of people arguing that we need to “do” economics and law differently. Lillian is an interested bystander, and wants to know more.
Why the characters? Personae can be a useful tool for exploring research concepts. We can see the relevance of concepts and frames for our own lives. They can make the conceptual visible and tangible.
Each of these will be developed in future posts, and will each bump up against the limitations of the ways we currently do, talk, and think about legal and economic phenomena. Each of them will then try an ESL lens using embeddedness and then moving beyond embeddedness. Through their eyes, we can explore the benefits and drawbacks of reframing in different contexts and for different audiences.
In the meantime, these characters are by me, using ProCreate on an iPad. They are rough first drafts, and the characters will be developed along with their stories. Copyright 2020.
I’m in the process of moving everything over from my old site to this shiny new one, and wanted to bring some of the content with me. This (included below in this post) is one of the original pages I wrote for the old site, back in 2012 or so, when I was just starting out with the PhD. Reading back on it now is a little bit like looking back over a long journey and realizing just how far you’ve come. The final draft that I’m about to submit is so different to what I originally wrote!
Of course, this is all completely normal and just part of the process of doing a PhD. But there are a couple of other things that have leaped out at me too, rereading over the abstract. There’s so much “jargon”! There are entire sentences below that make me wince. It’s not that I don’t understand the terms – I’m completely comfortable relating to and with the ideas. But really, my supervisor and I are the only two people in the building who understand what I’m talking about, then what is the point?
This has become quite a significant part of the drafting process as time has gone on, and I have another blog post lined up about this. But in the meantime, the only way research is going to have impact in the real world is if people in the real world can understand what you’re saying. And for this to happen, the research has to be accessible and in plain English (as well as interesting, engaging, and relevant, of course).
In the meantime, here is what I was embarking on some seven years ago…
Recent World Bank policy documents are notable for hinting at a retreat from doctrinaire reliance on “investment climate” discourse frameworks. Although the concept of an “ideal paradigm” still informs much of the World Bank’s lending and consulting praxis, there has been a reappraisal of the empirical certainties underlying many assumptions. While a quantitative, leximetric approach to law and governance continues to define World Bank ideology, assertions of causation between these and economic development are increasingly being questioned.
By taking a socio-legal approach to an investigation of the interaction between law and the economy, this research offers a new approach. Taking law as a socially constructed phenomenon existing as perceived by the actors in their interactions both with each other (economically-oriented actions and interactions) (see the work of Roger Cotterrell) and with the local laws (operating on a range of scales from the micro, macro, meta and meso levels (see the work of Sabine Frerichs and Amanda Perry-Kessaris), this approach questions both current terminology as being overly laced with economic theory, and the frameworks that deny the normative bias of much of the current discourse. The research responds to calls for careful empirical socio-legal studies by Cotterrell and Swedberg, amongst others, by conducting grounded-theory informed ethnography in Sri Lanka, interviewing foreign investors about their interactions with the legal system prior to, and during the investment process. The framing of law in a socio-legal paradigm thus facilitates the use of the results not only to engage with questions of correlation between the legal environment in Sri Lanka and the actions of foreign investors, but also with causation; understanding clearly the motivations and perceptions of the investors themselves.
The results will enable clarification of the interaction between law and the economy in Sri Lanka, as well as the use, abuse and avoidance characteristic of the interaction between foreign investors and local laws. It is then possible to ask whether legal and governmental reform lending conditionalities recommended by the World Bank and other International Financial Organizations (IFOs) were a factor in the attraction of foreign investment to the country, and to what extent this might have been the case. The results will allow for an appraisal of current IFO policies, as well as the extent to which Sri Lanka should tailor its legal system to the requirements of foreign investors, potentially at the expense of other actors in the domestic legal and economic systems. Moreover, a careful selection of interviewees should allow a comparison between attitudes and approaches towards the importance of formal law and legal systems in an investment situation, both along nationality and institutional sectoral axes. This should thereby facilitate closer appraisal of the legal reform process with respect to more accurate tailoring of the reforms depending on the desired outcome. This should also work to minimise unintended, and undesirable, side effects of reforms on local businesses and entrepreneurs, while facilitating investment according to policy objectives.
Clare's research blog 