So - here is his take on academic writing and the use of theory.
The orientational use of theory, on the other hand, means using a certain vocabulary or citing certain authors we make a public claim to belong to a particular academic club: It’s a way of saying "these people are our friends, those who speak differently, our enemies." The problem here is that sometimes it’s a very cliquish club, or even a cult, and theory functions like a kind of secret password. In fact, this is one reason that orientational uses of theory are common in graduate studies – precisely because graduate education is partly an initiation into disciplinary thinking. As Lutz (1995) argues , the "difficulty" of theory, the high jargon and complicated syntax, not only distance the writer from the text, but also push readers away, creating a kind of exclusionary discourse reserved only for those willing to devote the time and psychic energy required to imagine meanings for the text (or those who are lucky enough to be able to study with the authors themselves). As Gouldner (1970: 202) explained, “obscurity makes a work relatively costly,” which keeps most people away and turns it into a “cult object,” membership-symbolizing language (the obscurity allowing it to operate both to strengthen within group ties and to serve as a boundary object, Star & Gereisemer, 1999, that can spread across fields). This creates a status differentiation within the field – theorists become flying saucer pilots (to borrow Bruno Latour’s (1987) metaphor) who occasionally (in their writings at least) swoop down to abduct a bit of empirical reality for analysis.
And here is a little bit of insight on the effects of scholars wearing blinders [which sounds QUITE A BIT like the department I am in - since we can't write a research proposal WITHOUT having some sort of theoretical frame to guide it... boo to that. BOO I SAY!]
The potential pathologies here are 1) that it makes you as mere earthling students feel like you can’t theorize; it also turns theory into an academic language game, and pretty soon we’re no better than the people who think the world’s made up of “variables” and instrument-generated constructs like “self-efficacy.” Theory then functions like Vaughan’s blinders, allowing people to see only those things which can be described in terms of the theory. More fundamentally, it misconstrues the whole purpose of theorizing, which is to explain things/events/crap actually happening. This is what the best theorists do:
As Foucault explained, his purpose is "not to formulate the global systematic theory which holds everything in place, but to analyse the specificity of mechanisms of power... to built little by little a strategic knowledge" (Foucault, 1980, p. 145) and, as Bourdieu often argued, he wanted his readers to read his works as "exercise books" rather than theories and was keen to "remind us that 'theory' should not be valued for its own sake" (Karalayali, 2004, p. 352). He felt strongly that we need to be reflexively aware of the implications and effects of theory in relation to the social world we conjure up in our work. (Ball, 2006, p. 4).
Great social theorists are "data-heads" as Abbott says somewhere (and you could say the same of methodologists) – if you can’t find places where people are actually engaging with empirical problems – describing specific cases, explaining things – be skeptical of their theoretical and methodological writings.
I would like to point out that I laughed my ass off when I read the line - "and pretty soon we’re no better than the people who think the world’s made up of “variables” and instrument-generated constructs like “self-efficacy.” OSU School of Comm anyone?
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