I’ve been looking forward to seeing the film The Damned United - the story of Brian Clough’s 44 day tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974. The film has received generally positive reviews, helped by Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of "Old Big ‘ead", and the laughs and knowing references to seventies popular culture it contains – it offers a kind of upbeat nostalgia fest for those with misty-eyed memories of a time when men were men, smoking was obligatory and everything else was either brown or orange.

The film contrasts markedly with David Peace’s novel (The Damned Utd), from which the film is adapted. The book doesn’t have many laughs. In fact it is uncompromisingly dark, bleak and dystopic. The book largely takes place inside the mind of Cloughie, who recounts his various fears, hatreds and obsessions; mainly his fear of failure, hatred of Don Revie and Leeds United, and obsessions with money, power and fame, all conducted through an expletive-strewn fog of whisky and cigarettes.

Brian Clough [image © copyright BBC]

But the release of the film has reignited some of the controversy that surrounds the book. The Clough family reacted strongly to Peace’s portrayal, with wife Barbara objecting vehemently to seeing her late husband represented as a "chain-smoking, obscenity-shouting and selfishly driven man". Ex-Leeds player Johnny Giles (who appears in the book as the sullen and duplicitous character "The Irishman") called the book "outrageous and wrong" and won damages against the claim in the book that he had played an instrumental role in Clough’s sacking.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, the pain and upset caused by the book (published shortly after Clough died, and therefore rendering Peace and his publishers immune to a libel suit from the great man) should not be discounted - think how we might feel if we were represented in this way - but, at the same time, there is the issue of artistic freedom to consider. The Damned Utd is described by Peace as a "Yorkshire Fairy Story" and a "fiction based on a fact" – not a reportage or replay of what actually happened.

Critics have tended to argue that what the book is "really" about is (variably) failure, redemption, vengeance, loneliness and despair; others have read it as a specific evocation of the "problem" of the North at a particular point in time - with the fictional character of "Brian Clough" merely providing the vehicle through which these various issues are explored. I tend to sympathise with this position; however, such aesthetic justifications can appear hard to defend when fact and fantasy are combined and real people get hurt.

The debate raises some important questions for social science. What is the social duty of art and authorship? How far can we hold authors responsible for their texts? Further, for those of us who are students of media studies, it raises issues that routinely crop up as central concerns in the context of our OU course, DA204 Understanding Media; namely, What is the nature of celebrity? To what extent is it possible to define a fixed and "authentic" meaning of a text? What is the relationship between text and audience(s)? How is our reading of a text shaped by our knowledge, values and beliefs?

These are well-established questions which obtaining clear answers to has proved difficult – not that Cloughie would have struggled, he always got things done; as he said: "Rome wasn't built in a day. But I wasn't on that particular job."

About the author

Mark Banks is Reader in Sociology at the Open University. His research interests include the cultural and creative industries, popular culture, cities and urban space.

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As the recession deepens righteous anger grows about the systemic greed and unbridled power of the few at the top. Once again people are starting to make connections between their own vulnerability and the exploitative, unequal nature of the capitalist system. A sign of the times here is the launch of the No2EU, Yes to Democracy campaign which is fielding a platform of left candidates in the forthcoming European elections. Opposed to the Lisbon Treaty, with its charter for privatisation and subversion of workers’ rights, the campaign stands for a democratic Europe built on principles of social justice.

rather than opposing the capitalist system they saw the enemy as ‘universalism’

What is interesting about No2EU is the way it poses a challenge to the identity (and post-identity) politics which have become so significant in oppositional thinking for the last quarter century or more. For many radicals the neo-liberal impasse of Thatcherism encouraged a re-evaluation of what progressive politics should be about. Rather than opposing the capitalist system – which looked increasingly impregnable – they saw the enemy as ‘universalism’, of which there were left versions as well as right. Feminism provides the case in point. Launched in the 1960s and 70s, the ‘second wave’ of feminism demanded recognition for women as women, not as women who were adjunct members of the working class. The same was true of black power, and the gay, lesbian and bisexual movements. This new types of identity politics asserted the difference of political subjects against monolithic and exclusive definitions of what it is to be human.

Although these movements were still strongly aligned with the traditional left and the critique of capitalism in the 1970s, a decade later identity politics were becoming increasingly disconnected from socialism. By the late 1990s the new social movements, as they were now called, were strongly libertarian, pluralist and suspicious of any kind of unifying principle concerning what radical politics might be for. The anti-globalisation protests and the series of World Social Forums (WSF) which emerged from them in the 2000s show this very well. Indeed, the collapse of the WSF over the last few years suggests that the strong emphasis on identity, autonomy and plurality has been self-defeating. With no general goals, or programme for achieving them, the new social movements seem to have lost their way.

Still, the demands for recognition and autonomy which drove the new radical politics back in the 70s have not gone away. The challenge now must be to integrate them with the demands of the labour movement. That’s where No2EU, Yes to Democracy comes in. Simultaneously an attack on BNP far right nationalism and the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of the EU, the campaign calls for a Europe where workers’ rights are protected and public services are enhanced rather than cut back and privatised.

The recent strikes at the Lindsey oil refinery suggest that a crucial negotiation has to made here; between the principle of recognising others, in this context workers of other nationalities within the EU, and the need to defend pay and conditions which have been struggled for over many years. The right approach is surely not to say that one simply trumps the other, that the recognition of identity is more important than economic equality or vice versa. Rather it is to show how capitalism conveniently appeals to the recognition of difference (‘workers of whatever nationality have the right to work anywhere in Europe’) while exploiting difference as means of driving down wages across Europe in a race to the bottom. At Lindsey it was workers from impoverished southern Italy who were contracted for well below union negotiated rates.

All this suggests that reconciling difference and identity with demands for social justice is going to involve, above all, the exposure of pernicious ideology. But that’s nothing new. Perhaps two thirds of the struggle of radicals has always consisted in refuting lies and ‘telling truth to power’ as Edward Said once put it.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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Lord Laming's review of children's services in England, announced on 12^th March, concluded that child protection issues in England had not had ‘the priority they deserved’ and that many of the reforms brought in after Victoria Climbie's death in 2000 had not been properly implemented. Laming referred to Social Work as a ‘Cinderella service’.

I think this is an intriguing metaphor, and worth exploring further. In the Cinderella folk story the heroine has attributes that are unrecognised and lie hidden, and after a period of brutality from those who are supposed to be caring for her, she unexpectedly achieves success and emerges from obscurity. Why might elements of this plot be so meaningful in relation to contemporary feelings about social workers?

I don’t think it was explicit, nor consciously in the mind of Lord Laming, but anyone who knows Cinderella will remember that this girl was the daughter of a man who remarried the ‘wicked stepmother’ who already had her own two daughters – the ‘ugly sisters’ of pantomime fun.

In modern parlance, she was abused daily and deemed to be no better than the cinders she was forced to sit in.

So this story has resonance in relation to the recent child abuse cases that we have become so familiar with in the media. I wonder if Laming had in mind more than just the idea that Cinderella is a good metaphor for how social workers are treated (under resourced and under-recognised). Did his choice of metaphor also imply that every day social workers must confront difficult and quite often very dangerous people, people who, like Cinderella’s stepmother, abuse and threaten children but who are experts in covering this up?

Cinderella rises above her ghastly situation, to marry the prince and live happily ever after. But there is no fairytale intervention for social workers, who must routinely deal with people whose minds, actions and ways of relating to others seem incomprehensible. Likewise and more importantly, there is no easy, failsafe way of preventing the most extreme forms of child abuse. To understand why, we have to understand something about the complex nature of the work that social workers routinely do.

when deeds are ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation

The notion of ‘evil’, which trips off the tabloid tongue so easily – and which was applied so readily to the child killers of Jamie Bulger – brings us to a halt in our understanding of what social workers have to face. This is because when deeds are conceptualised as ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation, even to our mostly secular contemporary minds. Evil is a coded way of stating the incomprehensibility of something. Even if governments seek to understand the causes of crime, to use Tony Blair’s famous phrase, large parts of popular opinion do not want to.

Among Lord Lamings’ findings was that ‘there had been an ‘over-emphasis on process and targets’, resulting in a ‘loss of confidence’ among social workers, who were overstretched and undertrained’ and that ‘progress was being “hampered” by an ‘over-complicated... tick-box assessment and recording system’. Many social workers concur, arguing that the emphasis on data-entry and record keeping has meant that less and less time is actually spent building relationships with family members that in itself is the key to detecting child abuse:

In his earlier report into the death of Victoria Climbié, Laming noted that parents were hostile and workers were frightened to visit their homes; and that ‘apparent or disguised cooperation from parents often prevented or delayed understanding of the severity of harm to the child, and cases drifted’. The latter was also a factor in the Baby P case, where the mother was adept at simulating compliance with social workers. Because of a lack of critical supervision that would have forced hard questioning of evidence, the social worker was allowed to assume that the mother was committed to improving her son’s care even though injuries occurred whilst he was with her.

Research shows that most people who abuse children over long periods are dedicated to disguising what is happening. It’s also clear that social workers along with doctors and police find it exceedingly difficult to confidently identify child abuse and torture. Their work is fundamentally interpretative, under conditions of extreme pressure and anxiety. In confronting a suspected child abuser a fierce, aggressive denial is normally the response. Are they rightly or wrongly accused? Whose version of reality is correct? Upon what basis do you make a judgement, which has serious consequences, especially when breaking up a family is now considered to be the last resort?

We are very familiar with popular narratives in film and television where we as the audience are held in suspense, not knowing for some time if the hero is actually a villain. As his actions slowly become more risky or mores suspicious to others we start to see, through their eyes, that s/he is not as first appeared. But we expect social workers to straightforwardly ‘know’ when child abuse is happening and being covered up and when it isn’t.

At the same time, social workers who act to remove a child from its parents because of suspected or known abuse are all too frequently accused of representing the overbearing power of the state, interfering in the private sphere of sacred family life. Social workers are vilified when children are removed from their parents because it is unthinkable that parents could intentionally harm their children and when this happens, social workers represent the flaunting of the unthinkable under our noses.

It seems therefore that social workers can’t ever win. Unlike others of their colleagues who care for children colleagues in the public sector such as doctors, nurses, police and teachers, who may at times achieve heroic status, social workers are the object of perpetual social anxiety and aggression. So perhaps there are obvious reasons why they will never be loved by the public. If we barely understand the nature of their work and would rather not understand it (we certainly seem unable to realise that they do succeed in keeping most children safe, day after day) that is because on behalf of us all they must not only directly encounter extremely distressing and terrorising human behaviour but also make life and death decisions in these circumstances.

If we who are not social workers find it hard to ‘think the unthinkable’, that mothers and fathers can intentionally harm their children, then we should remember that social workers in the field of child protection are confronted with having to think this every day. Inevitably, if they are under extreme pressure due to unfilled posts, lack of supervision and overloaded cases, their capacity to do this thinking is undermined. If they are not enabled to do the work of social work properly and with an emphasis on quality – with good, critical and experienced supervisors, time to develop relationships with children and families seen separately as well as together – social workers and the children they protect will never emerge from a Cinderella status.

Further reading

An interesting article by Eileen Munro of the London School of Economics argues that the reforms made in the wake of Laming’s report on Victoria Climbié’s death have weakened the quality of social work.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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Cricket has been in the news. The move of the IPL (Indian Premier League) to South Africa after the attacks on the Sri Lanka team in Lahore is clearly a big news story on the international politics pages as well as, if not more so, than on the sports pages. The future of the IPL is crucial to the economic survival of the sport; a key matter in these times of economic recession and decline in sports sponsorship. These worrying times mean that news of success in sport is even more welcome.

The most successful cricket story for English cricket fans in recent weeks might, or should have been, England winning the world cup -no not the England men’s team, but the women’s team, beating New Zealand by four wickets to win the ICC Women’s World Cup in March 2009.

Yes, there was media coverage (the six best games were broadcast to 100 countries world wide) and even interviews with captain Charlotte Edwards on BBC radio sports programmes and not just Woman’s Hour. Even cricket fans might have trouble naming the members of the team though. What’s happening here-or not happening for women’s sport? It’s not just that we can’t name the team; we don’t really know anything about the players even if we do their names.

Women’s games do get a bit more coverage now, if nowhere near as much as men’s cricket, but that’s the only reason the sporting public are not as engaged with women’s sport as they are with men’s. Sport generates its own meanings and what happens on the pitch or in the field matters, but why are the fans not so gripped by the tensions and excitement of women’s sport? Success in competition provides a great impetus for creating wider interest; think of the 2005 Ashes series and the great boost given to English men’s cricket by their success. Success can go a long way towards encouraging young people to play, although the resource problem applies to men’s and women’s cricket, but tradition means the situation is worse for the women’s game. However, the increased interest in men’s cricket after 2005 came partly from the increased coverage of cricketers off the pitch as well as on.

Although sport is enmeshed with popular culture, which is often seen as a female terrain of interest in celebrity, we read more of the feelings and inner lives of male cricketers than female. Kevin Pietersen’s anxieties about being away from home and on losing the captaincy almost get more coverage than his competence on the pitch.

This is not a superficial point. The women’s team are not represented as complex real people in the terrain of popular culture which means that the success of the team doesn’t have the same resonance. The politics of success in sport includes a range of different materialities, of resource and of organisations and institutions, of the sport itself and how it’s played, and of culture and representation.

Media coverage is just one of the dimensions of sporting success, as I’ve argued before in this blog; visibility matters but it’s the form it takes that matters too. Visibility extends beyond ball by ball coverage (although that would be great); being in the public eye can contribute to how success is seen and understood and how much or how little those in sport can benefit from success on the field.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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