Back to the Future...?

I haven’t written on this for almost a year, largely because on the thesis front it has been a bit rubbish. I have gone over and over this ‘third chapter’ and not got very far.

I am starting to feel that I started from the wrong angle – For example, I did not review party literature in which I was interested, or search for a question in the empirical literature, identifying interesting phenomena that might benefit from a different approach

I had an instinct that there might be a way of connecting Weber and Foucault’s work because they seem, in different ways, to address similar concerns about modernity and rationalisation.

I have an interest in political parties and in the Labour Party in particular, how it has changed, its affects on politics and policy in general.

However, these two things have very much been sitting in silos and I have since struggled to connect them all up properly. I thus have three ‘lumps’ of research:

One: on Weber, rationalisation and bureaucracy, with Michels thrown in as ‘weberian’ (although I am less convinced of this – what is my evidence?).

Two: on Foucault, his approach to history, power and the concept of discipline, attempting to draw parallels with Weber.

Three: on main theoretical party literature from Duverger through to Katz & Mair (although I am told that the latter have moved on considerably since their idea of the ‘cartel party’ which I have elaborated).

I am not certain what the connections between these are and I need to find some somehow.

I am therefore going through the 30,000 words of text that I have written in order to try and a) find the theoretical connections, tensions, problems etc; b) have some theoretical points that I would wish to discuss in a case study.

However, mainly the point of doing that is so that I can put aside what I have done so far and start to look at something more concrete. Otherwise I am going to keep going round and round in theoretical circles. To that end, I am also going through some Labour Party texts to try and identify some possible case studies. They will be very small, detailed, possibly quite banal things, but they might just help to crystallise this amorphous mass of dislocated theoretical mush I have got so far.