#in-group

I. Introduction

The novel concern at the centre of this article is how legal academics imagine non-legal academics think about legal academia. Forming part of a broader study funded by the British Academy exploring how non-legal academics standing as ‘outsiders’ perceive the field of legal academia,2 a major aspect of our research possessed an ‘insider’ focus. We sought to capture how legal academics typify their own field, as well as their ‘imaginaries’ as to how they anticipated academics employed in other schools and fields would come to portray them and their discipline. These ‘insider imaginaries’ and the comparison between these and the actual perceptions of ‘outsiders’, provide illuminating insights into an understudied area. While a growing and valuable body of research about legal academia and legal scholars by legal academics exists, ranging from Fiona Cownie's landmark work Legal Academics,3 to a broader scholarship about the research behaviours, patterns and trends within the discipline,4 limited empirical attention has been given to the questions of how legal academics believe their field (and the field's constituents) is perceived by those standing externally to it, and how ’outsiders’ do in fact perceive it. As our research has uncovered, other than Tony Becher's exploration of disciplinary cultures in the 1980s,5 and Paul Trowler's subsequent work with Becher,6 much of the literature around how ‘outsiders’ perceive legal academia comes from scholarly literature generated by the legal academic community itself. This becomes a significant and fascinating source of literature in its own right. While close attention to this body of work demonstrates the extent to which legal academics’ ideas of how ‘outsiders’ think about the legal field rests upon speculation (albeit, often represented as fact), these accounts are nevertheless revealing. What we discovered within that literature was the curious presence of a series of insider imaginaries which consistently highlight the expectation that ’outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia in a largely negative way.

The insider imaginaries appearing within legal scholarship formed the starting point for our research as a means of investigating whether they possess a broader life within the minds of legal academics, as well as in the minds of ‘outsiders’. Undertaken as a scoping study, our investigation explored such questions in the context of the higher education community of academics. We sought to evaluate whether these negative insider imaginaries might be more prevalent within the legal academic community, and to explore the extent to which these aligned with legal academics’ self-perceptions of their field, and indeed, importantly, the actual beliefs of non-legal academics (‘outsiders’). We conducted our empirical research using online surveys to gather data from non-legal academics across different departments in one higher education institution in the U.K., Cardiff University, with the aim of empirically exploring what non-legal academics (‘outsiders’) know or believe about legal academics and legal academia. As an analytical benchmark to evaluate these responses, and a mechanism for eliciting legal academics’ imaginaries, we conducted similar surveys with legal academics (‘benchmarking survey’). At points in this article we pause to consider issues around how non-legal academic ‘outsiders’ come to view the legal academic field,7but with the aim of evaluating the extent to which these align with the imaginaries and self-perceptions of legal academics. Discussion of the results from our benchmarking survey and the connected legal scholarly literature form the central focal points of the current article.

Providing the first study of its kind, this article positions itself in the context of literature aimed at identifying the kinds of conditions that will enhance opportunities for legal academics and others within the academy to work in a more collaborative fashion across traditional disciplinary and sectoral divides.8 While a strong focus has been on the cognitive and structural barriers that need to be overcome to enhance the potential of cross-disciplinary collaborative work,9 an emerging literature is highlighting the critical role that socio-attitudinal, relational and emotional factors can play in both facilitating and hindering integrative collaborative practice.10 While inviting an enquiry of how actors external to a field actually perceive it, and the extent to which inaccurate perceptions and stereotyping of other fields might act as a barrier to cross-disciplinary collaboration,11 our study also underpins the importance of attending to a field's internal constituents in terms of their ‘imagined’ beliefs about how their own field might be regarded by ‘outsiders’. While our analysis of the literature and the responses of our legal academic participants suggest that imagination, rather than empirical reality, plays a significant role in shaping these bleak ideas, these imaginaries can help us to uncover aspects of disciplinary life. Imaginaries can prove illuminating for gaining insight into how actors make sense of their field and mark out its boundaries, just as they can point towards a performative dimension.12 While the faculty of imagination can be prized ‘as an attribute of the creative individual’, enabling ‘the extraordinary person to see beyond the limits of constraining reality’, in ‘visionary’ or potentially ‘transformative’ ways,13 so too can the role of imagination implicate ‘shared perceptions of futures that should or should not be realized’, or of the blurring between ‘real and imagined realities’.14 In turn, underpinning their operative potential, imaginaries can ‘frame and represent alternative futures, link past and future times, enable or restrict actions in space, and naturalize ways of thinking about possible worlds’.15 In these latter respects, our study reveals the presence of insider imaginaries that appear to run counter to aspirations for cross-disciplinary collaboration with others. The harboring of expectationsthat ‘outsiders’ will perceive one's field in a negative, confused and inaccurate light, summons up a range of perceived challenges that could limit the appetite of legal academics to engage in cross-disciplinary collaborative work. Undoubtedly, where those kinds of cross-disciplinary confusions and misunderstandings do exist, these can present significant challenges and frustrations for researchers engaged in collaborative work;16 but what is at issue in the present article is the extent to which those confusions and misunderstandings on the part of ’outsiders’ are generated by imagination rather than being based on empirical reality. Imagination then, is far from benign in its effect—instead, for some it may present a barrier to collaboration in limiting, ruling out, and foreclosing a range of otherwise potentially valuable collaborative partnerships. This is particularly so where investigation of the attitudes and beliefs of ’outsiders’ reveals the presence of more favourable and insightful views of legal academia than is commonly imagined by its ‘insiders’.

Emerging from the scholarly literature, as well as our empirical investigation, is a fairly undisrupted pattern of imaginaries about how ’outsiders’ perceive the legal academic field and its constituents—one that is consistently bleak. As we highlight in our review of the literature, and as is supported by our survey results, underpinning these negative imaginaries is a persistent concern that ’outsiders’ are often operating on the basis of flawed stereotypes of legal academia which fail to align with what legal scholars actually do. While this cognitive deficit on the part of ’outsiders’ is often assumed to exist, it is also an experience reported as real by some legal academics in two key empirical studies.17 That ‘outsiders’ will come to miscast the legal academic field is also treated as phenomenologically real by authors who have highlighted that such misunderstandings and lack of insight arise by virtue of a failure of communication on the part of the legal academy. Murphy and Roberts,18 for example, highlight that the legal academy has ‘failed to provide any significant explanation or justification of what academic lawyers do (as is normally demanded of the theoretical component of a discipline) and thus of what academic law is or might be’. In similar force, Chynoweth19 notes that the failure of the legal research community to ‘adequately explain itself to its peers in other disciplines’ means that ‘it can hardly complain if those peers then judge it by standards other than its own’. For other legal scholars, the failure to communicate what legal academics do is not the concern. Pointing towards more attitudinal factors, some have highlighted that ‘outsiders’ will regard legal scholarship in a negative light or regard it as ‘irrelevant’ by virtue of the inherent weaknesses and methodological problems in legal research and the paradigm orientation of legal scholarship. As we discuss later in this article, such views are often accompanied by a call for the close evaluation of the future of legal academia, its core business, and its ‘identity’ as an academic discipline. In this respect then, while these imaginaries highlight a sense of pessimism about how ‘outsiders’ perceive the field of legal academia, they may also be fairly revealing of some ‘insider’ tensions and uncertainties about the identity of the field itself. A number of authors have noted the self-deprecating tendency of legal academics and the harbouring of insecurities and uncertainties about the field as a whole;20 while these raise questions as to the transmission and communicability of negative assessments of the legal academy externally—they also raise questions about the extent to which this ‘talking-down’ of the field might impact on the attitudes of legal academics to their own discipline.21

Importantly, our survey findings provide us with an opportunity to critically revisit the assumptions about how legal academia is perceived—and imagined. While insider imaginaries emerging from the literature find their expression in the imaginaries of legal academics from our surveys at Cardiff, there are nevertheless two critical and fascinating points of divergence across the survey results that disrupt this persistently bleak characterisation of the legal academic terrain. The first point of divergence is how legal academics think about their own field—as ‘insiders’—as contrasted with how they imagine that those external to their field, will regard it. The second point of divergence is how legal academics imagine outsiders will perceive legal academia, and how in fact non-legal academics come to portray the field. In respect of the first, while one might not be surprised to learn that many constituents of legal academia might find value and derive pleasure from the field in which they are actively engaged, what is fascinating is how the more positive messages we see here about legal academia are rarely, if ever, projected onto the imagined ’outsider’. In respect of the second point of divergence, we find a pronounced divergence between the negative imaginaries of legal academics, and what non-legal academics report in our survey. While this aspect of our survey is more fully reported elsewhere,22 as this article highlights, the assumption that outsiders will generally hold legal academia in a dim light is not borne out in practice.

Both points of divergence appear to stem from a problematic conception of the ’outsider’: one that is based on assertion, rather than inquiry. As we come to argue, this highlights the potential importance of a rethink for the legal academy in terms of how the field is both internally and externally perceived. Given the points of divergence we identify here, there is certainly a pressing need for broader empirical work around how ’outsiders’ do think about legal academia. More fundamentally, however, we suggest that there may also be a need to interrogate in far more depth how legal academics ‘think’ about and ‘portray’ their field—to themselves, and the outside world. To make strides in raising the reputational standing of legal academia as an academic field, as some have urged is now needed,23 and to enhance legal academia's capacity to engage in cross-disciplinary work, greater gains might be made by thinking harder about why law as an academic specialism and pursuit is interesting and exciting to be part of and valuable in the insights it can offer others external to the field. As we argue, it may be time for legal academics to be prepared to project thismessage to the outside world.

II. Literature

The aim of this section, presented in two parts, is to outline the critical literature which underpins the present article, and has served to shape our empirical work and analytical priorities for this study in important ways.

The first part of this section (Part A) engages literature which highlights the importance of legal academics’ imaginaries to our study. That a study aimed principally at evaluating how ‘outsiders’ perceive legal academia should end up becoming fascinating on account of how legal academics imagine their field is regarded by outsiders, might seem surprising. When we embarked upon the overarching study, our main purpose was to investigate the beliefs, attitudes and knowledge of non-legal academic ’outsiders’—yet this still implicated ‘insiders’. From the outset, it was clear that to be meaningful, a study aimed at eliciting responses from non-legal academics about the field of legal academia, also needed to centralise the perspectives of legal academics. Our ability to assess the responses of non-legal academics and to judge the extent to which they aligned with ‘legal academia’, correspondingly required us to investigate ‘insider’ norms from within the legal academic community via benchmarking surveys.

That the imaginaries of legal academics constituted an important theme, became apparent at the point of undertaking an extensive literature review designed to identify the presence of other work that might reveal how non-legal academics portrayed the field of legal academia. On investigating the non-legal academic literature, as we highlight below, we found remarkably little of substance on this topic. While an oblique finding, what we identified was a body of legal scholarship which commented on how ’outsiders’ perceived legal academia. In this respect, two things stood out; the extent to which these accounts were driven by speculation and ‘imagination’, and the extent to which it was asserted that those outside of legal academia hold the field in very low regard. This interesting finding led us to more deeply centralize in our study the insider imaginaries produced by legal academics themselves, and to include this aspect as a specific query at a range of junctures in the benchmarking surveys. By virtue of this, our subsequent survey sought to capture three different perspectives: legal academic self-perceptions (insiders), legal academic imaginaries of how ‘outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia, and the perspectives of outsiders themselves.

In the second part of this section (Part B), we turn our attention to the literature that informed our broader survey design. A study aimed at evaluating how the field of legal academia is perceived by multiple audiences, consisting of those internal to it (which for our purposes also included two sub-populations—vocational legal scholars and academic legal scholars), those external to it (non-legal academic ‘outsiders’), and indeed, how its insiders imagine ‘outsiders’ are likely to portray it, poses some interesting and unique challenges in terms of survey design. These included quite fundamental issues, ranging from what kinds of questions and queries one should pose in order to elicit meaningful portrayals of ‘legal academia’, to how one designs a robust survey aimed at eliciting and comparing responses from quite distinctive audiences. As we highlight in the second part of the section, we greatly profited from engaging strongly with earlier empirical approaches in legal studies, which while narrower in scope and aimed at eliciting ‘insider’ perspectives, provided us with important cues as to how we design a survey that would meet our multiple objectives.

Before we introduce the literature, which forms a critical base for the remainder of the article as a whole, a note on language is required. Throughout the article, subtly different terms are deployed to describe the identity of the individual or individuals that stand external to the legal academic field. This is particularly apparent within the literature, where some authors refer to ‘Other(s)’ or ‘Outsider(s)’ or broader terms. The lack of stable language used to refer to this external (non-legal academic) population is also attended by some ambiguity around which ‘external’ populations that such authors point to, with some centralizing non-legal academics, ‘non-lawyers’, specific sub-populations within higher education, or more hazily-cast populations still which could refer to a range of publics or the world-at-large. While imperfect, and our engagement with the literature throughout much of this article results in some interchangeable use of terminology, our preferred term for signalling all those external to the legal academic field, is ‘Outsider’ or ‘Outsiders’,24although we also have recourse to the terms ‘Others’ or ‘Others’/‘Outsiders’. In the context of our survey, the question of the identity of the ‘Other’/‘Outsider’ is clear and far narrower, relating exclusively to non-legal academics employed at Cardiff University.

A. Perceptions of Legal Academia and the Importance of ‘Insider Imaginaries’

As noted above, the overarching aim of our main study was to focus on how non-legal academics perceive legal academia and legal academics. However, the question of how legal academics perceive themselves and their field and how they imagine others within the academy would perceive the legal academy became a fascinating topic in its own right. This is not only by virtue of the results from the benchmarking survey, but also arises by virtue of our analysis of legal scholarship and those moments when legal scholars have ventured views on how ’outsiders’ regard the field.

In exploring the literature on how non-legal academics view legal academics, and searching for instances where legal academics strongly featured within non-legal scholarship by which to assess ‘how others see us’, it became apparent that there is remarkably little work available.25 That is not to say that legal scholarship does not emerge within the corpus of other disciplines, nor that law is not interesting to other disciplines, but in terms of legal academia being the focus—whether for empirical evaluation or even as the subjects of speculation—for non-legal academics, such accounts were far and few between. Legal academics, where they emerge, are such marginal characters, so that these cameo appearances told us virtually nothing about how others might regard legal academia.26 In terms of work that enables us to capture the views and attitudes of a wider population of non-legal academics about legal academia and its constituents, Tony Becher's27 empirical study undertaken in the 1980s constitutes a noteworthy exception.28But beyond Becher, we were surprised to find that our main sources on this topic came from within legal academia itself. Here we find that a variety of authors have ventured views about how the external world and/or legal academics do or might regard the field.

So, we start with Becher. While not the sole focus, Becher's29 small-scale study of the nature of academic disciplines included law—alongside chemistry, physics, biology, mechanical engineering, pharmacy, economics, sociology, history, modern languages, geography and mathematics.30

Undertaking interviews with practising academics from these fields in institutions in the U.K. and the U.S., Becher sought to investigate the characteristics of these disciplines, epistemological and methodological issues, as well as concerns around career patterns, reputations and rewards, and practitioners’ ‘value systems’. Embedded within this latter category, and of interest here, Becher also explored practitioners’ characterisations of other disciplines and disciplinary actors. Noting that academics’ perceptions of other disciplines and disciplinary practitioners seemed to be ‘surprisingly hazy’, ‘neither particularly perceptive nor particularly illuminating’,31 and on the whole ‘rather crude and hostile’, Becher nevertheless found that the ‘gallery of stereotypes’32 produced discernibly different profiles of the academic subjects in question. To those outside the field, Becher notes that the predominant view of academic lawyers,

[I]s that they are not really academic—“arcane, distant and alien: an appendage to the academic world”. Their personal qualities are dubious: vociferous, untrustworthy, immoral, narrow, and arrogant: though kinder eyes see them as impressive and intelligent. The discipline is variously described as unexciting, uncreative, and comprising a series of intellectual puzzles scattered among “large areas of description”.33

This negative view, Becher found, also seemed ‘to be shared by its victims’.34 This speaks not only to a self-confessed tendency of legal academics ‘towards self-denigration’, or ‘a sense of doubt about one's intellectual quality’, but also the views of different legal academic communities towards each other, expressing greater or lesser levels of esteem.35While U.S. academic lawyers expressed concerns that their ‘techniques and methodologies’ might not be sufficiently probing or fundamental, some cast their British counterparts as ‘narrow and uninteresting’, ‘atheoretical, ad hoc, case-orientated and not much interested in categories and concepts’.36 In contrast, while English legal scholars themselves downplayed the ‘scholarly’ status of English academic law, suggesting it shared the ‘anti-intellectual ethos of practising lawyers’, was ‘insular’, standing separate to other fields, and ‘based on a narrow and isolated education’,37 the view of legal academia across the Atlantic was far more favorable, presented (in contrast to English legal academia), as a ‘higher tradition of worthwhile academic thought’.

Unsurprisingly, given the novelty of Becher's work and the broad ranging enquiry about the ‘cultures’ inhabiting higher education, Tribes and Territories and his subsequent edition of the text with Paul Trowler,38 have become heavily-cited classics. Moreover, his approach has also inspired others to investigate the ‘cultures’ and everyday practices within their own fields, including law.39 Nevertheless, in terms of investigating how different disciplinary actors perceive other disciplines, including law, Becher and Trowler's work continues to stand apart. For broader commentary which attempts to capture how ‘others’ /‘outsiders’ view the discipline as a whole then, our main sources on this topic come from legal scholarship produced by the legal academic community itself.

Although often arising as a marginal theme, various legal academics have ventured views about how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ regard academic law and its constituents. These views consist of three main kinds: anecdotal reports, ‘thought experiments’, or assertions presented as ‘fact’. Importantly, none of these accounts claim to be based upon an empirical evaluation of what non-legal academics think. Nor do these accounts point to broader evidence from the field to substantiate how legal academics are regarded. While we highlight the strong possibility that the ‘other’ stands as a rhetorical vehicle, what is particularly striking is the extent to which the view that non-legal academics will regard legal academics in a negative light arises as a persistent and fairly undisrupted theme within the literature.

1. Anecdotal Reports

No doubt many legal academics can point to social exchanges which suggest that some ‘others’/‘outsiders’, whether within the academy or among the lay public, have a fairly limited insight into what legal academics do or the kind of concerns which drive legal academic research. Based on her interviews conducted during 2002 and 2003 with 54 U.K. legal academics, Cownie notes how outsiders, even within the academy, ‘frequently characterise law as vocational’.40

While all her interviewees worked in academic, rather than vocational law departments, a few of them reported a lack of understanding of what a ‘legal academic’ is or does. Some complained of being confused ‘with practicing lawyers’,41 while another commented that ‘[e]ven in universities, there are people who think we’re all in practice’.42 Cownie comments that because the discipline of law is not ‘merely vocational or staffed exclusively by practitioners’ it would seem that legal academics have ‘failed to communicate themselves even to closer observers of academic life’.43 In fact, only around 35% of legal academics in Russell Group institutions are qualified to practice law.44 Cownie's comment might find its basis not only in what her interviews revealed, but also her analysis of Becher,45 and Becher and Trowler's46 representations of the legal academic terrain.47 The mischaracterization of the legal field by ‘others’ within the wider academy was also a theme arising from Owens and Noblet's study with U.S. environmental law professors engaged in environmental legal research and related cross-disciplinary work.48

Highlighting the frequency by which ‘people outside of the legal academy often misunderstand the kinds of questions that interest law professors’, the authors note that,

Ironically, for the most commonly cited problem was that nonlawyers tend to ask for help with narrow legal issues—in other words, for the kinds of focused legal analyses that critics sometimes allege is the antithesis of interdisciplinary work—rather than on the more systemic questions that tend to interest legal academics.49

The accounts presented, of course, do not present empirical insights about how non-legal academics do in fact perceive the discipline of law. That is not the aim of either study. Cownie's work was aimed at gaining insights into the (wider) lived experiences of those legal academics, and Owen and Noblet sought to explore environmental legal professors’ attitudes towards, and experiences of, cross-disciplinary work. Nevertheless, while not their aim, there is a risk of being left with the impression that non-legal academics do in factcommonly or frequently miscast the legal discipline and the work of legal academics. While Cownie's research and Owen and Noblet's study reveals the experiences of some legal academics finding themselves being mischaracterized by ‘others’/‘outsiders’, and presents a fascinating hypothesis for empirical evaluation, those accounts constitute an unreliable proxy for identifying what ‘others’ do in fact know or believe about legal academics.

2. The Thought Experiment

Stolker's work provides the source of the ‘thought experiment’.50 Noting how the discipline of law has fallen behind other fields which have become far more dominant in respect of qualitative evaluations of academic research and the contest for ‘research funds’, Stolker asks why this should be the case by adopting ‘the perspective of other disciplines’. He surmises that other disciplines would view legal scholarship in the following way,

[T]o have a strong national focus, an individualistic nature and a rather peculiar publishing culture; it is normative, commentative, a discipline lacking an explicitly-defined scholarly method, and one with little interest in empirical research. As a result, it is a remarkable discipline in terms of both form and content. . . .[I]t is difficult to obtain a clear picture of what we do. . .. 51

Stolker's imaginary of ‘others’, of course, strongly intersects with accounts based on anecdotal reports. Rather than offering a description based on external evidence (and perhaps also falling short of a genuine ‘thought-experiment’), how the ‘other’/‘outsider’ thinks stands as pure assertion. The ‘other’, he imagines, encounters difficulties in understanding what legal academics do, but also curiously s/he appears to possess a sophisticated level of insight in picking up some key ingredients of the internal norms of the field. Further elements of Stolker's ‘other’/‘outsider’ depiction are contestable. First, his portrayal of how ‘other’ disciplines will view legal scholarship looks suspiciously like an ‘insider’ perspective, given that the concerns raised can be detected in many legal scholars’ evaluations of legal academia in Anglo-American literature. Secondly, while Stolker is concerned that ‘others’ will find it hard to get a clear picture of what legal academics do, this seems every bit as applicable to the ‘insider’. It might be noted that even for legal scholars it is quite a tall order to ‘presume broad knowledge’ of the research practices which inhabit the field, given the volume of work produced and the wide variety of sub-specialisms within it.52 As such, Stolker's account perhaps more ably portrays an ‘insider’ view—or more specifically his insider view (rather than an external view). And arguably, sharing much in common with our final category—assertion—the portrayal of ‘other(s)’/’outsider(s)’ may well simply operate as a rhetorical device by which to prompt the broader evaluation of concerns about the discipline from an insider perspective.

3 Pure AssertionThe largest category in terms of ‘how others/outsiders regard us’ as a theme arising in legal scholarship, is far trickier to classify. In general, it is often unclear who the other/outsider is, and such work frequently slips and slides between others/outsiders who are out there in ‘the world’ or (non-legal) others/outsiders within the academic community. Either way, the emphasis is upon the ‘other’ as an outsider, standing external to the legal academy. While evidently not based upon empirical research, nor offered explicitly as ‘thought experiments’ or highlighted as based on anecdotal experience, in the work we analyzed, the views expressed take the form of pure assertions, albeit ones which often appear to operate as rhetorical devices. Take for example, Smits who notes that ‘not only do outsiders accuse legal science of being unacademic, but also legal scholars themselves no longer seem to know which discipline they practice’.53 Within the confines of the University, he notes that ‘legal scholars often have a hard time convincing colleagues from other disciplines about their methodology’ and ‘too often, the study of law is considered the odd one out in the modern university’.54 Critically, no support for any of these propositions is offered. Positioning this as a moment of crisis for the field, albeit a surprising one, he offers a speedy review of the fall of the field from a position of being held in high esteem, to its subsequent demise in the eyes of others. Providing the foundation for the development of empirical science, he argues that in the nineteenth century, ‘legal science was seen as one of the most important achievements of human civilization and even superior to many other academic disciplines’, but by the twenty-first century, that view had shifted:

The image that the outside world has of legal academics is apparently no longer based on these (or other) merits. The general tendency is to say that ‘real’ knowledge cannot be based upon conceptual constructions, the findings of coherence, or the development of abstract theories (all important parts of the ‘internal’ approach to law) but should rest on empirical work instead.55

Of course, the call for more engagement with empirical approaches in legal scholarship has been a strong feature of debate within legal academia over the past few decades,56 and Smits’ himself notes the increasing influence of empiricism on legal studies. In part, this is his concern —or at least the pivot for his later arguments: that law is increasingly under pressure to become like other disciplines to make it more ‘scientific’. This marks out Smits’ next move. Arguing that a wholesale shift in that direction would be problematic, Smits concentrates his efforts on providing a strong defence of conceptual work, one that recasts legal science, teases out and elevates the importance of its normative core. It is an account that is highly engaging and thought-provoking. But his portrayal of how the ‘outside world’ regards legal academia stands as assertion. It is rendered immediately suspect by virtue of the asserted homogeneity of others’/outsiders’ views in respect of legal academia. In respect of these claims, it takes little effort to displace them. He paints an unbelievable characterization of the ‘other’/‘outsider’ who exclusively deifies the empirical and ignores the value of other kinds of work. In doing so, Smits’ account ignores debates in other fields,57 including the social sciences, which promote the value of, and assert the inescapable place for conceptual and normative work—every bit as strongly as Smits goes on to do.58 Moreover, Smits’ paradigm of science, which he then projects on the “outside world” (and then reflects back on “legal science”) is fatally one-dimensional; it is a paradigm of science that is strongly contested within the sciences themselves.59 As such, it is hard to escape the sense of irony that flows from an account that cautions against moving towards empiricism, when it is so strongly driven by speculation about the ‘outside world’. That is not to say that the ‘other’/‘outsider’ that Smits presents might not exist in some form, but that the actual existence of this ‘other’ is fairly irrelevant. Instead this caricature of the ‘outside world’ is a pure literary construction. The ‘other’/‘outsider’ standing in this outside world constitutes an external threat (‘traditional legal scholarship has been under attack for quite some time now’60) which has driven a debate over the future of the field. Smits’ aim is to respond to this threat, engage in this (self-constructed) “debate”, by reconceptualising the terrain of legal scholarship—a field which he argues possesses its distinctiveness and strength by virtue of its normative orientation and its ‘ability to reflect upon what people and organizations legally ought to do’.61

The use of the ‘other’/‘outsider’ trope as a rhetorical device by which to contemplate the discipline and provoke contemplation of the tensions and shifts within it, also emerges within Vick's work around legal academia and interdisciplinarity.62 While embracing aspects of Weinstein's work, which itself draws on a number of empirical studies,63 albeit in respect of mixed populations of law students and lawyers, Vick highlights a potential barrier to collaboration by virtue of there being ‘a strong perception, in some, that lawyers are bad collaborators because they tend to be pushy know-it-alls’.64 Nevertheless, the other/outsider in Vick's account is mainly based on assertion, albeit one that strongly resonates with attitudes emerging from Becher's and Cownie's interviews. He notes (as Smits had), how the uncertainties legal scholars harbor about their own discipline might deleteriously impact on others’ perceptions of the field, so that,

To this day, many within universities harbour a palpable scepticism about the academic rigour of legal scholarship which is often a reaction to the close association of the discipline of law within the legal profession—a skills-orientated profession at that. In fact, the self-doubt engendered by perceptions that law is as much a professional discipline as an academic one may partly explain why some legal scholars turn to interdisciplinary research. Moreover the same disciplinary inferiority complex might also partly explain the tenor of criticism some academics have directed at such research.65

Still sitting within the category of ‘assertion’ about how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ regard legal academics, is the complaint that legal scholars are not regarded at all. In the early 80s, Mark Tushnet famously highlighted the ‘intellectual marginality of legal scholarship’.66 Tracing the rise and fall of the influence of legal scholarship in the broader social sphere he noted that while ‘in the past, legal thought has been a component of important intellectual movements. . .’, now ‘few of the various strands of contemporary thought are informed by legal scholarship’67—a position all the more surprising given the ‘immense role that law plays in American society’.68 Tushnet's diagnosis rested on the extent to which legal scholarship is strongly tied to professional legal education, ‘the desire to support the rule of law, and the attempt to escape the implications of Realism’.69 For this reason he noted, many of the ‘main currents of twentieth-century intellectual life’ prove irrelevant for lawyers with this professional legal orientation.70 His broader analysis as to the future relevancy of the discipline makes for fairly depressing reading. He noted that while one area of legal scholarship, in particular, social theory, has the capacity to address epistemological problems of social knowledge, it occupies little more than a toehold in law schools. Moreover, such an approach arguably poses a fundamental challenge to law as a field; as Tushnet argued, abandoning the ‘liberal theory of law’ and turning away from its traditional professional orientation ‘might deny law its privileged status as a device’.71

While much time has elapsed since Tushnet's contribution, it might be thought such concerns have diminished over time in light of increased cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaborative activity—the kind of step-change that grant funders, governments and higher education institutions have been strongly pushing for.72 Nevertheless, the apparent rise in such collaborative work, for some, has made the absence of engagement with law seem that much more obvious. Even in contemporary fields noted for their high levels of cross-disciplinary collaboration, such as environmental research, legal researchers have complained about the degree to which the field of environmental legal research is passed over.73

That ‘others’/‘outsiders’ exclude, ignore or perceive as wholly irrelevant the body of legal scholarly work has also troubled a range of U.K. authors. Echoing the U.S. literature, a recurring complaint is the lack of cross-disciplinary mutuality. While legal academics frequently turn to a multitude of other disciplines for inspiration, it is claimed that scholars from other disciplines are disinterested in legal academia.74 In common with Tushnet's more substantive concerns about the marginality of law as a discipline in the eyes of others, is the critique offered by Geoffrey Samuel. Noting the deliberate exclusion of law from social scientific work, Samuel highlights that while regrettable, ‘it is understandable in some ways why social science theorists might not wish to take lawyers seriously’.75 He argues that ‘it would seem to some outside the discipline to be a subject that has little to contribute to social science epistemology’.76 The root of his argument is based on much of legal scholarship being tied to an ‘authority paradigm’ rather than one of ‘enquiry’, so that law ‘is not really a discipline whose validity is confirmed by correspondence with reality (although the success or failure of a particular law can be judged by its social effects)’.77While disciplines like the social sciences attempt to investigate and model aspects of the external world, Samuel claims that legal scholarly work within the ‘authority paradigm’ in contrast, ‘is not really telling us much about the world. It is, like astrology or numerology, telling us about formalism, coherence, and philosophy in a world constructed by consenting insiders’.78 Strongly resonating with Tushnet, Samuel's concern of course, is why legal scholarship might prove irrelevant to other fields (rather than evidencing how and if it is). In this respect the putative ‘irrelevancy’ of legal scholarship (in the eyes of these imagined ‘others’), constitutes a powerful vehicle for evaluating the terrain—one that invites deeper exploration of what Samuel regards as a fundamental (and perhaps insurmountable) challenge to the discipline the moment that its paradigm orientation shifts from ‘authority’ to a realist one driven by enquiry.

In contrast with these accounts, Roger Cotterrell's evaluation is focused on the question of how legal scholarship (and at points, ‘law’ more generally), has come to be neglected by the social sciences.79 Highlighting that ‘the sociological study of law has been marginalized in the image of sociology-as-discipline’,80 Cotterrell traces what happens to ‘legal sociology’ when it moves within the field of mainstream sociology. The process he describes is one where the ‘legal’ dissipates, and is transformed into ‘something more amenable to observational methods of research or, at least, not requiring engagement with the object “law” constructed in legal discourse’.81 He notes that while one of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber regarded his ‘studies of law as the most complete part of his work’, these aspects have proved to be peripheral to sociology-as-discipline which has ‘tended to focus on behaviour and avoid entanglement with the mysteries of jurisprudence’.82 The same process of filtering out the legal, he notes, can be said of Emile Durkheim whose work has proved highly influential to contemporary sociology. While Durkheim centralized the sociological study of law and legal institutions, ‘the works which most strongly reflect this concern are neglected in Anglo-American sociology and in many cases have remained untranslated into English’.83 Cotterrell highlights a similar concern in respect of Talcott Parsons’ work. He notes that despite Parsons making frequent incursions into the world of law and regarding law as significant for sociological analysis,

[N]o confrontation with legal discourse takes place. Parsons betrays no recognition of the questions which are raised in so much legal literature . . . about the nature of transformations occurring in Western legal doctrine in recent decades. Yet these matters demand sociological analysis.84

The aim here is not to take issue with any of the substantive claims as to spaces and bodies of work where law and legal scholarship is suspiciously absent. Instead, our interest is in how the ‘other’ emerges in such accounts, and the extent to which these ‘others’, who purportedly disregard or neglect legal scholarship, are grounded in reality. The ‘other’ as s/he (or indeed they) emerges, seems to be exclusively based on assertion rather than based on empirical investigation. Whether invoked as thought experiment, assertion or narrated through anecdotal experience, none of these accounts aim to unravel or explore the truth of their assertions about how ‘others’ regard legal academia. Perhaps the constant repetition of these claims, through a range of literatures (often by individuals of high standing within legal studies) in the absence of competing accounts, helps to reinforce the idea that legal academia does indeed maintain a low standing in the eyes of others. Nevertheless, as noted above, the manner by which this putative ‘other’ is invoked, requires us to critically stand back from these claims. The first point to be made here is that the majority of these accounts present a homogenous external ‘other’—an actor, actors, a discipline, or perhaps the entire world, that comes to miscast, misrepresent, regard as irrelevant, or present in a negative light or one-dimensional way, legal academia. And while a number of authors point towards more specific populations (i.e. some ‘others’ rather than the entire ‘world’), there is still no consideration of how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ are likely, based on differing levels of interaction with the field, to regard it in different ways. It seems, we think, fairly implausible that all ‘others’ will come to view the field of legal academia through the same negative lens—even if one might suppose that some others might perceive legal scholarship in the way that these authors describe.

A second concern relates to the internal-facing nature of the accounts offered and the fleeting emergence of the ‘other’ in that context. There is no contemplation given as to how the very same concerns—being passed over or misunderstood by other disciplines,85 or even ‘crises’ about the characterization of one's own field and its relevancy86—populate most, if not all, disciplines.87 The complaint that law proves irrelevant to ‘others’, whilst then retreating back within the field of legal scholarship to contemplate its internal dynamics, seems fairly hollow in substance. Instead, a more valuable critique might emerge from evaluating how many aspects of the ‘crisis’ some have highlighted as occurring within the field of legal academia are shared in common with other disciplines. Such an enquiry can better interrogate what ‘relevancy’ means in this context, evaluate who are the winners and losers in the game of ‘relevancy’, and why. But of course, the aim of these works, as noted above, does not appear to be directed towards a genuine evaluation of how non-legal academics really perceive the field of legal academia nor to contemplate the challenges of gaining insight into other fields; rather, in the main, the ‘other’ appears to stand as a strategic trope, a rhetorical vehicle for reflecting upon the field of legal academia itself.

Overall, our evaluation of the literature suggests a strongly negative set of imaginaries held by legal academics, in terms of how they portray the ’outsiders’/‘other’ view of the field of legal academia. Yet insofar as the literature presents a fairly small population of legal thinkers, many of whom came to write on the topic decades ago, our benchmarking survey with legal academics at Cardiff University gives us the opportunity to identify whether these negative depictions continue to emerge in the legal academic community, and whether they are widely held amongst that population. So too are we able to investigate, even if only in a small way, how ‘outsiders’ within the university context do think about legal academia, and to explore the extent to which these might converge or diverge from the imaginaries emerging within the legal scholarship, and by legal scholars in our survey.

B. Portrayals of Legal Academia: Characterising Approaches to Legal Research

We turn then, from portrayals of legal academia in the literature, to the question of how one designs a survey that meaningfully captures comparative data that can highlight how multiple audiences come to portray legal academia in practice. As we discuss later in this article, our survey involved posing a wide range of questions to survey participants, some of which invited respondents to provide broad field wide depictions—but here we focus on the literature that provided us with critical cues as to how we might elicit more specific portrayals around legal academic research. Insofar as the imaginaries emerging in legal scholarship anticipated that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ would regard the field of law as strongly vocational in orientation, as individualistic, insular, descriptive, normative, disinterested in empirical research, and distant from other disciplines, we sought to explore the extent to which these kinds of characterizations emerged within the responses of non-legal academics, and within the imaginaries of our legal academic survey respondents.

Our aim was to elicit fairly specific insights into how these different populations portrayed legal research, consisting of questions ranging from the nature of, and kinds of approaches legal academics (might) take to legal research. Such questions would be posed to non-legal academics, whilst in the benchmark survey, we sought to ask legal academics to map out their actual approaches to legal research (and in the case of those on teaching and scholarship contracts, their approaches to legal scholarship) and as is particularly central to this article, we also asked legal academics to imagine how non-legal academics would respond to the same questions.

Nevertheless, while our work is novel in attempting a systematic analysis of how the views of ‘insiders’, ‘insider imaginaries of others’ and ‘others’ align, we are not the first to empirically investigate the research approaches that legal academics adopt in practice. As such, the aim here is to highlight intersecting scholarship, and how it connects to two overarching concerns that were particularly pressing for us at the point of survey design: how one investigates academics’ views around research approaches that will capture something valuable, and how one does so in a way that will make sense for an external (‘other’) audience that may have varying levels of insight into the field of legal academia and legal research. While many of the authors we have pointed to earlier have attempted field-wide description, our focus here is on some of the methodological challenges inherent in empirical attempts to ‘capture’ the field, and research approaches within it.

1 ‘Black-Letter Law’ and ‘Socio-Legal’ Approaches

Perhaps the most obvious way of categorizing legal research approaches is to draw upon the traditional ‘black-letter law’88 versus ‘socio-legal studies’ dichotomy, or sub-variants of this.89

The imaginaries emerging within the legal scholarship, of course, play completely into this division, and serve to overwhelmingly reflect the view that others will perceive the field in a way that mirrors a ‘purely doctrinal’ conception of legal scholarship. While these terms might baffle some those external to legal academia, within the legal scholarly community, these terms tacitly express a lot. As Bartie notes, historically, the dominant conception of law in terms of legal scholarship was largely wedded to legal education, with scholarship directed at an audience comprised mainly of legal professionals or students.90

Captured by the concepts of ‘doctrinalism’ or ‘black-letter law’, scholarship falling into this tradition is focused primarily on,

[L]egal principle (largely that generated by courts but also the legislature); basing argument and prescription on a normative premise which is not unpacked or explained; reacting to events comprising of changes to the law by judges or legislatures; and looking for deficiencies in legal principles, suggesting ways to improve them or clarifying the law so that judges or legislatures can better understand their development. The methodology adopted is likened to that of the courts with primary focus resting on the internal logic of judgments or statute.91

Not all, however, would agree with such a definition. Smits for example claims that ‘the days of a purely doctrinal approach . . . if those times ever existed at all—are now far behind us’.92 From this position, he goes on to advocate a form of legal scholarship—one which elevates the normative core of the field—in a way that still fits squarely within Bartie's description. Whether real or apparent, most accept that the concept of ‘black-letter law’ summons up an approach within legal studies that whether rightly or wrongly, has been subject to sustained criticism. The concern, as expressed by some, has been of the tight coupling with the needs of the legal profession, which has encouraged ‘the production of textbooks and other items of utility to practitioners, such as case notes and commentaries on statutes, while inhibiting the production of the kind of original theoretical research which the academy in general would value’.93 As Cownie notes, this remained the dominant model of teaching and research until part way through the twentieth century when a number of alternative approaches emerged offering alternative paradigms—critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, socio-legal studies and ‘law in context’.94 While Cownie comments that there was little evidence to support the extent to which these alternative approaches had become entrenched within the field of legal studies, leading some to assume that ‘doctrinal analysis retained its dominance over legal education and legal research’,95 Cownie's empirical study of English legal academics96 led her to revise her views.

The findings which led Cownie to depict the discipline as one that was in ‘transition’, as well as her findings in respect of how legal academics understood the labels of ‘black-letter law’ and ‘socio-legal studies’, prove particularly germane here. Asking interviewees to position their research and teaching according to a range of paradigm orientations on a scale—‘from doctrinal [generally referred to by academic lawyers as ‘black-letter’], through socio-legal studies to critical legal studies (CLS) and feminist’97—Cownie reported that 10 per cent described themselves as taking a socio-legal/CLS approach, 40 per cent as adopting a socio-legal approach, with the remaining half describing their approach as black-letter.98 Noting that while a range of alternative approaches to doctrinal law appeared to have become firmly established in academic law, socio-legal studies had emerged as the ‘major challenger’. Critically, however, her work also revealed that the categories of ‘black-letter law’ and ‘socio-legal’ were ill-understood in terms of what kinds of research either actually accommodated. While just under a fifth of her respondents depicted their approach ‘without qualification’ as black-letter law, about a third of the total offered a qualified answer, noting that this ‘did not mean that they concentrated solely on legal rules’ but that it was also important ‘to introduce contextual issues (social, political, economic and so forth)’.99 While socio-legal studies is a broad church, embracing a wide range of topics, subject-matter and a large array of research methodologies and methods, Cownie noted that some of her legal academic respondents held a belief that socio-legal studies referred ‘exclusively to empirical investigation of the law, using standard quantitative social science methodology’.100 As such, she highlighted the need for caution with these terms, given their interpretive ambiguity:

Some of those describing themselves as ‘’black-letter’ appeared to be adopting a very similar, not to say, identical, approach to others who described themselves as ‘socio-legal’, so that the line between legal academics adopting a doctrinal perspective and those adopting a socio-legal perspective is not always clear.101

Cownie observed that the fluidity of these research descriptors, in particular the conflation of ‘socio-legal’ with ‘empirical’, had ramifications for her impression of the field; conceivably, she noted, the community of socio-legal lawyers might well be larger than appeared on her data.102

Notwithstanding these concerns, Cownie's overall findings led her to assert that purely doctrinal law no longer ‘dominates the legal academy in the way it used to’. Highlighting a range of changes of research orientation and approach, Cownie described a field in transition,

Looking at the culture of the discipline as a whole, it becomes clear that, whatever they call themselves, the majority of academic lawyers occupy the middle ground between the two extremes of pure doctrinal analysis and a highly theoretical approach to the study of law. Arguably, law is a discipline in transition, with a culture where a small group still clings to a purely doctrinal approach, but a very large group (whether they describe themselves as socio-legal or not) are mixing traditional methods of analysis with analysis drawn from a range of other disciplines among the social sciences and humanities, while other small but significant groups are mainly concerned with the application of feminist ideas to law or in analysis of law which, like socio-legal studies, is interdisciplinary in nature but tends to be more overtly concerned with critical theory.103

Of course, not all have quickly accepted these claims. Pointing to critique around this aspect of Cownie's methods and findings, in particular by virtue of the (nearly) catch-all definition afforded to ‘socio-legal studies’, Bartie argues that Cownie's assessment of the field can ‘be viewed as either an accurate reflection of movements in legal scholarship or as a form of advocacy’.104 Whether an ‘accurate reflection’ or not, the specific point under debate—and Cownie's words of caution—are instructive in themselves and further underline the contested (and political) nature of the terms ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal studies’.105 This consideration, coupled with our main survey audience, consisting of non-legal academics, for whom the terms ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal studies’ might have little purchase, pointed towards the need to explore different and perhaps more granular descriptors for categorizing research approaches in law.

2. Between and Across Categories - Mixed Approaches

A range of alternative approaches can be identified for attempting to capture the different methodologies and methods deployed by legal academics in ways that move beyond the potentially troubled dichotomy of ‘black-letter law’ and ‘socio-legal studies’ in favour of a more granular approach. While there are some who rely on the ‘published discourse’ of the field,106 we sought out empirical approaches which centralized academics’ own representations of their research approaches. Our aim was not to sum up or capture a field in its entirety but rather to gain more detailed impressions about a particular population of legal academics and their research practice and approaches. In fact, there are few examples of such work attempting meta-disciplinary analysis of this kind in a way that builds upon Cownie's study. One of the rare exceptions to this has been more recently provided by Siems and Síthigh.107 Their method and overarching framework provides a source of fresh inspiration for thinking about different ways of mapping research orientations in legal academia. Moving away from the more conventional labels of ‘doctrinal’/‘black-letter law’ and ‘socio-legal’, the authors organize research orientations through the conceptual framework of “law as a practical discipline”, “law as humanities” and “law as social sciences”.108 While the authors set out to explore the interplay between “macro-level” (the position of law schools within university structures) and “micro-level” factors, it is the latter that is of particular interest here. Mapping the orientation of legal academics using “ternary plots”, the overall results are plotted onto a triangle with each of the three research orientations located at a corner. An academic whose work is strongly concentrated on practically and vocationally orientated work, for example, will appear in the “law as a practical discipline” corner. Importantly, however, the approach can also show the “balance” between these three approaches, and their overall orientation. Within the triangle sits an inverted triangle that distinguishes where academics’ research profiles become mixed between approaches, with points falling within the central area when this is the case.

There are numerous merits to this approach, and it elegantly builds on previous attempts to map legal research. It provides a method that is capable of capturing the more dynamic and complex features of research profiles where scholars move between or across the categories of ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal’. In avoiding these terms explicitly, the approach squarely addresses Cownie's concern as to the “fluidity” that these terms could invite. Siems and Síthigh's approach can be commended for broader reasons. While others have attempted to identify patterns relating to different intellectual traditions (e.g. doctrinal, feminist, empirical etc.) using words and phrases as proxies to search across large databases of published legal scholarship,110 a key weakness is that such analyses point to very general trends across the legal scholarly terrain. What they cannot tell us is about research orientations of specific legal academics, or the extent to which the work of different researchers might demonstrate methodological plurality. In similar force, the choice of ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal’ either demands a stark choice, or a qualified one, leaving us unclear quite where researchers actually ‘fit’. In contrast, this is where Siems and Síthigh's contribution is particularly valuable. Noting that legal academics ‘often tend to mix approaches’, the authors comment that it is ‘not uncommon that a legal researcher starts with a historical introduction, then turns to an analysis of the relevant case law and finally engages with socio-political considerations’.111 Such a researcher might depict herself as being split between all three or two particular orientations, rather than falling 100% into a single orientation. Using a written survey, Siems and Síthigh undertook a pilot survey with research active staff at the University of East Anglia in 2010. They invited survey respondents to highlight how frequently on a scale of 0 – 10 (not at all to always) they used one of the three approaches, described in the following way,

Practical legal research, i.e. research aimed at understanding the law using similar approaches to the ones used by practicing lawyers (judges, solicitors etc.);

Legal research as part of humanities, i.e. analysis of legal texts (cases, statutes etc.) using approaches similar to research in humanities (history, philosophy, literature, religion etc.)

Legal research as part of social sciences, i.e. analysis of law in its socio-economic context, similar to research in social sciences (sociology, economics, psychology etc.).112

While the authors note that the sample size is small (n = 17), overall it nevertheless lends further support for Cownie's finding113 that there is a strong prevalence of ‘mixed approaches’ in legal studies, rather than any single orientation (law as practical discipline, as social sciences, or as humanities) being dominant (the results of their pilot survey is shown above in Figure 1).

Figure 1. Mapping Legal Research109 Citation: British Journal of American Legal Studies 9, 1; 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006

Given the aims of our survey, Siems and Síthigh's contribution struck us as particularly valuable for a further reason. As we have already highlighted, we sought to address quite distinct audiences, consisting not only of non-legal academics and legal academics, but also two specific legal academic sub-populations consisting of vocational legal scholars and academic legal scholars. The centralization of more generic typifications of how one goes about research or scholarly practice, which could then be translated into particular paradigm orientations (e.g. for Siems and Síthigh's purposes, ‘practical legal research, legal research as part of humanities, legal research as part of social sciences) would enable us to speak in a comprehensible way to all of our audiences but also elicit granular data around legal research and scholarly orientations.

While Siems and Síthigh's approach provides particular inspiration for the survey design and analytical approach we adopted in enquiring about legal research, we have also benefited from combining aspects of the approaches adopted by Cownie and Ellickson. For our survey design we embraced some of the categorizations offered by Ellickson as well as Siems and Síthigh in order to gain a more granular approach to research approaches which will make sense to ‘insiders’ and ‘others’/‘outsiders’. In addition, rather than asking survey respondents to pick between research orientations in binary fashion, we have used the ‘scaling’ approach that Siems and Síthigh introduce. Our aim has been to build overall individual research profiles, ones which can be subsequently analyzed to assess their key constituent elements and whether they are strongly orientated in one direction or another. The combination of these approaches served to provide a useful and accessible framework for online survey design that could be presented to different audiences, including those which might not be familiar with the concepts of ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal studies’. Nonetheless, as we detail in section three below, we reintroduce these concepts at a later stage, using these as crude analytical tools for evaluating the results in assessing the overall research orientations our respondents offer. Even if these concepts are ambiguous and political, they nevertheless connote meaning within the legal academic community and can give us a sense of the general orientation of the field.114

III. The Study

The aim of this third part of the article is to focus on the study we undertook at Cardiff University across 2016 and 2017. Following an introduction of our methods and research approach, we then turn to set out our findings in respect of the two key queries surrounding how legal academics imagine non-legal academics (‘outsiders’) perceive legal academia. Separate consideration is given to two queries that were central in our study, notably (1) field wide depictions of legal academia, and (2) more specific depictions of the research approaches that legal academics adopt in respect of legal research. While we separate out these queries, as we shall see, analysis of both highlights strikingly consistent themes.

A. Methods and Research Approach

We used online surveys as our method for investigating beliefs, attitudes and knowledge around legal academia at Cardiff University. We consulted with scholars with expertise in survey design in the social sciences, screened our initial survey through a social science focus group, and gained ethical approval for our study in early 2016. We also ran small pilots with legal and non-legal academics to inform the design of the survey we eventually launched. Across the course of 2016 and early 2017, we ran a total of four surveys, in two survey releases. The first survey release occurred in 2016, involving a ‘main’ survey with non-legal academics and a ‘benchmarking’ survey with legal academics. In 2017, we also ran a shorter second survey release, consisting of a main and benchmark survey. The survey questions are presented in Tables 1 to 4 in the Appendix.

The first survey release, which forms the basis of the findings we centralize in this article, required an extensive commitment for survey participants given a large number of questions designed to investigate typifications and perceptions of legal academia. While our broader findings are discussed extensively elsewhere,115 a brief overview of the main components of the surveys provides useful context for what follows. In the main survey aimed at non-legal academics, we sought to elicit detailed insights around how non-legal academics characterize the field of legal academia. Question sets addressed a range of themes including the personality traits of legal academics, the relative prestige of a variety of research outputs/activities, beliefs/knowledge about approaches taken to and nature of legal academic research, non-legal academics’ sources of understanding (e.g. contact with legal academics, films, television etc.) and general (inter)disciplinary disposition. We also asked non-legal academics about their interaction with legal academics, the context of those interactions and about their engagement with legal scholarship. Such factors enabled us to gain some insight into the extent to which non-legal academics venture into the field of law and/or collaborate with legal academics, and whether those factors had any discernible impact upon their responses to questions about the field of legal academia. We also posed a series of broader demographic questions by which to further contextualize responses. Our benchmark survey posed similar questions to legal academics, albeit with the aim of eliciting ‘insider’ knowledge and ‘imaginaries’ about how ‘outsiders’ might regard their field. Gaining a spread of legal academics’ perspectives on their own individual approaches to legal research and scholarship provided, in our view, a promising benchmark for evaluating and comparing the responses of non-legal academics, as well as a useful source of information about the kinds of approaches legal academics purport to take and differences in attitude. The second survey release, consisting of a main survey and benchmarking survey, was aimed at the same general audiences but targeted a smaller number of non-legal academics. The second survey consisted of a small number of questions aimed at testing out slightly different survey techniques (e.g. affording options to ‘rank’ rather than using sliding scales) and eliciting wider data around interactional behaviors and contexts. Across these surveys, all of the three Colleges at Cardiff University were well represented in the sample, with a strong distribution of disciplinary backgrounds, position (e.g. research associates, lecturers, senior lecturers, readers and professors), gender, age and time in service.

The findings presented in this article draw exclusively on the first set of surveys in which a total of 102 non-legal academics (estimated minimum of 3.72% participation rate from non-legal academic population)116 those sections of the survey which sought to elicit, ‘insider views’ of legal academia, ‘insider imaginaries’ of outsiders’ views and ‘outsider views’ themselves on the same questions. These reveal distinct sources of data about the same phenomena which can be evaluated to assess the extent to which they converge or diverge. In this respect two question sets fall into this category, notably “Beliefs and Knowledge about legal academia as a discipline”, and “Nature of and approaches to legal research and scholarship”. These were the only areas of the survey where we asked legal academics to imagine how non-legal academics at Cardiff University would be likely to respond to those specific questions. 117

In our discussion of these findings, we also draw upon broader supportive data from wider aspects of our survey where it is useful and relevant to do so. In thinking about the alignment between legal academic and non-legal academic responses, we refer to some of our analytical work around frequency of interaction between actors within the non-legal academic population with legal academics. In addition, we fleetingly refer to data emerging from a further question which was presented to legal academics as optional, notably how legal academics would describe the discipline of law to the hypothetical non-legal academic. In this latter respect, such narratives add life to and are wholly consistent with other findings which flow from legal academics’ self-portrayals of legal academia: notably of a field that is rich, stimulating and one that legal academics appear to be proud to belong to. Significantly, these upbeat ‘insider’ views stand in stark contrast to how legal academics anticipate outsiders will envisage their field.

Using survey as a method also allowed us to explore demographic differences within the population of legal academics as a whole.118 A broad range of legal research is conducted by legal academics at Cardiff University in the School of Law and Politics. Within this range of study, a variety of approaches to legal research are taken. These can be plotted on a continuum of ‘doctrinal legal studies’ to ‘socio-legal studies’.119 Cardiff is renowned as an important hub for socio-legal scholarship, which is reflected in the fact that the highly-respected Journal of Law and Society was founded in Cardiff in 1974 in the early days of the socio-legal studies movement in the UK.120 More recently, following Adler's cri de coeur,121the School of Law and Politics has been recognised by the Economic and Social Research Council's Doctoral Training Partnership as being fit to offer an MSc Master's degree in Social Science Research Methods on a Socio-Legal pathway. But Cardiff also has a strong reputation for doctrinal scholarship and is the only Russell Group institution in the U.K. to offer vocational legal training. At Cardiff University, law is taught in two Departments within the same School—the Law Department and the Centre for Professional Legal Studies—collectively known as Cardiff Law. These departments form separate centres of legal activity and as such, we see clear points of distinction between them on the basis of typical contract type, and potentially paradigm orientation to law. Out of the 26 legal academic respondents, 6 came from Professional Legal Studies. Holding a strong vocational orientation, the majority of these staff are employed on teaching and scholarship contracts and are engaged in delivery of the Bar Professional Training Course, the Legal Practice Course and the Graduate Diploma in Law. The remaining 20 survey respondents were academic lawyers, most of whom are employed on teaching and research contracts and engaged in the delivery of the LLB and a wide range of postgraduate programmes. When we discuss these legal scholarly populations separately, we describe them as VLS (vocational legal scholars) and ALS (academic legal scholars); where we discuss the law department as a whole, we use the term ‘legal academics’.

B. Insider Perspectives of Legal Academia, Outsiders’ Portrayals of Legal Academia and Insider Imaginaries: Points of Convergence and Divergence

In the main survey, we asked non-legal academics to highlight their beliefs and/or knowledge about legal academia as a discipline as a whole. We provided 21 pre-set key attributes to arrive at a range of descriptors which in principle could apply to a range of fields/specialisms. We identified ‘disciplinary’ descriptors emerging from Cownie's interviews with legal academics,122 as well as those arising from Becher's interviews across 12 disciplines.123 We then reviewed the range of overall key terms and added to these where necessary attribute ‘opposites’ (e.g. ‘interesting’ versus ‘boring’), excluded terms that were overly specific, either in a disciplinary sense or in terms of overall description (e.g. ‘dusty’, ‘white coats’, ‘very left’, ‘Boffins’, ‘fuddy-duddy’, ‘dubious in methodology’) or transformed them in order to achieve more generalizable concepts (e.g. ‘scientific’, ‘methodological’).124

Non-legal academic survey participants could select as many of the attributes as they wished but were asked to select those that they considered best described the discipline. In the benchmarking survey, legal academics were also invited to select from these pre-set attributes on the same terms. We also followed up this question by presenting legal academics with the same list, asking respondents to indicate which attributes they imagined academics from other disciplines would select. The sample of non-legal academics was 102, and the number of legal academics was 26. We report our key findings below highlighting percentages which indicate the frequency by which different participant groups selected particular attributes in each survey. In addition we highlight key contrasts in the overall depictions each population provides, as well as points of convergence and divergence between the self-reports of legal academics (‘insider’), the reports of non-legal academics (‘outsider’), and the reports of legal academics in terms of how they anticipate that non-legal academics will portray the field (‘imaginaries’). In respect of legal academics, we also split this community into two distinctive parts where there are striking differences between the accounts provided by those belonging to the vocational part (VLS) and academic part (ALS).

1. Insider Perspectives: How Legal Academics Portray Legal Academia

Across the community of surveyed legal academics our findings reveal some commonalities in response around the attributes that ‘insider’ participants considered to best describe their own discipline. Of note, however, we also see some interesting points of contrast between the two populations inhabiting the Law Department. Potentially reflecting different paradigm orientations and distinctive everyday ‘business’, the most frequently selected descriptors for legal academia among VLS were Theoretical, Vocational, Academic, Practical and Reliant on Documents., with 66.7% selecting each of these attributes. Some convergence in view between VLS and ALSs can be identified on a number of these attributes (ALS: Theoretical (80%), Academic (80%) and Practical (75%). Nevertheless, on aggregate the ALS population, while selecting options across all of the descriptors, very strongly emphasised Interesting (90%), as well as Creative (70%), in contrast with VLS, of whom 16.7% and 33% selected those options. A majority of VLS selected Vocational and Reliant on Documents as attributes (66.7%), but while still featuring prominently, a comparatively smaller proportion of ALS selected these (45%). In addition, 55% of ALS typified the field as Empirical (in contrast with VLS: 16.7%) and 50% of ALS considered the discipline of law to be Innovative (in contrast with VLSs: 33.3%). In terms of the negative descriptors highlighted above, few selected these across the population of 26 legal academics: Arcane (VLS: 0%; ALS: 15%), Boring (VLS: 0%; ALS: 5%).125 Across the population of legal academics as a whole, the mean number of attributes selected per survey respondent stood at 7.57, with none selecting above 14.

These depictions of the field also emerge within the narrative section of the survey. We included an optional question which invited legal academics to attempt to ‘describe law as an academic discipline to a non-legal academic interested in what kinds of research, scholarship and enquiries populate the discipline as a whole’. 18 of the 26 legal academics provided substantive responses to this.126 A number of VLS respondents emphasised the vocational or transactional-orientation of law, and its importance, for example, emphasising that “Legal academia has most impact when it is combined with the practical/vocational aspects of law to deliver ‘real world’ solutions to problems”, or “Explaining, demonstrating and applying the law in a transactional context”.

In contrast, another VLS respondent noted how the discipline as a whole “is hugely varied”, encompassing the “practical and the theoretical, the empirical and the procedural and more besides”. Nevertheless, the same respondent also noted some tension between different depictions of law as an academic discipline,

If I was being honest I would also tell the hypothetical non-legal academic that it's full of lack of understanding and distrust between those who view academic law as primarily a social science and those who view it as in part vocational

From the ALS respondents, one expressed uncertainty about the vocational orientation of the discipline, “I’m not sure that law as an academic discipline is ‘vocational’ (although it may be a vocation, and may be on vocational questions). . .” while another considered that the traditional vocational focus of the field “has had an impact on the kinds of research that have traditionally been pursued. . . often around analysing law. . . with a practical focus”. Nevertheless, the same respondent, akin to many other ALS contributors, did not see a tension between paradigm orientations, instead emphasising that the role of ‘socio-legal enquiry’ “broaden[s] the focus, by using social research methods and by looking at different aspects of ‘law in society’”. On these accounts, enquiry within the discipline of law, can embrace “both doctrinal and socio-legal scholarship”, be both “problem and solution orientated, with a deep concern for society and social relations”, with a strong orientation towards questions of “what the law should be” or “knowing how the law really works in practice”. One respondent highlighted that while the field appeared to be “increasingly fragmented”, it was perhaps held together by “a shared knowledge of the principles by which legal norms are (traditionally) created, identified and interpreted”.

Across the ALS population, the portrayal of law as an academic discipline was highly positive, and the sheer breadth and diversity of the work and approaches the field captures often underpinned this depiction, “An exciting set of varied engagements with law: some doctrinal, some philosophical, some critical, and characterized by a very high number of law-and subjects: law and geography; law and literature; law and anthropology etc.”, with another describing law as,

[A] muscular, interactive field full of surprising angles and unexpected convergences. It is a highly stimulating world to work in”

One respondent noted that “it would be sad to consider [the field of law] unscientific, but a broad definition of science is required!” and also added that “[c]learly it cannot be uncreative and boring. . .!”

2. Outsiders’ Portrayals: How Non-Legal Academics Perceive Legal Academia

Those ‘insider’ portrayals offer an interesting benchmark for evaluating non-legal academics’ responses. In respect of non-legal academics, while the population as a whole provided responses that span the full range of attributes, the most frequently selected were Academic (60.8%), Applied (54.9%), Reliant on Documents (46.1%), Interesting (45.1%) and Theoretical (43.1%). We see points of convergence between legal academics’ own description of the field and the selections made by non-legal academics (“non-law”) in respect of the frequency of selection of Theoretical, Academic and Reliant on Documents.We also see convergence between the ALS and non-legal academics, with both populations highlighting Interesting as a key attribute (non-law: 45.1%; ALS: 90%). Attributes attracting the lowest selection frequency by non-legal academics included Uncreative, Unscientific, Dealing in Pure Ideas, and Boring. Nevertheless, 54.9% of non-legal academics also selected Applied which was more strongly emphasised by ALSs (45%) than VLSs (33.3%). Across the population of non-legal academics as a whole, the mean number of attributes selected per survey respondent stood at 5.08, with none selecting above 16.

We also cross-referenced the responses of non-legal academics (‘outsiders’) with their self-reported frequency of interaction with legal academics to assess whether this factor might present different findings within that population. While this aspect of our study extends beyond the remit of the present article, and is discussed elsewhere,127 it merits some mention here. Interactional frequency fell into four categories: Frequently, Occasionally, Rarely and Never. We found that level of interaction did appear to make a difference to characterisations of the field of legal academia. Non-legal academics who frequently interacted with legal academics were more likely to characterize legal academia as Theoretical (50%) than those that never interact (23.9%). Significant differences also appeared in relation to other attributes: Methodological (Frequently: 62.5%; Never: 41.3%) and Empirical (Frequently: 50%; Never: 17.4%). While none of those reporting higher levels of interaction with legal academics (Occasional and Frequent) selected Uncreative, Dealing in Pure Ideas or Boring, a small percentage of those falling into ‘Never’ or ‘Rarely’ selected these (<10% in each category, with the exception of Boring which 11.1% of those Rarely interacting selected).

3. Insider Imaginaries: How Legal Academics Imagine Non-Legal Academics Perceive Legal Academia

As we discussed earlier, the literature reveals a variety of legal scholars that have asserted how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ perceive legal academia in a way that is persistently negative and homogeneous. While aware that we were inviting speculation, we also asked our legal academic survey population to undertake such an exercise. We asked them to select from the same list of 21 descriptors the attributes they believed non-legal academics might select in typifying legal academia. In respect of those surveyed, while the legal academics’ imaginaries often contrasted with how non-legal academics responded, we do see a number of points of alignment. Attributes frequently selected by legal academics in terms of how they imagined non-legal academic responses, included Theoretical (VLS: 83.3%; ALS: 40%)—an attribute which was in the top five of those selected by non-legal academics. In respect of Reliant on Documents, a large proportion of both parts of the law school (VLS: 83.3%; ALS: 80%) also anticipated this attribute as one that non-legal academics would likely select (non-legal: 41.6%), which also sat in the top five of attributes selected by non-legal academics in practice.

Nevertheless, for the greater part we see very different portrayals of legal academia emerging between the imaginaries of legal academics and how non-legal academics actually typified the field. In terms of Interesting, no VLS members anticipated that non-legal academics would select this attribute to describe legal academia. Only 10% of ALS imagined that non-legal academics would select this attribute—a factor also mirrored in the frequency of ALS respondents selecting Boring (60%) as an attribute that they imagined non-legal academics would select. In fact, only 6.9% of non-legal academics selected this attribute. While a high number of vocational lawyers and academic lawyers had selected Academic in terms of their ‘own’ perception of the discipline, when coming to imagine how outsiders might perceive law, this factor was far less pronounced (VLS: 16.7%; ALS: 25%). Legal academics’ perceptions were rather far off the mark on Unscientific. In practice, while a small percentage of legal academics had selected this item in terms of their ‘own’ assessment (VLS: 16.7%; ALS: 10%), 66.7% of VLS respondents imagined that non-legal academics would perceive legal academia this way, whilst 35% of ALS respondents shared this view. In practice, only 7.8% of non-legal academics made this assessment (with 11.8% of non-legal academics positively selecting Scientific). Again, in respect of the movement away from their self-assessment of the field of legal academia to how they imagine outsiders will portray the field, both vocational and academic lawyers downgraded Applied as a factor (VLS: 33.3% to 16.7%; ALS: 45% to 15%), whilst this was the second most popular descriptor selected by non-legal academics in practice (54.9%).

C. Bleak Legal Imaginaries

When evaluating the responses afforded by non-legal academics, the ‘other’/‘outsider’ perspective emerging from our survey presents a rather different narrative to that appearing within the legal scholarly literature. Although there are limitations to a survey, undertaken at a single university and drawing on a relatively small population of academics, we see that a high proportion of the surveyed non-legal population characterize legal academia as ‘academic’, ‘interesting’, and ‘theoretical’. While some emphasised its vocational dimension, as well as its applied nature, these are attended by a broader range of descriptors which suggest that survey participants from a non-legal academic background anticipate a far richer and diverse scholarly field.

While this is an interesting finding, what is perhaps more striking, is the shift in attitudes of legal academics themselves between their own perceptions of their field, and their imaginaries about how outsiders might regard legal academia. This is perhaps most revealing in those areas where legal academic constituents have upgraded or downgraded attributes away from their ‘insider’ descriptions. In respect of the vocational lawyers, such shifts can be seen strongly on three particular attributes: Applied (from 33.3 to 16.7), Vocational (66.7 to 16.7) and Practical (66.7 to 0). In fact, all of these descriptors were selected by a significant number of non-legal academic survey participants (54.9%, 37.3% and 42.2%). This may highlight the possibility that VLS constituents believe that ‘outsiders’ will regard the field in ways that stand not only at odds with how they perceive it, but potentially more in line with an academic legal portrayal.

When turning to the responses of ALS respondents, what we see is a remarkably similar pattern of responses that mirror the negative imaginaries that populated the rather bleak ‘outsider’ narratives in legal scholarship. There is a very clear pattern that emerges, from ‘insider’ assessments to ‘insider imaginaries’ of outsiders, that suggests a high level of pessimism about how non-legal academics might perceive the field of legal academia. The shifts away from self-appraisals of the field (and the often upbeat narratives legal academics provided) are striking across the board: Uncreative (from 5% to 30%) whilst only 3.9% of non-legal academics selected this descriptor; Arcane (from 15% to 40%) whilst 17.6% of non-legal academics selected this; Creative (70% to 5%), whilst 15.7% of non-legal academics selected this option; Unscientific (10% to 35%), whilst 7.8% of non-legal academics selected this; Modern (30%) and Innovative (50%) are both downgraded to zero (whilst 13.7% and 10.8% of non-legal academics selected these attributes); Methodologicalwas downgraded from 45% to 5%, whilst 37.3% of non-legal academics selected this. Aspects we have already noted, such as Academic moved from 80% in terms of self-perception to 25% in evaluating how non-legal academic ‘outsiders’ might see legal academia (whilst 60.8% selected it in practice - the most commonly selected descriptor). In similar force, Interesting moves from 90% to 10%, whilst 45.1% of non-legal academics selected interesting. And Boring moves from 5% to 60%, while only 6.9% of non-legal academics selected this in practice. Other noteworthy descriptors include Empirical, where 55% ALSs selected this in their self-assessment, but downgraded this to 5% when imagining the responses of outsiders (whilst 24.5% of non-legal academics selected this) and Practicalmoves from 75% to 15% (whilst 42.2% of non-legal academics selected this).

The overall picture presented in terms of how ALS imagine legal academia through the eyes of ‘outsiders’ is pretty bleak and fairly peculiar – arcane, uncreative, unscientific, unapplied, non-methodological, an impractical field, with minimal empiricism, minimal coherence, that is vocationally-orientated, boring, and perceived as less academic. What remains, confidently, is an imaginary that outsiders will see the field as one that is highly Reliant on Documents (80% of legal academics selected this; whilst 46.1% of non-legal academics did). To the extent that this attribute is selected by all populations it highlights some alignment between legal academic imaginaries and outsider perspectives; despite this, the overall thrust of legal academics’ imaginaries is that outsiders are unlikely to grasp the more nuanced position that ‘documents’ or ‘text’ occupy within the field—a factor that one of our ALS respondents was keen to emphasise to the ‘hypothetical outsider’,

The legal discipline always implies the analysis of legal texts (whether hard law, soft law, or case law) in a way no other discipline does. At the same time, the legal discipline engages with the context of these texts; mostly to understand them better, while some legal research reverses that order by primarily aiming to understand the societal reality in which the texts operate. Understanding that reality (partially by analysing the texts) is then the main focus, rather than aiming to interpret the texts by taking into account the contextual reality

D. The Nature of and Approach to Legal Research (and Scholarship)

While our survey was directed to two main groups, legal academics and non-legal academics, the legal academics constituted the critical benchmark for evaluating all of the responses of non-legal academics, and indeed, the legal academic imaginaries. In approaching the next major aspect of this article—notably how legal academics imagine that ‘outsiders’ will portray legal research specifically, it proved necessary to devise an approach that could capture (a) how legal academics in our survey population typify their own research approaches; (b) how legal academics imagine ‘outsiders’ in the academic population will typify their research; and (c) how non-legal academics will conceptualise the approaches that they believe are ones typical in the field of legal research.

This element of the survey proved to be the most challenging by virtue of a range of considerations. The first major challenge concerned the issue of how to design a survey inviting responses around legal research approaches that would also be comprehensible to multiple audiences, consisting of both insiders and outsiders. As noted earlier, some of the terms deployed by legal academics to describe different legal research orientations can be interpretatively slippery even to insiders. That concern is amplified when centralizing non-legal academics, some of whom may be entirely unfamiliar with concepts such as ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal’. Our approach to this was to include more general categories of research (such as empirical, vocational and so on) which would be comprehensible to all survey populations. The second challenge related to how one goes about analyzing these categories so that one can sensibly map the approaches that (1) legal academic respondents actually take to their research, as distinct from (2) their imaginaries of how outsiders will typify legal research approaches, and (3) non-legal academics beliefs about legal academic research. Both of these issues are discussed shortly. The final major consideration, and certainly quite an initial stumbling block for us, related to our legal academic survey sample and the question of which legal academics should be included. We tackle this latter issue first.

Insofar as this aspect of the survey concerned legal research, as distinct from scholarship, there had been considerable debate within our research team about whether to include the VLS population at all. As noted earlier, the activities and work profiles of VLS scholars can be seen as distinctive in many respects from those of the ALS population, and engagement in research constitutes a clear point of distinction. Vocational legal scholars employed at Cardiff Law are typically on teaching and scholarship contracts, rather than teaching and research, and their central work consists of work activities that have a vocational and practical lawyering orientation rather than an academic leaning. In turn, VLS colleagues, as with all those on teaching and scholarship contracts are not expected to meet research benchmarks (e.g. through producing research outputs) for promotion or other institutional requirements. Yet, VLS and ALS are all ‘legal academics’. Moreover, there are some members of the VLS population, who, despite contract type, are engaged in research activities, just as ALS is not composed exclusively of individuals on teaching and research contracts (e.g. one of our ALS survey respondents was employed on a teaching and scholarship contract). These considerations, alongside our value of the work of VLS colleagues and our belief that the distinction between scholarship and research is an unpromising and problematic qualifier for sorting out who is, and who is not a ‘legal academic’, led us to explore further the ways that including the VLS population might prove fruitful. In this respect, we considered that even where a clear delineation emerged between the VLS and ALS populations, including distinctions between approaches to scholarship and research in terms of paradigm orientations, this, coupled with the imaginaries produced by both populations and the alignment with non-legal academic responses might produce useful and interesting results. For these reasons we sought to design our ‘legal academic’ facing survey on inclusive grounds so that it captured approaches to scholarship and research in this section of the survey. The categories that speak to approaches therefore serve to span those two potentially distinctive paradigm orientations.

So here we start by highlighting how we went about capturing the research and scholarship approaches of those within the VLS and ALS populations. All legal academics were presented with the following categories, and were asked to situate on a sliding scale how much they thought the subjects and approaches best described their own research or scholarship:128

Descriptive, concerned with legal judgments, statutory provisions and other legal instruments;

Investigative/empirical approaches;

Normative/Philosophical/Analytical Approaches.

Investigation of social phenomena;

Adopt vocational approach with strong focus on legal education and legal profession;

Theoretical and critical approaches, including social, economic, feminist, historical and political.

For each of these categories, participants were presented with a sliding scale which ran from 0 – 100 (‘does not describe well’ – ‘does describe well’), with the default sitting at 50. Survey respondents could also select ‘not applicable’ under each item which if selected would have the effect of returning a zero response for that item.

Following this, legal academics were presented with the same question but one which invited them to highlight, in the same way, how they thought academics from other disciplines would respond to such a question.

This question set was also put to non-legal academics in the main survey. The question asked non-legal academics to highlight on the sliding scale the extent to which they believed each of these categories described the research and research approaches of legal academics.

E. Constructing a Research Profile Spectrum – Black-Letter to Socio-Legal

Each survey response to this question elicited a range of scores which the survey participants provided. Legal academic survey participants would weight the extent to which their own research (or where appropriate, scholarship) was weakly or strongly typified by Descriptive, Empirical, Normative, Social Phenomena, Vocational and Theoretical approaches on a sliding scale. Where this question was put to non-legal academics, that population was being asked to evaluate their beliefs or knowledge about research approaches typical of the legal academic field. The sliding scale afforded a numerical score from between 0 to 100. By way of an example, three different individuals, X, Y and Z, might use the sliding scales to typify research approaches in law in the following way:

Figure 2. Example Legal Research Profiles. Citation: British Journal of American Legal Studies 9, 1; 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006

The collection of those scores, running from Descriptive through to Theoretical produced by each survey respondent is then treated as a unique and indivisible research profile record. The aim of so doing is to give us an idea of the range of approaches that a survey respondent considers to best represent their own research/scholarship in the case of a legal academic, or that a survey respondent believes is typical of legal research where they are a non-legal academic.

To evaluate and map the different research profiles of our survey respondents, and the raw scores within them, we created an overarching scoring method. We sought to produce a scoring method that could translate a series of raw scores contained within individual research profiles, into something more globally meaningful. In line with the different paradigm orientations highlighted in the literature, we settled on achieving an indicative spectrum running from black-letter law to socio-legal onto which the individual research profile records could be plotted, and enable us to make sense of a series of raw scores. While crude, the aim was simply to provide an overall visualisation of the kind of paradigm research (or scholarship) orientation that survey respondents claimed to possess (or imagine). While the associations that we make can be debated, each of the ‘approach’ variables (Descriptive, Vocational and so on) were treated as indicators of a particular paradigm orientation in the following way. Descriptive and Vocational were treated as approach variables more commonly associated with a pure black-letter law approach, Descriptive, Vocational and Normative as indicators of a black-letter law approach (rather than ‘pure’),129 and Social Phenomena, Empirical, Theoretical and Normative were treated as indicators of a more Socio-Legal approach.

These approach variables were organized within an equation accordingly (see Figure 3below). The effect of the equation when applied to the individual raw scores of research profiles was to produce an overarching Research Profile Score. The overall calculation for a research Profile Score is achieved through combining the Socio-Legal score, the Normativeelement, the total from which the Black-letter Law score is deducted. This achieved a single “Research Profile Score” for each unique research record.

Figure 3. Calculating the Research Profiles. Citation: British Journal of American Legal Studies 9, 1; 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006

These overall ‘Research Profile Scores’ could then be plotted on a Spectrum accordingly. In Figure 4 below, the Research Profile Scores are visualised on a graph which runs from Black-Letter Law through to Socio-Legal.

Figure 4. Research Approaches (Responses of Legal Academics). Citation: British Journal of American Legal Studies 9, 1; 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006

In testing the spectrum, the maximum scores achievable under the two main categories (at either end of the spectrum) were as follows. For pure black-letter law, the maximum research profile score would stand at −100130 where scores consisted exclusively of 100 on both vocational and descriptive approaches, with all other ingredients (i.e. empirical, normative, social phenomena, theoretical) being scored by the survey respondent at zero.131In fact, one VLS respondent mapped directly onto this definition of ‘pure black letter law’ having selected 100 Vocational, 100 Descriptive with all other attributes scored to zero (see Figure 4 below). At the other end the spectrum is purely socio-legal, where the maximum research profile score would stand at +200. This would be achieved through responses of 100 on each of the categories of social phenomena, empirical, normative and theoretical,with an absence of all black-letter law ingredients.

Scores sitting in between −100 and zero are typified by a dominance of black-letter law approaches—e.g. a score of zero can represent a response of 100 for Vocational, Descriptiveand Normative. Nevertheless, scores around zero can also denote an increasing mixture of approaches, but these remain more strongly typified by those attributes highlighted here as black-letter law factors. Scores between zero and 100, indicate an increasingly mixed profile which becomes more dominated by socio-legal approaches towards 100. Profiles above 100 sit within a terrain very strongly dominated by socio-legal approaches with an extremely limited emphasis on Vocational and Descriptive factors. This spectrum and the scoring method provided the framework for plotting the profiles of legal academics (and in the main survey, the profiles of ‘non-legal academics’) and enabling subsequent analysis.

To be clear, the aim here is not to achieve a neat categorisation of all individual survey participants into either ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal’. Considerable debate can be enjoyed over whether specific approaches are genuinely indicative of a ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal’ approach. Instead, the intention is to create an indicative spectrum that indicates in relative terms differences in paradigm orientation to legal research and scholarship. Even if we arrive at final research profile scores that indicate a paradigm orientation that is more socio-legal than black-letter law, or even ‘mixed’, the final assessment is designed to achieve relative scoring and to compare and contrast different sub-populations (e.g. all legal academics, or VLS and ALS).

F. Findings on Research Approaches

Earlier in this article when discussing survey responses around general depictions of the field, we noted that while legal academic survey respondents generally held favourable views about their own field, they were noticeably more pessimistic in their estimation of how non-legal academics would view their discipline. This was particularly apparent with the ALS survey respondents, where it was anticipated that non-legal academics would portray the field as: Arcane, Uncreative, Unscientific, Unapplied, Non-methodological, impractical field, with minimal empiricism, minimal coherence, vocationally-orientated, boring, and perceived as less academic. While such a perspective aligns quite neatly with the asserted ‘outsider’ view presented in legal scholarship, as we highlighted, it did not align with the portrayals provided by the non-legal academics we surveyed. While some key elements converged (e.g. Reliance on Documents), the general pattern was of divergence, with a typification of the field by non-legal academics as ‘academic’, ‘interesting’, and ‘theoretical’.

The current exercise sought to dig more deeply into such attitudes and beliefs. Engaging all survey respondents in a more granular evaluation of the field by focusing on the range of research methods and methodologies available to researchers, presented two opportunities. First, it allowed us to evaluate the consistency of some of the responses provided earlier. However, the second, is that it provided survey respondents with a different opportunity to articulate their impressions of the field, and indeed, to think through in a more detailed way about how outsiders/non-legal academics might come to imagine it. If, as the ALS respondents seemed to believe on the basis of their earlier responses, non-legal academics would regard the field as non-methodological, impractical, unempirical or largely vocational—the current question invited them to state the extent to which they believed that would be so.

1. Legal Academics’ Presentation of Own Research and Scholarship Approaches

The overall mean of each legal academic group, ALS, and VLS, in respect of self-rating (‘my approach to research and scholarship’) is reflected below in Figure 4 as “ALS self” or “VLS self”, and the rating in respect of how ALS and VLS groups believe non-legal academics will respond when addressing such a question is detailed under “ALS Thinks Others”, and “VLS Thinks Others”, accordingly. The results present the overall means of these groups, as well as providing the minimum and maximum Research Profile Scores from each constituent group.

In respect of self-reports of ALS, the overall mean sits within “mixed” territory, but with a strong orientation towards socio-legal approaches, and to a lesser degree, a tendency to also draw on approaches associated black-letter law. 7 of the ALS survey participants had Research Profile Scores that were above 100, indicating profiles that are very strongly socio-legal, with very low scores on black-letter law factors (an overall black-letter mean score of 16). Nevertheless, for the remaining ALS population (n = 13) factors associated with black-letter law, Vocational or Descriptive, or both, most clearly have a place in their work (with a black-letter mean of 43). The maximum ALS Research Profile Score at 161, highlighted a profile composed of 85 Social Phenomena, 5 Vocational, 12 Descriptive, 80 Theoretical, 85 Normative, and 88 Empirical. At the minimum end, the lowest Research Profile Score recorded is −10.7. This was the only ALS score that dipped below 0, and the profile belonged to the only survey respondent on a teaching and scholarship contract in the ALS population. Such a finding appears to support the conclusions reached by Cownie, and Siems and Síthigh, to the extent that there would appear to be a strong prevalence of mixed approaches within the field of legal academia, with a strong socio-legal orientation.132

In respect of the survey responses of VLS, the overall mean score demonstrates the opposite pattern, sitting firmly below zero, indicating a very strong orientation towards black-letter law factors. An overall Research Profile Score of zero, would typically indicate a profile composed of Vocational, Descriptive and Normative, whilst a score of −100 indicates a more “Professional Law” profile consisting exclusively of Vocational and Descriptive. In practice, 5 VLS Research Profile Scores sit below zero (−17, −23, −74, −91, and −100) indicating an orientation that ranges between black-letter law towards a more professionally distilled form of black-letter law. Out of the 6 VLS respondents, only one had a Research Profile Score above 0, sitting at 67.7 with a strongly mixed profile: 82 Social Phenomena, 96 Vocational, 82 Descriptive, 80 Theoretical, 80 Normative, and 68 Empirical. Overall, these findings align neatly with our expectation of the VLS population in light of contract type and professional orientation.

2. Insiders’ Imaginaries of Outsiders’ Depictions of Legal Research

In the context of how legal academics ‘imagine’ others/outsiders will regard legal research, here we see particularly interesting results. The imaginaries of both ALS (n = 20) and VLS (n = 5)133 were fairly similar with means that sit within the “mixed” territory. This sits somewhat at odds with the earlier insider imaginaries our legal academic survey respondents provided in respect of general depictions of the legal academic field—and it certainly provides a very stark contrast with the imaginaries of ‘Others’/’Outsiders’ as presented in the literature which highlight a portrayal of legal academia that is strongly black-letter law in orientation. This stark portrayal, however, might well reflect a key weakness of that earlier survey question, which sought out broad typifications of the legal academic field through the presentation of a series of binary choices (e.g. boring/interesting, academic, unacademic etc.), rather than affording survey participants the opportunity to offer more nuanced/measured evaluations of how ‘others’/’outsiders’ might think. As such, if the prior survey question suggested extreme pessimism among the legal academic community in terms of how they think others/outsiders will perceive the field, the present question elicited responses which suggest that the overall view is not as bleak as it had first appeared.

The overall scores of ALS and VLS populations highlight a belief that non-legal academic ‘others’/’outsiders’ will regard the field as consisting of a “mixed” terrain, rather than squarely ‘black-letter law’. However, as Figure 4 above shows, both the ALS and VLS populations anticipate that non-legal academics will nevertheless portray the research approaches in law very differently to how ALS and VLS populations themselves depict them. In common with our earlier finding, across both legal populations we see a combination of up- and down-grading from self-reported data that suggests that legal academics expect to see a strong divergence between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives. This pattern can be seen in Figure 5 below. Across both legal populations, we see significant movement away from self-assessments, with 17 survey respondents migrating on average 76 points towards or deeper into black-letter law territory, and 8 survey respondents moving on average 65.9 points towards or deeper into socio-legal territory. While we see movement across all categories (social phenomena, vocational etc.), the most significant changes can be seen in the stronger emphasis placed on black-letter law factors, Vocational and Descriptive, with some downgrading of other categories. Interestingly, the only factor that remains more or less stable is Normative.

Figure 5. Shifts in Means from Self-Assessment to Imagined ‘Other’/’Outsider’ (n = 25). Citation: British Journal of American Legal Studies 9, 1; 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006

Looking within the specific populations, we can potentially account for the strength of the overall pull towards black-letter law factors by virtue of the comparatively larger population of ALS. It is the majority of the ALS population that accounts for the strong migration towards black-letter law in their assessments (ALS constitute 16 of the 17 respondents that migrate in this direction). This particular population very strongly moves away from self-reported Research Profile Scores. While the overall mean for self-assessment Research Profile Scores falls squarely into ‘mixed’ territory, with a maximum sitting high in socio-legal and the lowest score sitting narrowly below zero, when it comes to imagining how others/outsiders might survey the field, the score lines shorten considerably so that profiles appear far less socio-legal (on average by 77.6 points). The overall imaginaries of the ALS population seem to suggest an expectation, on the part of the majority, that non-legal academics will see the field of law as extremely different to the approaches they take to their research. But, insofar as this suggests an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will see it as more vocational and descriptive, this is a far cry from an expectation that non-legal academics will anticipate a field that is purely doctrinal. Instead, the overall results highlight an expectation that outsiders might see the field as largely mixed.

In turn, while a smaller population pull in the opposite direction, towards socio-legal factors, 8 of our legal academic survey participants made selections which demonstrated this trend. Here we see an even split between 4 VLS and the remaining 4 ALS (including 1 ALS on a teaching and scholarship contract, and another ALS that is recorded as a part-time tutor). While the VLS population is small, those migrating towards a more socio-legal depiction are far more pronounced with a very strong shift away from self-reported Research Profiles (VLS: an average of 89.2 point rise). In respect of the 4 ALS participants who anticipate a more socio-legal depiction, we see a 42.5 point rise.

The general pattern across the populations of VLS and ALS is highly consistent; a series of imaginaries that others/outsiders will categorise the field in ways that are at odds with own approaches. Certainly, for the ALS population, this maps to some degree onto our earlier findings of a tendency towards pessimism in respect of how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ think. Nevertheless, this is far less marked, and the overall results provide a series of legal academic voices which sit at odds with those in the legal scholarly literature. Moreover, even if the overall trend highlights that the ALS community in particular hold an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will regard the field in a way that is more vocational or descriptive in orientation, there are exceptions to this. We noted a number of exceptions earlier, in respect of two ALS survey participants on non-typical contract types (teaching and scholarship and part-time casual tutor) who migrate away from their own research profiles towards a stronger socio-legal depiction when imagining the responses of non-legal academics (from Research Profile Score of 37 to 69, and −11 to 76 respectively). However, two further ALSs also shifted higher up the socio-legal scale, highlighting a perception that others/outsiders might imagine the field to be slightly more typified by socio-legal approaches than was the case with their own research depictions (migrating from 40 to 65, and 73 to 100 respectively).135

3 Do Legal Academics’ Imaginaries Align with the Views of ‘Others’/’Outsiders’?

Central to the present article has been the insider imaginaries of legal academics about how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia. As we noted at the outset, this was a theme which emerged from our evaluation of the legal literature and the results of the benchmarking surveys from our scoping study at Cardiff Law. Our key aim in the scoping study as a whole was to explore how non-legal academics conceptualized legal academia, their attitudes towards and insight into the field. While the results of our main survey are discussed extensively elsewhere,136 our findings around how non-legal academics at Cardiff University perceive legal academia and the extent to which this aligns with imaginaries, merits brief discussion here.

A key reason for this is by virtue of how some of our results from the non-legal academic survey responses appear to disrupt the imaginaries that we have noted throughout this paper. What is particularly disrupted is the view maintained within legal scholarship around how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ regard the field. In particular, the assumption that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia in a negative light, and as largely doctrinal, unempirical, untheoretical etc. is one that appears to be countered by the survey responses from non-legal academics. We earlier highlighted how our survey findings around field wide descriptions (e.g. interesting, boring, academic, unacademic etc.) suggested a more positive portrayal of the field on the part of ‘others’/’outsiders’ than the imaginaries of legal academics surveyed. In similar force we find points of non-alignment between legal academics’ imaginaries on the benchmark survey and the survey responses of non-legal academic population in respect of depictions of approaches to legal research.

The results on approaches to legal research as reported in the main survey, and as highlighted below in in Figures 6 and 7, organize the non-legal academic survey Research Profile scores by interaction. This used the frequency of self-reported interaction with legal academics across a range of settings (e.g. teaching, supervision, workshops, research etc.) as a vehicle for evaluating whether the extent of interaction with legal scholars and researchers might make a difference to their responses. While this is discussed elsewhere at greater length,137 here we comment on the aggregate finding—notably, that standing in contrast with the portrayal within the legal scholarship that others/outsiders will regard the legal academic field as being dominated by a doctrinal or black-letter law focus, the results as a whole highlight that non-legal academics portray the field as one which is overwhelmingly mixed in terms of the nature of research and research approaches deployed.138 While scores below zero indicate research profiles more strongly characterized by black-letter law approaches, significantly, none of the non-legal academic Research Profile score means dip below zero (or even come close to zero). Only 7 of the overall 102 non-legal respondents produced Research Profile Scores that dipped below zero, moving into black-letter law territory. The remainder are situated above zero, with over 55 per cent recording Research Profile Scores above 50, and nearly 6 per cent with a Research Profile above 100. As we noted earlier, while the VLS population on aggregate is more strongly characterized by black-letter law approaches, none of the ‘outsider’ groups (represented here as ‘no’, ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ interactors), nor the non-legal academic population on aggregate, come close to resembling the legal scholarly profile of our VLS population in overall mean score.

Figure 6. VLS Imaginaries and Non-Legal Academics. Citation: British Journal of American Legal Studies 9, 1; 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006

Figure 7. ALS Imaginaries and Non-Legal Academics. Citation: British Journal of American Legal Studies 9, 1; 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006

Note that in Figures 6 and 7 below, the ‘Survey Respondent Populations’ highlighted as No interaction, Low interactors, Medium Interactors and High Interactors, all belong to the non-legal academic group of survey respondents.

When we focus on the legal academic respondents in our survey, a slightly more nuanced and less extreme series of imaginaries emerge—most certainly ones which sit at odds with the imaginaries profiled in legal scholarship. While the minimum scores among both the ALS and VLS populations suggest imaginaries that non-legal academics are likely to regard the field of legal academia as bordering on ‘purely black-letter law’ in approach (with the ALS group anticipating this to an even stronger degree with a Research Profile minimum score of −91), the mean scores of both the ALS and VLS groups both appear to suggest an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will regard the field as more mixed in practice. While the VLS group self-reports a more black-letter law orientation, the imaginaries as to how others/outsiders are likely to regard the field of legal academia shifts in the opposite direction—with a mean that anticipates that ‘others’/’outsiders’ are likely to perceive the field as more mixed in practice (and at odds with the approaches VLS take to their own work). In contrast, while the ALS group self-reported mean sits high on the socio-legal spectrum, and this drops significantly when imagining the responses of ‘others’/‘outsiders’, there would appear to be an expectation that others will anticipate the field to be populated by more mixed legal research approaches in practice. On the basis of the mean scores however, the ALS imaginaries do tug the hardest towards the black-letter law end of the spectrum.

Overall then, we find a series of responses around research approaches that diverge quite significantly from the imaginaries within legal scholarship as to how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia; this is not only by virtue of how our non-legal academic population responded, but also the imaginaries provided by legal academics themselves. What we do find, however, is that even if legal academics imaginaries suggest an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ are unlikely, on the balance, to depict the field as starkly ‘black-letter law’, the difference between self-reported approaches to research and scholarship highlights an expectation that how others will regard legal research will be rather different (i.e. more dominated by black-letter law approaches or socio-legal approaches) to how legal academics go about their own research in practice.

While our surveys highlight pessimism within the legal academic community at Cardiff University about how others/outsiders might perceive the field at the point of field-wide description, with an expectation that others will see legal academia as unacademic, untheoretical, purely doctrinal, unapplied, non-empirical or indeed, boring—the results from the imaginaries in respect of research approaches, suggest less pessimism. While there is an expectation that non-legal academics/‘others’ might perceive the field in ways that are distinctive from the self-perceptions of legal academics themselves in terms of approaches to legal research, the overall results do not suggest that legal academics expect ‘others’ to regard the field as purely black-letter law. Perhaps there is now an emerging sense, at least amongst this community of legal academics, that the field of law is now far more strongly integrated within the academy so that it would be inconceivable that academics in other parts of the University could come to imagine the discipline in the particularly stark and harsh terms that legal scholarship has portrayed.

IV. Conclusion

Throughout this piece, we have centralized the legal academic ‘imaginary’ around how legal academics believe that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ perceive their field. In the legal academic literature, as with our survey findings, we identified a bleak series of such imaginaries. While certainly far more pronounced in the legal scholarly literature, both the literature and our surveys suggest an expectation that ‘others’—whether in the world at large, or within neighbouring disciplines at Cardiff University—perceive the field of legal academia in a negative light.

Expectations of this kind may have a far from benign effect. As we noted at the beginning of this article, ‘imagination’ has a performative dimension. In this respect, the persistently pessimistic beliefs and expectations that legal academics appear to hold about how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ might regard them and their field, suggest the potential for inhibiting, forestalling and closing down the kinds of collaborative opportunities and intellectual partnerships that legal academics could strongly benefit from. If legal academics expect to find that others regard legal academia as boring, methodologically deficient, unscientific, or irrelevant, this is perhaps more likely to encourage legal academics to be more cut-off from the wider intellectual environment than is desirable, given the value of the work that they perform, and of its potential to inform cross-disciplinary discussions. Indeed, in the context of legal scholarly contributions which emphasize the critical importance of cross-disciplinary collaborative engagements for the future of law as a discipline,139 and its relevance to the outside world, these imaginaries suggest potential anxieties about taking this step given the expectation that ‘outsiders’ will perceive the legal academic field in a largely negative way.

Perhaps the most notable finding of our research, however, is how these negative imaginaries contrast so markedly with legal academics’ beliefs about their own field. While legal academics at Cardiff who participated in our empirical research appear to imagine that other academics would hold a similarly negative view of their discipline to that found in the literature, when asked to evaluate their own field, many expressed a sense of confidence and pride. Again, we see a sharp contrast with the literature which highlights uncertainty on the part of insiders about their discipline, tantamount to an ‘identity crisis’.140 One possibility is that this sense of rampant confidence, pride and general security within legal academia is specific to Cardiff Law—but this seems doubtful. Here we see a rich description, charged by a sense of positivity, and at points displaying excitement at being part of a “muscular” and “stimulating” discipline. Yet when invited to contemplate how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ might regard the legal academic terrain, this sense of confidence and excitement is far more muted, and on some accounts, entirely absent. In undertaking field-wide description, the overarching responses or imaginaries, are most certainly negative—but as we noted, when asked to evaluate research methods and methodologies from an insider and outsider perspective, the insider imaginaries softened so as to become less harsh and pessimistic. Nevertheless, overall, the pattern is clear: when moving from self-evaluation to the imagined evaluation of others, the accounts become gloomier.

Across both these substantive areas of the survey, the shifts in tone and tenor from self-evaluation to imaginary was very striking so that it was possible to identify that legal academics appeared Janus-like, speaking in two voices depending on which judgement, inward-facing or the imagined outsider looking in, was begged. Whether vocationally-orientated or situated on the academic side, the legal academic imaginary of how outsiders would depict the discipline of law strongly resonates with the often ‘hostile’ and ‘cruel’ commentaries provided by some of Becher's interviewees several decades ago. Moreover, so too does this harsh voice resonate with some of the legal scholarship when it comes to thinking about the outside world—of devaluing the discipline—through the voice of the imagined ‘other’/‘outsider’. As we highlighted earlier, this other/outsider is imagined. As implicated within the legal scholarship, this ‘other’ often appears as a fleeting, but ultimately rhetorical vehicle. There is, however, one constant in terms of when the outsider appears—his/her personality, thoughts and perspectives are crafted largely on the back of fantasy, rather than based on external enquiry about how ‘others’ contemplate legal academia.

Although the imaginaries of legal academics have constituted the central focus for us in this article, we found it useful to make reference to some of our wider findings around how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ regard legal academia. Crucial here, was the question as to whether the views of ‘outsiders’ would resonate with the imaginaries emerging from the legal scholarly literature, and survey responses of legal academics themselves. Significantly, the non-legal academics who participated in our study generally provided far more positive evaluations of legal academia than those espoused in the literature. We also found an extremely low incidence of negative appraisals on the part of non-legal academics about the legal academic field. The attributes selected least frequently by non-legal academic survey respondents were Uncreative, Unscientific, Dealing in Pure Ideas or Boring. Instead, non-legal academics placed greater emphasis on attributes that aligned more strongly with the more positive characterizations of the legal academic field provided by legal academics themselves. The extent to which these findings are generalizable of course requires further investigation. In similar force, as we noted in respect of research approaches, here too, the ‘imagined’ view that non-legal academics would generally come to portray the legal academic field as doctrinal, unacademic, unscientific and so on—fitting a description of a field that is strongly doctrinal/black-letter law—also sharply contrasted with our findings across the non-legal academic population. Overwhelmingly, the vast majority of our non-legal academic population anticipated a field that would be composed of mixed approaches to legal research.

While we acknowledge the limitations of this study, it is noteworthy that our small-scale study has provided results that do not adhere to the negative portrayals of legal academia found in the literature. The findings of this study provide some room for asserting that the depictions of the ‘other’/‘outsider’ as presented within legal scholarship might more strongly find their roots in legal scholarly imaginations, than in reality. That is not to say that the non-legal academics responding to our survey necessarily possessed strong insight into the discipline (this went beyond what our survey sought to capture), nor that we gained depth of insight into or invited open narratives—and indeed, deeper enquiry might well tell a different story. Again, further research is needed to evaluate how and whether these trends might be replicated elsewhere, and perhaps in the context of broader populations beyond Higher Education. But until that work is undertaken—and if external perceptions about legal academia as a discipline matter, as we contend they do—our study opens up the possibility of a new and far more upbeat narrative that can be told—one which departs from negative ‘folklore’ imaginaries entrenched within the psyche of legal scholars, but whose place in reality appears more questionable.

For us, this points to the importance of a dual strategy for the legal academy. The first, which speaks to the reason for us coming to write this article, is that there is a pressing need to disrupt the (negative) folklore ideas apparent in the literature of how ‘others’ regard the legal academic field. While we do not claim that the small population of non-legal academics in our survey speaks to how all ‘others’/’outsiders’ would represent legal academia, that our findings quickly trouble a series of negative accounts that find their roots in speculation and imagination rather than in empirical reality, does strike us as significant. Our hope is that this will prompt others to move away from speculation as a device for thinking about how ‘others’/’outsiders’ perceive the field in favour of evidence-based approaches. Connected to this, our second point concerns how legal academics‘talk’ about the field of legal academia as a whole. We started out with a concern about how these negative imaginaries can have a performative effect in limiting and foreclosing collaborative horizons. But so too, can imaginaries potentially help to open up and expand horizons.

The concerns here are two-fold, but both ultimately point to the desirability of placing meta-disciplinary accounts on a stronger empirical footing. One of the striking aspects of some of the legal academic literature that we have captured here has been how a number of authors attempting meta-disciplinary level analyses have produced fairly critical takes on the state of the field, from its development, the approaches that define it, to advocacy about how the field ought to develop. While we highlighted the role that speculation played in the context of portrayals of how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ view legal academia, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that speculation might play a role in how some depict legal academia more generally, from the attitudes of ‘others’ to more substantive concerns about the techniques, approaches and topics that populate the field. While valid questions can be asked about the extent to which single authors are well situated to capture legal academia at large,141 which given the incredible diversity of methods, methodologies and concerns it invites, should be a tall order for most of us, what particularly interests us here is how one portrays the field. While some have portrayed a field in crisis, as uninteresting or ‘irrelevant’ to ‘others’/’outsiders’, our small investigation with legal academics at Cardiff University highlights the presence of a far more optimistic set of conceptualizations of the legal academic field. This was most apparent in the context of inviting legal academics across Cardiff Law to describe the field to the hypothetical ‘outsider’. These more positively charged, richer and diverse accounts, particularly when contrasted with negative portrayals that find their root in imagination, highlight the potential benefits of giving voice to those from within and across legal academic field. It also highlights the presence of a largely untapped resource that could enable a new way of talking and thinking about the legal academic field. It may be that broader investigation, with this more positive end in sight, could reveal a far wider range of resources with different audiences in mind, that make far more visible and apparent to insiders and outsiders what is useful, important, and promising about contemporary legal studies.142 This points to the presence of a potentially far more promising terrain for communicating to a range of publics, within and outside the academy, what legal academics do, why their academic research and scholarship matters and signalling the way that legal academics can collaboratively contribute to a wide range of cross-disciplinary projects. In a significant way, we are pointing to the increased importance of legal academics being prepared to ‘talk up’ the work that they do, and to be increasingly willing to project these more positive articulations of an exciting, rich, diverse and relevant field to the outside world.

Footnotes

Nicky Priaulx, Cardiff School of Law and Politics; Martin Weinel, Cardiff School of Social Sciences; Willow Leonard-Clarke, Cardiff School of Social Sciences; Thomas Hayes, Cardiff School of Law and Politics. Our thanks to the British Academy for funding this project, to Richard Collier, Fiona Cownie and Tony Bradney for their generous support and guidance, and to colleagues at Cardiff Law School and across Cardiff University for their kind engagement with this project. Thanks to those involved in crash-testing earlier pilot versions of the survey, including Bernadette Richards at the University of Adelaide, who provided such useful feedback. We also owe a large debt of gratitude to Harry Collins, Rob Evans, Dave Caudill, Luke Sloan, broader members of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise, Science at Cardiff University and the international SEESHOP community as a whole for their extensive and invaluable support across the duration of this project as a whole. Last, but not least, our thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this piece for very helpful and illuminating comments, and to the editor and editorial team at the British Journal of American Legal Studies for all of their excellent work and support.

This project, ‘Multidisciplinary Understandings of Legal Academia’ was supported by a British Academy Small Grant (Grant number 509225).

Fiona Cownie, Legal Academics: Culturesand Identities (2004).

Susan Bartie, Histories of Legal Scholars: The Power of Possibility, 34 Leg. Stud. 305 (2014); Susan Bartie, The Lingering Core of Legal Scholarship, 30 Leg. Stud. 345–69 (2010); HazelGenn, Martin Partington & Sally Wheeler, Lawinthe Real World: Improving Our UnderstandingofHow Law Works (2006); Paddy Hillyard, Law's Empire: Socio-legal Empirical Research in the Twenty-first Century, 34 J.L. Soc’y. 266 (2007); Mathias M. Siems & Daithí Mac Síthigh, Mapping Legal Research, 71 Camb. L. J. 651 (2012); J. M. Smits, The Mindand Method of the Legal Academic (2012).

Tony Becher, Academic Tribesand Territories: Intellectual Enquiryandthe Cultures of Disciplines (1st ed. 1989).

Tony Becher & Paul Trowler, Academic Tribes And Territories: Intellectual Enquiryandthe CultureofDisciplines (2d ed. 2001); Paul Trowler, Depicting and Researching Disciplines: Strong and Moderate Essentialist Approaches, 39 Stud. High. Educ. 1720 (2014).

Our findings in relation to the wider study, and in particular around the question of how ‘outsiders’ regard the field of legal academia, are discussed extensively elsewhere. See further, Nicky Priaulx et al., How “Outsiders” See Us: Multidisciplinary Understandings of Legal Academia and Legal Academics, Cardiff Univ. L. Lab Work. Pap. 1–60 (2018).

See, e.g., Arild Buanes & Svein Jentoft, Building Bridges: Institutional Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity, 41 Futures 446–54 (2009); Catherine Lyall, Laura Meagher & Ann Bruce, A Rose by Any Other Name? Transdisciplinarity in the Context of UK Research Policy, 65 Futures 150 (2015); Helga Nowotny, Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: TheoryandPracticeacross Disciplines (Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, & Barbara Prainsack eds., 2016); Nicky Priaulx & Martin Weinel, Connective Knowledge: What We Need to Know About Other Fields to ‘Envision’ Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration, 6 Eur. J. Futures Res. 21 (2018).

For a summary of that work, see further Priaulx and Weinel, supranote 8.

See Gabriele Griffin, Pam Medhurst & Trish Green, Interdisciplinarity in Interdisciplinary Research Programmes in the UK (2006), https://www.york.ac.uk/res/researchintegration/Interdisciplinarity_UK.pdf; Veronica Boix Mansilla, Michele Lamont & Kyoto Sato, Successful Interdisciplinary Collaborations: The Contributions of Shared Socio-Emotional-Cognitive Platforms to Interdisciplinary Synthesis(2012), https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/10496300 (last visited Dec. 21, 2017); Deana Pennington, Collaborative, Cross-Disciplinary Learning and Co-Emergent Innovation in eScience Teams, SpringerLink, 4 Earth Sci. Inform. 55 (2011).

Christine A. Ateah et al., Stereotyping as a Barrier to Collaboration: Does Interprofessional Education Make a Difference?, 31 Nurse Educ. Today 208 (2011); B. Mallaband et al., The Reality of Cross-Disciplinary Energy Research in the United Kingdom: A Social Science Perspective, 25 Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 9–

Sheila Jasanoff, Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity, in Dreamscapesof Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginariesandthe Fabricationof Power 20 (Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim eds., 2015).

Id. at 5–6.

Id. at 6.

Id. at 24.

David Budtz Pedersen, Integrating Social Sciences and Humanities in Interdisciplinary Research, 2 Palgrave Commun. 1 (2016); Vanesa Castán Broto, Maya Gislason & Melf-Hinrich Ehlers, Practising Interdisciplinarity in the Interplay Between Disciplines: Experiences of Established Researchers, 12 Environ. Sci. Policy 922 (2009); Andrew Bartlett et al., The Locus of Legitimate Interpretation in Big Data Sciences: Lessons for Computational Social Science from -omic Biology and High-Energy Physics, 5 Big Data Soc. 2053951718768831 (2018); Mallaband et al., supranote 11.

Cownie, supranote 3; Dave Owen & Caroline Noblet, Interdisciplinary Research and Environmental Law, 41 Ecol. Law Q. 887 (2015).

Introduction, 50 Mod. L. Rev. 677, 682 (1987).

Paul Chynoweth, Advanced Research Methods in the Built Environment, in AdvancedResearch Methodsinthe Built Environment 28, 37 (Andrew Knight & Les Ruddock eds., 2009).

Douglas W. Vick, Interdisciplinarity and the Discipline of Law, 31 J.L. & Soc’y 163 (2004); Becher, supranote 5.

We note, for example, that the fairly persistent ‘negative imaginaries’ of legal academia highlighted in the literature (i.e. those who venture views on how others might regard legal academia) points to remarkably few sources; moreover, our study highlights the same persistent negative pattern. While far from attempting to explain this phenomena, which may relate to a far wider range of sources about how ‘lawyers’ as a whole are portrayed, there is nevertheless a growing body of work that highlights within organizations a phenomena called ‘emotional contagion’, and the role that (positive and negative) emotions can have in shaping others’ behaviors and attitudes. See Stéphane Côté, Positive Emotions in Organizations, in Handbookof Positive Emotions 448–61 (Michele M. Tugade, Michelle N. Shiota, & Leslie D. Kirby eds., 2014).

Priaulx et al., supranote 7.

C. J. J. M. Stolker, Legal Journals: In Pursuit of a More Scientific Approach, 2 Eur. J. Leg. Educ. 77 (2005).

We are aware of course that this creates a stark dichotomy between ‘insiders’/’outsiders’ that is far from uncontentious. In our broader work, particularly focused on how ‘outsiders’ do perceive legal academia the boundaries between ‘Insider’/’Outsider’ is problematized (for instance, amongst the so-called ‘Outsider’ population, actors demonstrated very different levels of interaction with legal academics, with some frequently and intensely engaged in cross-disciplinary collaborative work that should make it hard to conceptualize these individuals as ‘Outsiders’). See further, Priaulx et al., supranote 7.

The paucity of interest by non-legal academics in the academic field of law may be due to the fact that, in England and Wales at least, law as a discipline of study is a relatively recent entrant to the academy. While the confines of space preclude a thoroughgoing historical exegesis of law's place within the academy in England and Wales, some aspects of its emergence warrant attention. Although Roman Law was taught at Oxbridge from the C12th, Twining reports the first LLB degrees in England as having been awarded as late as 1839 by University College London (William Twining, Blackstone’s Tower: The English Law School: Disciplineof Law (1994).). And it was arguably only following the scathing report of a House of Commons Select Committee in 1846 that Universities in the UK began to take up the mantel of legal education in earnest. See Roy Stuckey, The Evolution of Legal Education in the United States and the United Kingdom: How One System Became More Faculty-Oriented While the Other Became More Consumer-Oriented, 6 Int. J. Clin. Leg. Educ. 101 (2014). Consequently, law's place within Universities in England and Wales is comparatively novel relative to other disciplines (sometimes described as ‘pure’ academic disciplines) such as philosophy, theology and mathematics. Indeed, for some, law ‘has remained rather aloof from the academy’. See Twining, supranote 25.

We do not assume that the absence of interest suggests that legal academia or academics are perceived as irrelevant, albeit some might arrive at that conclusion. See Mark Tushnet, Legal Scholarship: Its Causes and Cure Symposium on Legal Scholarship: Its Nature and Purposes, 90 Yale L. J. 1205 (1980). In many respects the absence of attention given to legal academia as an object of study for other disciplinary actors might not be at all surprising. As most of us are aware, there are strong research incentives (and disincentives) that operate so that our own discipline remains our primary focus. In this regard, those outside of the discipline of law that centralize legal academics in their work constitute quite a special population indeed; the small number of non-legal theorists that have done so, are better rationalized as empirical theorists of higher education, or the study of academic disciplines – so that law, rather than constituting the specific object is part of a broader enquiry about disciplines or specialisms. See Becher, supranote 5; J. Douglas Toma, Alternative Inquiry Paradigms, Faculty Cultures, and the Definition of Academic Lives, 68 J. High. Educ. 679 (1997). While we had expected to find more discussion about law as an academic discipline, given the heightened interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration, the work around cross-disciplinarity is still fairly novel.

Becher, supranote 5.

Beyond those instances where legal academics make marginal appearances in non-legal scholarship (see e.g., Lawrence Baum, Judgesand Their Audiences: A Perspectiveon Judicial Behavior(2009); Bruno Latour, The Makingof Law: An Ethnographyofthe Conseild’Etat (2013); Kyle McGee, Latourandthe Passageof Law (2015)), the only work we could find where legal academics centrally feature (albeit a range of authors whose work belongs to sub-specialisms of law and economics, and law and literature) was Kellert's monograph which centralized scholarly works from law, economics and literature in their ‘technical applications and metaphorical speculations’ of ‘chaos theory’. See Stephen Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge: ChaosTheoryandthe Challengeof Learning Across Disciplines (2008)

Becher, supranote 5.

Id. at 174–6, Becher undertook a total of 221 interviews lasting between half an hour and two hours with actors from these 12 disciplines from a variety of locations in the UK (Bristol, Reading, Southampton, Cambridge, Exeter, UCL, Kent, LSE, Birmingham, Brighton, Imperial and Essex) and the US (Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Stanford, San Francisco).

Tony Becher, Towards a Definition of Disciplinary Cultures, 6 Stud. High. Educ. 109, 110 (1981).

Becher, supranote 5, at 28.

Becher, supranote 31, at 111.

Becher, supranote 5, at 30.

Id. at 30.

Id. at 30.

Id. at 31.

Becher & Trowler, supranote 6.

See in particular Cownie, supranote 3.

Id. at 78

Id. at 100.

Id. at 78.

Id. at 78.

Mark Davies, Educational Background and Access to Legal Academia, 38 Leg. Stud. 120, 132 (2018).

Becher, supranote 5.

Cownie, supranote 3.

Supranote 3, at 78.

Supranote 10.

Id. at 909.

Supranote 12.

Id. at 78.

Owen & Noblet, supranote 17, at 890.

Smits, supranote 4, at 4.

Jan Smits, “What Do Legal Academics Do?”, ElgarBlogfrom Edward Elgar Publishing (2012b), https://elgar.blog/2012/08/15/what-do-legal-academics-do/ (last visited Jan. 15, 2018).

Smits, supranote 4, at 4.

Genn, Partington, & Wheeler, supranote 4; Hillyard, supranote 4.

Richard Dawid, The Significance of Non-Empirical Confirmation in Fundamental Physics, ArXiv170201133 Phys. (2017), http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01133, (last visited Jan 12, 2018); Stephen Toulmin & David Leary, The Cult of Empiricism in Psychology, and Beyond, Century Psychol. Sci. 594–617 (1985).

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Smits, supranote 54.

Smits, supranote 4, at 151.

Vick, supranote 20.

Janet Weinstein, Coming of Age: Recognizing the Importance of Interdisciplinary Education in Law Practice, 74 Wash. L. Rev. 319–66 (1999).

Vick, Supranote 20, at 192. Such a view, finds its roots in the work of Weinstein, supranote 63, which we return to later in this paper—but we should note that this work is not without its difficulties, by virtue of combining and erratically moving between a range of populations that we would wish to keep distinct – law students, legal academics and legal practitioners—even if the work proves refreshing for drawing upon empirical studies evaluating personality traits.

Vick, supranote 20, at 187.

Tushnet, supranote 26.

Id. at 1205.

Echoing Tushnet's concern with the ‘marginality’ of legal scholarship, is Matthew W. Finkin, Reflections on Labor Law Scholarship and Its Discontents: The Reveries of Monsieur Verog Essay, 46 Univ. Miami L. Rev. 1101 (1991). Finkin argues that this is not an isolated view (citing the largely negative assessments given of academic lawyers from Becher's study). He comments that it seems ‘that a great intellectual feast is being held, a veritable Banquet of Ideas, to which law professors have not been invited’ Id. at 1151.

Tushnet, supranote 26, at 1216.

Id. at 1260.

Id. at 1222.

Gennetal., supranote 4; Michael Adler, Recognisingthe Problem: Socio-Legal Research TrainingintheUK (2007).

Owen & Noblet, supranote 17.

Gerhard Anders, Law at Its Limits: Interdisciplinarity between Law and Anthropology, 47 J. Leg. Pluralism & Unofficial L. 411 (2015); Stephen Feldman, Can Law Be a Source of Insight for Other Academic Disciplines?, 8 Wash. U. Juris. Rev. 151 (2016); Gennetal., supranote 4.

Geoffrey Samuel, Is Legal Knowledge Cumulative?, 32 Leg. Stud. 448, 449 (2012).

Geoffrey Samuel, Interdisciplinarity and the Authority Paradigm: Should Lawyers Be Taken Seriously by Scientists and Social Scientists?, 36 J. L. & Soc’y 431, 432 (2009).

Id. at 453.

Id. at 459.

Roger B. M. Cotterrell, Law and Sociology: Notes on the Constitution and Confrontations of Disciplines, 13 J. L. Soc’y 9 (1986).

Id. at 28.

Id.

Id. at 27.

Id.

Id. at 28.

Mallaband et al., supranote 11.

See e.g., Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (2001); Angus Dawson, The Future of Bioethics: Three Dogmas and a Cup of Hemlock, 24 Bioethics 218 (2010); Jason R. Goertzen, On the Possibility of Unification: The Reality and Nature of the Crisis in Psychology, 18 Theory & Psychol. 829 (2008); Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisisof Western Sociology (1980); Nicky Priaulx, Vorsprung Durch Technik: On Biotechnology, Bioethics, and Its Beneficiaries, 20 Cambridge Q. Healthcare Ethics 174 (2011); Cormac Shine, Our World Is Changing. It's Time for Historians to Explain Why, The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/jan/18/our-world-is-changing-its-time-for-historians-to-explain-why (Jan. 18, 2018, 07:30 AM GMT); George Steinmetz & Ou-Byung Chae, Sociology in an Era of Fragmentation: From the Sociology of Knowledge to the Philosophy of Science, and Back Again, 43 Soc. Q. 111 (2002); Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy (Penguin Books 2015) (2010).

Furthermore, those characterizations, for example of ‘(ir)relevancy’ to the outside world are open to contestation – that is so in law, as with other fields. For a recent example, see the below the line comments and broader engagements on social media in response to Shine's recent piece which laments the ‘irrelevancy’ of history on the wider social stage (See Shine, supranote 86).

See Shane Kilcommins, Doctrinal Legal Method (Black-Letterism): Assumptions, Commitments and Shortcomings, in Legal Research Methods: Principles and Practicalities (Laura Cahillane & Jennifer Schweppe eds., 2016).

We use these terms in a broad sense. We take ‘black-letter law’ to include what is sometimes referred to as doctrinal research (See e.g., Allan C. Hutchinson, Beyond Black-Letterism: Ethics in Law and Legal Education, 33 Law Tchr. 301 (1999)). We also take ‘socio-legal studies’ to include research that falls under the banner of ‘Law and Society’ research.

Bartie, supranote 4.

Id. at 350.

Smits, supranote 4, at 29.

Fiona Cownie, Law, Research and the Academy, in Tribesand Territoriesinthe 21st-century: Rethinkingthe Significanceof Disciplinesin Higher Education 57, 59 (Paul Trowler et al. eds., 2012).

Id. at 61.

Id.

See generally Cownie, supranote 3.

Cownie, supranote 93, at 63.

Cownie, supranote 3, at 54.

Id. at 55.

Id. at 56.

Id.

Id. at 58.

Id.

Bartie, supranote 4, at 356.

This is also the case in respect of slippery terms such as ‘interdisciplinarity’. As Vick notes, it is often applied loosely in practice, and ‘has a tendency to be all things to all people’ (Vick, supranote 20, at 164). While some see the drawing or borrowing from other fields as a form of ‘interdisciplinary’ engagement which is highlighted as highly prevalent (see Hillyard, supranote 4) others have their focus on genuinely integrative collaborative cross-disciplinary work (see Anders, supranote 74; Gavin Little, Developing Environmental Law Scholarship: Going Beyond the Legal Space, 36 Legal Stud. 48 (2016)), which is regarded, at least, by some within specialist pockets, as far less typical. Nevertheless, these differential understandings lead to assessments of quite different things and a quite confused picture as to what style of ‘interdisciplinarity’ engagement is prevalent.

See, e.g., Robert C. Ellickson, Trends in Legal Scholarship: A Statistical Study, 29 J. Legal Stud. 517 (2000). Ellickson's work in which is focused on achieving scope of capture (even if not depth) by deploying ‘words and phrases’ as proxies for different intellectual traditions. These proxies were used to search a Westlaw database to statistically map the rise and fall of different intellectual traditions in U.S. legal scholarship, including doctrinal approaches, law and economics, critical legal studies, postmodernism, feminist jurisprudence, empirical work, sociological approaches and a range of “law and . . .” approaches (history, psychology, philosophy and civic republicanism).

See generally Siems & Síthigh, supranote 4.

Id. at 652.

See Ellickson, supranote 106.

Siems & Síthigh, supranote 4, at 668.

Siems & Sithigh, supranote 109.

Cownie, supranote 3, at 58.

Mathias M. Siems & Daithi Mac Sithigh, Mapping Legal Research - Online Supplement 8 (2012), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2097698 (last visited Jan. 26, 2018).

We should note that we also introduced further categories for evaluating the legal academic terrain that supplemented these approaches. While Cownie found in her study that interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary collaborative work were not prevalent features of legal academia at that time, this is an aspect of the field that has been somewhat neglected since in terms of mapping exercises. Given that the ‘collaborative’ cross-disciplinary behaviors of legal academics, and perceptions others hold about legal academics constitute strong drivers for our overarching study, we included some soft measures around individualistic/collaborative approaches. Given space constraints, the results of this aspect of our study are reported elsewhere (See Priaulx et al., supranote 7).

Id.

For Survey 1, we experienced some technical obstacles in our attempt to communicate the presence of the survey to academics outside of the school of law/across the University. This was intensified owing to freshly rolled out policies concerning email communication (a measure taken to reduce high volumes of email across campus), including access restrictions to use of other departmental/school email lists, and a lack of alternative modes of easily reaching (or gaining the attention of) academics across campus at that time. Using social media was not an option for us given that we restricted this survey to Cardiff University academics.

See Table 2, Questions 8 and 12, in the Appendices.

Note that Cownie's study on legal academics focused exclusively on legal academics that were located in academic rather than vocational departments. (See Cownie, supranote 3, at 19).

See generally Hutchinson, supranote 89.

See further, Phil Thomas et al., The Journal of Law and Society at 40: History, Work, and Prospects, 2015 J. L. & Soc’y 390.

Adler, supranote 72.

Cownie, supranote 3.

Becher, supranote 5.

Pre-set attributes given to survey respondents were: Innovative, Interesting, Applied, Unapplied, Coherent, Uncreative, Arcane, Modern, Fragmented, Creative, Empirical, Unscientific, Methodological, Boring, Practical, Theoretical, Vocational, Reliant on Documents, Dealing in Pure Ideas, Scientific, and Academic. These attributes were randomized as they appeared to survey participants.

We note however, that in contrast with the ALS population, the VLS population sample size was small (6 survey respondents) and as such greater participation by this community in the survey may have led to very different results.

With a further two providing text highlighting that they would either not attempt such a task, or that their response would depend on “who was asking”.

See Priaulx et al., supranote 7.

We also included the categories Individual/Armchair/Library based, Lone Scholarship and Collaborative/Cross-Disciplinary Work.

Some of the legal scholarship we highlighted earlier noted normative dimensions of legal research, with some theorists affording it a particularly special place (e.g. Smits, supranote 4.) Nevertheless, distinct from the other categories (e.g. vocational, empirical and so on) it proved extremely challenging to determine where (if anywhere) a normative approach to law might fit within different research paradigm orientations. A legal academic who considers herself to be doctrinal or socio-legal (or a blend of the two) might well conceptualize herself as engaged in work that has a normative dimension to it. Coupled with a hypothesis that those engaged in practical and vocational ‘scholarship’ within the VLS population might be less inclined than their ALS counterparts to typify their work as possessing a normative dimension, we separated out ‘normative’ as a category in its own right for analysis.

We could, of course, have reversed this overarching research rating in order to produce a minus value for scores associated with Socio-Legal attributes, rather than Black-Letter law.On reflection, while such a change would have been presentational only, it may have been worthwhile given how the assertion of a negative/minus value here appears to tacitly feed into, rather than depart from, the sustained criticism that purely black-letter law approaches have been subjected to. Our aim here is not to suggest that particular approaches to legal research are preferable to others, nor to diminish the (critical) value of doctrinal/black-letter law approaches.

This is, of course, contestable. While some definitions of ‘black-letter law’ often include normative elements (See Bartie, supranote 4.), this would appear to be contested by others (for example, see Smits, supranote 4). Moreover, insofar as those engaged in scholarship might be involved in work that is not necessarily self-consciously involved in addressing overarching questions about ‘how society ought to be’, it seemed to us a better description of more vocationally-orientated work to exclude normative dimensions. What we found in practice was that while most respondents across the legal academic population selected ‘normative’ to some degree, the respondents that did not include this element sat exclusively in the VLS population.

Cownie, supranote 3; Siems & Síthigh, supranote 4.

Across other areas of the survey, we report 6 VLS survey respondents. The drop of 1 VLS participant here reflects that one of our VLS respondents that had provided a self-report of approaches to research and scholarship, and went onto complete the remainder of the survey, nevertheless selected ‘not applicable’ for all elements of this aspect of the survey. No explanation was given for this.

While we have cross-linked all profile responses with a range of separate markers around cross-disciplinary collaboration, we found no particular pattern emerged between those that migrated from one Research Profile Orientation to another. Nevertheless, what we did find is that these 2 ALS respondents were among 8 out of the entire cohort of legal academics (n = 25) that had high cross-disciplinary collaborative scores, and consistently reported this orientation across the survey. Nevertheless, to assess the extent to which higher levels of collaboration might provide greater insight into the beliefs of others, would require far more detailed questioning than our survey set out to achieve.

Priaulx et al., supranote 7.

Id.

This finding is one that is also supported strongly by a second set of surveys run at Cardiff University.

Little, supranote 105; Gennetal., supranote 4.

Smits, supranote 4, at 4.

Buanes & Jentoft, supranote 8, at 451.

See, e.g., the positively charged account of Neil H. Buchanan, Legal Scholarship Makes the World a Better Place, in Legal Scholarship We Like And Why It Matters (2014), https://jotwell.com/legal-scholarship-we-like-and-why-it-matters-program/ (last visited Aug. 18, 2019). See also the Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF2014) Impact Case Studies which highlights a large range of impactful research produced by members of the legal academic community (REF 2014 Impact Case Studies, https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/ (last visited Sept. 5, 2019)).

Politics is a department which is part of the School of Law and Politics (following a merger in 2014).

Background

“I have left my family and a comfortable life in Britain to risk suffering the most horrific death at the hands of IS. I’ve got a grenade in my pocket and I’ll blow myself up and take them with me."- Macer Gifford, White British citizen who joined the Kurds’ fight against ISIS [1]

“When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done.—Rachel Corrie, a White American activist who was killed in the Gaza Strip while trying to block an Israeli armored bulldozer [2]

It has been estimated that up to 35 thousand individuals from across Europe and the United States volunteered as soldiers in the Spanish Civil War against dictator Francisco Franco [3, 4]. What these foreign fighters had in common was a willingness to risk their lives for an ethnic and national group that they did not belong to, joining them in a lethal armed conflict in which they were not originally involved. As presented in the above quotes, such extreme and risky support for the political struggles of out-groups can also be observed today. For instance, it has been estimated that several hundred foreign fighters have voluntarily joined the Kurdish YPG forces (“People’s Defense Units”) in their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) [5]. Similarly, numerous Western activists, such as Rachel Corrie, have risked their lives or even died supporting the rights of Palestinians. What drives such people to engage in this type of extreme solidary behavior to support out-groups in political conflicts?

A host of studies has shown that a feeling of “oneness” with the in-group predicts extreme behavior on their behalf [6–9]. While previous research has found that this phenomenon can occur even with larger, abstract groups to which one belongs (e.g., one’s religious or national group) [7, 10], it is an open question if the psychological role of fusion processes is so fundamental and flexible that solidary actions on behalf of groups one does not initially belong to will also be motivated by it (but see [11] for a potential exception within the gender domain). That is, when people come to engage in extreme solidarity on behalf of out-groups of which they are not a priori members, is this also driven by perceptions that they are “one” with them and, if so, what are the conditions under which this occurs? Addressing this question is also addressing the possibility of social change: It is blatantly the case across cultural history that sometimes people and groups do join new alliances on behalf of which they may risk their lives, even if nationhood, ethnicity and religion are categories to which people are especially deeply fused today. Building on previous work on the relationship between extreme group behavior, identity fusion, and sacred values [12–15], here we predict that people are especially likely to fuse with a distant group if the way it is treated clashes with one’s fundamental ideological and political beliefs [12].

The potential role of fusion with out-groups in extreme solidary action

Distinct from normative social action (e.g., joining peaceful protests), extreme or non-normative social action often involves confrontations with militarized police or armed forces. Generally, people are more willing to engage in this kind of risky, self-sacrificing, and potentially life-threatening behavior for people with whom they share close relational ties [6, 16] or a common dysphoric and negative past [17, 18]. According to the theory of identity fusion [7], such extreme group behavior occurs because people experience being ‘one’ or fused with a group and, thus, perceive an overlap between their personal selves and their group. Support for this prediction has been observed on various measures of extreme support for one’s own group, including a willingness to fight and die for others, self-sacrifice in the trolley dilemma, and joining of revolutionary battalions and resistance movements [7, 9, 10, 16, 19–23].

Although similar to social identity, identity fusion is conceptualized as a distinct construct. As Hogg et al. [24] put it, in terms of social identity “the basic idea is that a social category (e.g., nationality, political affiliation, sports team) into which one falls, and to which one feels one belongs, provides a definition of who one is” (p. 259). Hence, different to personal identities, social identity refers to the part of the self-concept that is defined by membership in social groups [25]. In contrast to social identity, identity fusion denotes a state where individuals experience a visceral feeling of overlap between their personal and social selves [7]. In other words, they become one with the group. Moreover, although various subcomponents of social identity are conceptually similar to identity fusion at first glance (e.g., in-group homogeneity, solidarity), these are also conceptualized in distinct ways from what is the case in formulations of identity fusion. For instance, while the solidarity dimension of social identity involves feeling “a bond with,” “solidarity with” or “committed to” the in-group [26], one’s personal self and social identity are thought to still remain independent. By contrast, identity fusion involves feeling “immersed” or “one” with the group [20], such that the boundaries between both identities become permeable, allowing them to fuse to one [7].

Previous work on identity fusion highlights that people are likely to fuse with a group especially when they perceive other group members as kin [6, 27]. Hence, unsurprisingly, identity fusion is common for smaller groups in which group members in fact have strong face-to-face or even genetic relational ties (e.g., siblings, friends [28]). Yet, research suggests that people also tend to project such kinship-like processes to larger groups [9, 27, 29], for instance ethnic groups with which one may perceive a shared essence or bloodline. Arguably, as a result of these “fictive kin” perceptions [29], identify fusion can also be observed within more abstract higher-order groups, or imagined communities [30], for which actual genetic relatedness or even personal relations between most members is low such as cultural and national groups–processes that may generalize even to political and gender groups [8, 11, 31, 32]. Indeed, it has been suggested that people may show such “extended fusion” based on various abstractions such as a common political cause or ideology, in some sense treating people as if they were kin even when they have had no, or little, actual connection or face-to-face contact with other group members [7].

In short, a key insight of fusion theory is that the communality felt with larger, abstract groups is not simply the result of arbitrary social construction and communication, but shaped by the evolved logic of altruism directed towards kin ([33]; see also [34] for a similar analysis). This proclivity to recruit and apply kinship-like fusion processes, even at high levels of abstraction with groups that are not defined in terms of any shared biological essence, point to the fundamental importance of fusion-processes in navigating intergroup relations and conflicts. However, in previous demonstrations of extended fusion, participants’ ethnicity was often nested within, overlapped or substantially covaried with the abstract higher-order group in question (e.g., native Spaniards fusing with Spain; Israeli Jews fusing with Judaism; ethnic Poles fusing with the Polish national group or their religion in a country where the vast majority of Catholics are native Poles; [16, 21, 22, 32, 35]). Because ethnicity, religion and nationality often co-occur and are conceptually intertwined [36–38], this suggests that some perceptions of shared ancestry or biological essence might already be present in cases of extended fusion with national or religious groups for instance, or at least that the ambiguity of such groups lends itself readily for the extension of kinship-like processes driven by perceptions of shared essence and ancestry. Hence, a stronger test of the fundamental role of psychological fusion processes for extended solidarity would be if they also account for solidary extreme action for out-groups that appear to share no factual kinship, bloodline or biological essence with oneself.

Of course, in some sense the idea of fusing with an out-group is paradoxical: If you become one and part with a group, surely it must now be your in-group? This line of argument refers to the outcome of fusion processes, but it does not address if and why people come to fuse with new groups that they are not initially part of in the first place (in contrast to their own national, ethnic and often religious groups). Because ethnic, religious and national groups may be perceived to share biological ancestry, here we test if fusion processes also underpin solidarity with ethnic out-groups. If this is the case, it would suggest that kin-like perceptions of oneness underpin solidarity even with groups that one does clearly not share any kin-like common biological ancestry or essence with. This in turn would suggest that fusion processes of perceived oneness, although possibly ultimately rooted in biological kin altruism, flexibly underpin the formation and joining of new groups that occur in social change.

Hence, while individuals likely come to perceive the out-group as their in-group after fusing with it, when we focus on fusion with ethnic out-groups in the present studies, we refer to the process that makes it possible to fuse with a group that initially constituted–and from an outsider’s perspective still may be considered as–an out-group. An average person who is White American or Norwegian has no Palestinian or Kurdish ancestors and, thus, is likely to perceive neither as their racial/ethnic in-group. Yet, as we aim to demonstrate, Norwegians and White Americans may come to feel fused with Palestinians or Kurds. The present research investigates a process that motivates such fusion with out-groups across ethnic boundaries. To ensure that we indeed assess fusion across ethnic groups, we ask participants to indicate their ethnic group membership in each study. Moreover, to rule out the possibility that fusion with the out-group is simply due to perceptions of shared values with the out-group, we test and control for such a potential confound in one study.

The present research

In four studies, we investigated antecedents of fusing with outgroups and its impact on extreme solidary support. Based on recent research suggesting that individuals’ fusion with groups may be motivated by a desire to protect sacred values [12, 14], we predicted that people would fuse especially strongly with out-groups whose treatment is perceived to clash ideologically with one’s own core political views. Hence, because the oppression of groups in asymmetric conflicts via occupying powers stands in sharp disagreement with Leftist political ideology [39–41], Leftists would be expected to fuse with oppressed out-groups, motivating them to act on their behalf. While the term “Leftist” is a broad construct, the general left-right continuum is the primary way to describe and categorize political beliefs in many, if not most, parts of the world [42, 43]. Yet, despite this universality, the specific ideological content associated with this dimension varies between contexts [39, 44]. However, at least in liberal societies such as those of Western Europe and North America, from which most of our participants were recruited, being Leftist typically involves a concern for harm being done against others and equality for all [39, 45, 46]. Against this background, we tested the specific prediction that Leftists should fuse in particular to out-groups that are perceived to be violently oppressed, using a variety of populations and out-groups, and correlational and experimental designs. First, using a sample of European-Americans, we tested whether having a Leftist political orientation predicts more fusion with Palestinians and subsequently more support for non-normative extreme protests on their behalf. Next, in a sample of Norwegians, we tested whether Leftists are more fused with out-groups who are perceived to be maltreated in a way that ideologically clashes with central Leftist values (i.e., the Palestinians living under oppressive occupation) compared to out-groups whose treatment tends to not be seen as clashing with these values to the same degree (i.e., the Kurds). In a third study, we aimed to causally test whether framing the treatment of an out-group as a violation of Leftist political ideology would increase the extent to which this political orientation predicts fusion with the out-group. Specifically, we tested whether experimentally framing Kurds as living under oppressive occupation, rather than being involved in a symmetric war, might make Leftists European-Americans fuse with Kurds more and, thereby, increases their willingness to engage in non-normative extreme protest on their behalf. We included measures of normative as well as non-normative extreme protest in the first three studies to allow us to test whether the effects of fusion with out-groups are especially strong on non-normative extreme actions in line with previous research reviewed above. Finally, using a unique sample of aspiring foreign fighters in the very process of joining the Kurds in their fight against ISIS, we tested whether having a Leftist political orientation creates more fusion with the Kurdish out-group and, thus, more willingness to fight and die for this group.

Study 1

In the U.S., political engagement on behalf of Palestinians has become an important part of the Leftist political agenda. Indeed, former 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. Moreover, according to a recent survey, 29% of self-identified Liberal Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, compared to only 7% among self-identified Republicans [47]. This sympathy among the Left can be observed in form of political movements and protests against Israel and the Israeli occupation including “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).” Here, we tested whether a Leftist political orientation among European-Americans is associated with higher perceived fusion or “oneness” with Palestinians, and whether this fusion, in turn, predicts extreme activism on this group’s behalf.

To estimate the unique effects and relative strength of this political orientation–fusion with the out-group pathway, we also controlled for a selection of alternative predictors of the social identity [48] and social dominance models of collective action [49, 50]. Specifically, meta-analytical evidence has validated three major social identity predictors of social action [48]: 1) politicized identities such as activist identities, 2) affective reactions to injustice such as anger, and 3) political efficacy or the belief that one’s efforts are likely to produce social change. While these factors have mostly been studied in terms of collective action supporting one’s own group, some recent research has shown that efficacy beliefs and moral outrage (i.e., anger) can also predict solidary action for disadvantaged out-groups (e.g., [51]). Hence, in this study, we controlled for politicized social identity and its potential pathways through anger and perceived efficacy. In previous identity fusion research, social identification has often been measured with items such as “When someone praises my country, it feels like a personal compliment” or “When someone criticizes my country, it feels like a personal insult” [20, 23]. As these items may be seen as measuring outcomes of social identification rather than social identification per se, in our research, we used a more direct social identification measure developed by Hornsey et al. [52]. Importantly, this scale measures a politicized activist identity which, according to previous research is more predictive of collective action than are non-politicized identities [48]. Hence, it constitutes an appropriate control variable in the context of research on solidary collective action for out-groups. Importantly, here we use the term “solidary” to explicate that we focus on collective action in support of out-groups (rather than one’s in-group), and not to refer to the emerging literature seeing solidarity as a sub-component of social identity [26].

Finally, it has recently been argued that people can engage in solidary action with the motivation to attenuate or strengthen between-group hegemony [50], as captured by their Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) [53]. For instance, Stewart et al. [50] found that the higher non-Arab foreigners’ SDO levels were, the lower their support was for the Arab Spring protesters. This effect was mediated by a perception that Arabs’ lack the competence to rule their own countries (but see [54]). Hence, we also controlled for SDO and a measure of perceived Palestinian competence.

Materials and methods

Participants.

A total of 201 European-Americans, who were not Jewish and who were living in the U.S., participated in a study on “political conflicts” through Amazon MTurk (Mage = 34.6, SDage = 10.00; men: 56.7%). The focus on non-Jewish European Americans was important for two reasons: First, DNA ancestry research suggests that Jews and Palestinians are genetically related and that knowledge about this may positively impact intergroup attitudes [55]. Hence, Jewish participants may have perceived an overlap between their own racial/ethnic group and the Palestinian out-group due to shared perceived kinship. Second, although American Jews are not directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they often show emotional attachment to the Israeli state, which is a majority Jewish nation. Because our focus was on fusion with a distant ethnic out-group to which one does not belong to nor is involved in a conflict with, we focused on non-Jewish European-American participants here. Participants were paid $1 for participation. This and all remaining studies were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Departments of Psychology at the University of Oslo (Nr. 1790201). Unless stated otherwise, they completed the following measures on 7-point Likert-type scales, ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree):

Leftist political orientation.

In all studies presented in this paper, we assessed political orientation using a single-item indicator. This approach is common in social-scientific survey research (e.g., European Social Survey, World Value Survey, General Social Survey), arguably because it captures political orientation parsimoniously and equivalently across various social and demographic groups [43] and has high predictive validity [56]. Specifically, we used the validated 10-point format [57] to assess political orientation in all studies. For each study, we used the terms most common in the respective political context to denote the endpoints of the scale. That is, the endpoints were “very liberal”—“very conservative” in the US (Studies 1 and 3) and “extremely left-wing”—“extremely right-wing” in the Norwegian student population (Studies 3), while we use a combination of both terms (i.e., “very liberal/left-wing”—“very conservative/right-wing”) in the last international study (Study 4). Hence, in the present study, which was conducted in the US, participants rated their political orientation on a scale ranging from 1 (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative). This scale was reverse-scored so that higher values indicated more Leftist political orientation.

Social dominance orientation.

The new SDO7 scale [58] was used to measure social dominance with 16 items (α = .96) such as “It’s probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom”.

Activist identity.

We adapted a four-item scale developed by Hornsey et al. [52] to measure Palestine-activist identity (e.g., “I identify as a Palestine-activist”; α = .94).

Fusion with the out-group.

Participants completed the seven-item identity fusion scale developed by Gómez et al. [20]. To measure fusion with the out-group, the scale was adapted such that all items were framed towards the Palestinian out-group (i.e., “I am one with the Palestinian people”; α = .94). As in Gómez et al. [20], factor analysis showed that the identity fusion and social identity measures represented distinct constructs.

Palestinian competence.

Participants completed the item, “The Palestinian people are competent enough to govern themselves”, adopted from Stewart et al. [50] on a 10-point scale ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 10 (totally agree).

Political efficacy.

As in Saab et al. [51], we used four items to measure participants’ efficacy beliefs (α = .96). For instance, participants indicated whether they believed that protesting would result in “achieving justice in Palestine” on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (extremely).

Anger.

Three items from Ufkes et al. [59] were used to measure the degree to which participants felt anger, frustration and irritation regarding how Palestinians are treated (α = .98).

Normative protest intentions.

As in Saab et al. [51], we asked participants how many of the next ten organized protests for justice in Palestine they were likely to take part in. Response options ranged from 0 to 10.

Willingness to engage in non-normative extreme protest.

Willingness to engage in non-normative extreme protest (abbreviated as ‘extreme protest’ in the analyses) was measured with two items adopted from Simon et al. [60, 61] and slightly adapted to the present context: “I would participate in Palestine protests involving confrontations with the police” (original item: “I would participate even in a protest action which may involve a confrontation with the police”) and, “Sometimes violent protest for Palestine is the only means to wake up the public” (original item: “Sometimes violent protest is the only means to wake up the public”), r(199) = .50, p < .001.

Results

As displayed in Table 1, fusion with the out-group and activist identity were related to higher normative protest intentions and willingness to engage in extreme protest. Surprisingly, SDO was unrelated to both solidary action measures when considered as a full scale (.155 < ps < .583) or as separate dominance and anti-egalitarianism subscales (.112 < ps < .894). SDO and the potential mediator of perceived competence were therefore not included in the following models.

Table 1. Means, Standard Deviations and Correlations between variables in Study 1 are displayed.

In the first stage, we tested a simple model where Leftist political orientation predicts fusion with the out-group and activist identity, which both predict extreme and normative protest in turn (see Fig 1A). Here and in all other path models tested in this paper, maximum likelihood estimation was used to account for potential non-normality of the dependent variables [62]. In the well-fitting model, χ2 (df = 2, N = 201) = 1.38, p = .502, Root Mean Square of Approximation (RMSEA) < .001, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = 1.00, Root Mean Square Residual (RMR) = .05, Leftist political orientation positively predicted fusion with the out-group and activist identity. Fusion with the out-group, in turn, positively predicted extreme protest, while activist identity predicted both extreme and normative protest. Bootstrapping with 5,000 random resamples showed that leftist political orientation indirectly predicted more extreme protest mediated by fusion with the out-group (β = .05, 95% CI [.01, .11], p = .006) as well as activist identity (β = .05, 95% CI [.01, .13], p = .015). These effects did not differ in strength (p = .848). Moreover, Leftist political orientation had an indirect positive effect on normative protest intentions that was mediated only by activist identity (β = .07, 95% CI [.01, .17], p = .021).

Fig 1. Simple (a), and more complex and fitted (b), mediation models for Study 1 are displayed. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey. The correlation between anger and efficacy in Model b) is not displayed for purposes of presentation: ranger, efficacy = .30, p < .001.

We further tested a reversed model in which activist identity and identity fusion had effects on political orientation which, in turn, was expected to predict extreme and normative protest. However, in this fully-saturated model, political orientation had no effect on either dependent variable and, hence, did not mediate the effects (see S1 Fig in the supplementary information).

We also estimated a more complex model in which the effects of activist identity on normative and extreme protest were hypothesized to be further mediated by anger and political efficacy, following the social identity approach of collective action. However, in the poorly-fitting model, χ2 (df = 7, N = 201) = 29.15, p < .001, RMSEA = .126, CFI = .938, RMR = .297, only anger mediated the effects of activist identity on extreme protest, while efficacy did not mediate at all. When we fitted the model by deleting the non-significant paths and adding a direct path from leftist political orientation to anger, model fit was satisfactory, χ2 (df = 6, N = 201) = 13.54, p = .140, RMSEA = .050, CFI = .987, RMR = .015 (see Fig 1B). In this fitted model, the effect of Leftist political orientation on extreme protest that was mediated by activist identity was further mediated by anger, resulting in a weak indirect relationship (β = .01, 95% CI [.001, .02], p = .012). Moreover, political orientation had an indirect positive effect on extreme protest that was mediated by anger (β = .04, 95% CI [.02, .08], p < .001).

Preliminary discussion

This first study provided initial support that fusion with out-groups mediates the effect of political orientation on extreme solidary action on behalf of out-groups in need. Specifically, the more politically Leftist people were, the more they fused with the Palestinian out-group which, in turn, resulted in higher willingness to engage in non-normative extreme protests. This relationship remained stable even when controlling for alternative variables known for predicting solidary action. Why then do people fuse and show extreme support for some out-groups in political conflict but not for others? Next, we aimed to address this question while also confirming the robustness of our proposed political orientation–fusion with outgroups pathway by replicating our initial findings in a different cultural context.

Study 2

Despite its far geographical distance from the Middle East, Norway has a long history of political engagement on behalf of Palestine. For instance, Norway played a central role in the 1993 Oslo peace-treaty and provides more foreign aid to Gaza and the West Bank relative to its population size or GDP than any other country does [63]. At the grassroots level, this Palestine support can be observed in form of Leftist political protests against the way Palestinians are treated, sometimes resulting in violence and vandalism (see [64, 65]). In contrast, a group that finds itself in a similar situation as the Palestinian people but receives far less support from Norway are the Kurds. In their modern history, the Kurdish minority living in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria have been frequent victims of violent oppression [66]. Some of the most extreme examples include Saddam Hussain’s 1988 genocide in the Kurdish city of Halabja, in which chemical weapons killed thousands of Kurdish civilians. Indeed, despite historical differences, Kurds and Palestinians have in common a history of being low-power groups in asymmetric conflicts. Moreover, they both continue to be denied the formation of an independent state and experience repeated victimization at the hands of high-powered groups. Yet, Norwegians protesting against the maltreatment of Kurds are a rare sight and Norwegian foreign aid to the Kurdish territories is also drastically lower than to Palestine. In 2014 alone, Palestine received 109 million USD from Norway [63], while the total sum of all annual aid given to the Kurdish territories between 1995 and 2010 amounts to just 15.5 million USD [67].

Why do Norwegians show far less support for the Kurds than for Palestinians? We expected that Norwegians have substantially more knowledge about the way Palestinians are treated and are more frequently exposed to their suffering by the media. As a result, we expected Norwegian Leftists to show fusion in particular with Palestinians because this group’s perceived oppression clashes ideologically with Leftist beliefs, while this perception may be less pronounced for Kurds. To test this, we randomly assigned participants to a Palestinian or Kurdish condition and predicted that the more Leftist participants were the more they would fuse with Palestinians but not with Kurds. Again, we expected this fusion with the out-group to drive non-normative, extreme protest on the group’s behalf.

Materials and methods

Participants.

Through university mailing lists, 215 Norwegian political science students were recruited for a study about “political conflicts” (Mage = 24.99, SDage = 5.83; women = 59.1%). To ensure that we measured fusion with an ethnic out-group, two participants who either reported to have a Palestinian/Kurdish background or failed to complete this question were removed from the analyses.

Procedure.

Participants completed the SDO scale from Study 1 (α = .90) and indicated their political orientation on a 10-point scale ranging from 1 (extremely left-wing) to 10 (extremely right-wing). The latter scale was reversed-scored so that higher values represented a more Leftist political orientation.

Next, participants were randomly assigned to a Kurdistan or a Palestine condition. This between-subjects design was chosen instead of a within-subjects design to prevent participants from recognizing the comparative purpose of the study and to match their responses towards both groups. They then completed measures from the first study of: fusion with the out-group (α = .88), activist identity (α = .91), political efficacy (α = .92), anger (α = .92), perceived competence (due to an data error, the competence item was only presented to 158 participants), normative protest intentions, and extreme protest, r(211) = .44, p < .001. Importantly, dependent on condition, the measures were framed towards either Kurds/Kurdistan or Palestinians/Palestine.

Lastly, to test whether participants indeed were more knowledgeable about, and exposed to, the treatment of the Palestinians, they reported their knowledge about the respective conflict on a scale ranging from 1 (no knowledge at all) to 10 (very much knowledge) and completed five items measuring media exposure frequency to the respective out-groups’ maltreatment (e.g., “How often have you seen [dependent on condition: Palestinians/Kurds] being maltreated on the news during the last year?”; α = .95) ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (very often).

Results

In both conditions, participants indicated being relatively Left-wing and no differences between the conditions were observed on this variable (see Table 2). As expected, participants had more knowledge about the Palestinian conflict than about the Kurdish conflict, and had seen more media coverage showing the maltreatment of Palestinians than the maltreatment of Kurds. Moreover, participants in the Palestine condition were more fused with the out-group, had a stronger activist identity and showed more anger and normative protest intentions than those in the Kurdistan condition did (see Table 2).

Table 2. Between-group differences for the framing manipulation in Study 2 are displayed.

Moderation analyses.

As expected, the effects of Leftist political orientation on fusion with the out-group and activist identity were moderated by the framing manipulation. In a first regression with fusion with the out-group as dependent variable, F(3, 209) = 14.37, p < .001, the framing dummy variable (coded as 0 = Kurdistan, 1 = Palestine; β = .26, p < .001, B = .37, 95% CI [.19, .54]), the leftist political orientation variable (β = .23, p < .001, B = .09, 95% CI [.04, .14]) and the interaction between both (β = .21, p = .001, B = .16, 95% CI [.06, .26]) were significant. Simple slopes showed that leftist political orientation was positively related to fusion with the out-group in the Palestine condition, but not in the Kurdistan condition (see Fig 2). Given that the skewness and kurtosis values of the identity fusion variable (skew = 2.73, kurtosis = 10.23) exceeded the cutoff of +/- 2 and 7 respectively, indicating non-normality [68], we conducted the same analysis after log-transforming the variable (skew = 1.41, kurtosis = 1.59). The same pattern of results was observed applying this transformation.

Fig 2. The more Leftist participants’ political orientation was, the more they showed fusion with the out-group and activist identity in terms of Palestine, but not in terms of Kurdistan in Study 2.

Also in a second regression, with activist identity as dependent variable, F(3, 209) = 17.48, p < .001, the experimental dummy variable (β = .25, p < .001, B = .55, 95% CI [.28, .82]), the Leftist political orientation variable (β = .32, p < .001, B = .20, 95% CI [.12, .27]) and the interaction between both were significant (β = .16, p = .010, B = .20, 95% CI [.05, .35]). Here, simple slopes showed that Leftist political orientation was related to more activist identity in the Palestine condition, but not in the Kurdistan condition (see Fig 2). Given that the activist identity variable was only moderately skewed (skew = 1.47, kurtosis = 1.52), the model was not re-estimated log-transforming the variable.

Due to the close relationships of political orientation and SDO in previous research (e.g., [69]) and the present study (see Table 3), we also tested whether the framing manipulation would moderate the effects of SDO on fusion with the out-group and activist identity. However, the interaction terms were non-significant (ps > .338).

Table 3. Correlations between variables in Study 2 across conditions are displayed.

Moderated mediation model.

Given that SDO did not predict any form of solidary action in Study 1, we first ran two regression models in which normative, F(3, 209) = 54.29, p < .001, and extreme protest, F(3, 209) = 19.85, p < .001, were regressed on SDO, fusion with the out-group and activist identity to test whether we should include SDO in the full model. Again, however, SDO had unique predictive power in neither model (ps > .132), even when we calculated separate dominance (ps > .232) and anti-egalitarianism scores (ps > .410). This pattern remained the same when we log-transformed the normative protest (before transformation: skew = 2.05, kurtosis = 3.72; after transformation: skew = 1.26, kurtosis = .22) and extreme protest (before transformation: skew = 2.46, kurtosis = 6.65; after transformation: skew = 1.37, kurtosis = .89) variables. Thus, we did not include SDO in the path model.

We first tested a basic model in which the experimental framing condition, Leftist political orientation and the interaction between both predicted higher levels of out-group fusion and activist identity, which, in turn, both predicted normative and extreme protest (see Fig 3). In this well-fitting model, χ2(df = 10, N = 213) = 6.15, p = .803, RMSEA < .001, CFI = 1.00, RMR = .05, Leftist political orientation, the framing dummy variable and the interaction between both predicted higher levels of fusion with the out-group and activist identity. Fusion with the out-group, in turn, led to more extreme protest and slightly more normative protest intentions, while activist identity led to more normative protest intentions but was unrelated to extreme protest (see Fig 3).

Fig 3. Moderated mediation model in Study 2 is displayed. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey.

In the Palestine condition, bootstrapping showed that Leftist political orientation indirectly predicted higher levels of extreme protest, as mediated by more fusion with the out-group (β = .21, 95% CI [.07, .39], p = .001) but had no indirect effects on normative protest (p = .303). In contrast, Leftist political orientation indirectly predicted more normative protest (β = .24, 95% CI [.11, .38], p < .001) but not extreme protest for Palestine (p = .571) when mediated by higher activist identity.

In the Kurdistan condition, Leftist political orientation had a positive and indirect effect on normative protest that was mediated by stronger activist identity (β = .10, 95% CI [.02, .21], p = .009). All other indirect paths were non-significant (ps >.386).

To rule out the possibility that what accounts for the effects is mere knowledge about the conflict rather than fusion with the out-group, we first estimated an equivalent path model in which we replaced the fusion variable with the knowledge variable, χ2(df = 10, N = 213) = 9.03, p = .526, RMSEA < .001, CFI = 1.00, RMR = .06. In this model, knowledge predicted slightly less extreme protest, β = -.14, p = .037, but had no effect on normative protest (see S2 Fig in the supplementary materials for the full model). Moreover, no interactive effects of the experimental condition and political orientation on knowledge were observed in the first place. Only the path from the experimental condition on knowledge was significant, indicating that participants had more knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than about the Kurdish conflict. Second, we ran a model including the fusion with the out-group variable and controlling for the knowledge variable, χ2(df = 10, N = 213) = 5.29, p = .871, RMSEA < .001, CFI = 1.00, RMR = .45. Results showed that effects of fusion with the out-group remained the same when controlling for knowledge (see S3 Fig in the supplementary materials for the full model).

Additional analyses.

We also tested an extended model to control for anger and political efficacy by letting them mediate the effects of activist identity on solidary action. In the model, χ2 (df = 28, N = 213) = 66.73, p < .001, RMSEA = .081, CFI = .927, RMR = .16, efficacy partially mediated the effect of activist identity on normative protest intentions − indirect effect: β = .05, SE = .01, 95% CI [.014, .097], p = .002 − while the indirect effects mediated by fusion with the out-group remained the same as in the previous model.

Preliminary discussion

As expected, participants showed more fusion with Palestinians than Kurds. Our results suggested that the different degrees of fusion with Kurds and Palestinians were due to political orientation having distinct effects on both out-groups. Although participants in both conditions had equally Left-wing political views, this orientation only resulted in more fusion with Palestinians. We suspect that this is because, in Norway, the perceived treatment of Palestinians more clearly clashes ideologically with Leftist political beliefs. This interpretation is consistent with our findings that participants reported being substantially more knowledgeable of the Palestinian conflict and also more exposed to the maltreatment of Palestinians via the news media. Finally, Leftist political orientation was related to a higher activist identity but only predicted normative forms of protest. Fusion with the out-group, however, predicted extreme non-normative protest. This suggests that fusion may not only be a more potent predictor of extreme behavior than social identity when it comes to in-groups but also in terms of extreme solidary action for groups one is not part of.

While this study demonstrated that the political orientation–fusion pathway can explain why people are willing to go to extreme means to support one out-group but not another, the next study aimed to further uncover our proposed underlying mechanism. Specifically, we sought to causally test our proposal that the reason that Leftists do not fuse with Kurds is that their situation is not violating core Leftist values because it is not perceived as an asymmetrical conflict.

Study 3

To provide direct support for our argument that fusion with out-groups occurs when the group’s treatment clashes with one’s political views, here, we directly manipulate perceptions of the out-group’s situation. Specifically, because social justice [39, 40], resistance to oppression [49, 53, 70] and the right of self-determination [41, 71] are core Leftist values, we experimentally framed the Kurds as either being engaged in a symmetrical war or as being the victims of oppressive occupation, and predicted that the latter would increase fusion with and, subsequently, lead to more willingness to engage in non-normative extreme protests on behalf of Kurds.

Materials and methods

Participants.

A total of 234 European-Americans (Mage = 36.13, SD = 11.62; men: 45.7%) participated through Amazon MTurk in a study on “social issues.” All participants were paid $2.50 for participation.

Procedure.

Participants first completed the Leftist political orientation scale and then indicated how knowledgeable they were about the Kurdish conflict on the same scales as in the previous study. We then manipulated the out-group’s situation by randomly assigning participants to a war condition, an oppressive occupation condition or a control condition. In each condition, participants were instructed to read a text allegedly written by a Kurdish individual. In the war and occupation conditions, the text comprised a narrative describing Kurds living under war or under oppressive occupation yet the wording was otherwise identical. The text in the warcondition was:

"When I came into the world and first opened my eyes, we Kurds were fighting in a war.

For as long as I know, our people have been at on-going war with the Turks, the Arabs and the Persians.

More than 100 000 of our civilians, including many children and women, have become victim of this war, and every day brings more tragedy.

My only son was shot in front of my eyes because he was fighting the enemy soldiers. There is hardly a day that I don’t stare out of the window thinking about him…and how things would have been different without this war.

Living under war has left a mark on our people’s development as a sovereign nation. The war has not only caused a lot of suffering and families being teared apart, but also negatively affected our language and cultural heritage–in short, undermining the very essence of who we are.

I often dream and long for a war-free Kurdistan, with no fighting, where every Kurd could have the chance to live in peace and have the possibility to live her/his life with dignity."

The text in the oppressive occupation condition was:

"When I came into the world and first opened my eyes, we Kurds were under occupation.

For as long as I know, our people have been systematically oppressed by the Turks, the Arabs and the Persians.

More than 100 000 of our civilians, including many children and women, have become victim of this occupation, and every day brings more tragedy.

My only son was shot in front of my eyes because he resisted the occupying soldiers. There is hardly a day that I don’t stare out of the window thinking about him…and how things would have been different without this occupation.

Living under occupation has left a mark on our people’s development as a free nation. The occupying powers have not only caused a lot of suffering and families being teared apart, but also negatively affected our language and cultural heritage–in short, undermining the very essence of who we are.

I often dream and long for a free Kurdistan under no occupation, where every Kurd could have the chance to be free and have the possibility to live her/his life with dignity."

In the control condition, participants read a text about Kurds’ ethnic origins and language:

"The Kurdish people are an ethnic group that originated in the Middle East. Currently, Kurds are living in parts of Turkey, several Arab countries and Iran. The Kurds historically inhabited the regions surrounding the Zagros Mountains. The area is often referred to as Kurdistan.

Many Kurds consider themselves descended from the ancient Medes, and even use a calendar dating from 612 B.C.

The Kurdish languages form a subgroup of the Northwestern Persian languages. Just as the Kurdish people inhabit different countries, the Kurdish language is written in a range of scripts, including the Perso-Arabic alphabet and the Latin alphabet.

Kurdish is an official language of Iraq and a regional language in Iran. Many Kurds are bilingual.

Kurdish culture is a legacy from the various ancient peoples who shaped modern Kurds and their society. As most other Middle Eastern populations, a high degree of mutual influences between the Kurds and their neighboring peoples are apparent."

The three texts were matched in terms of length, number of paragraphs and format. To check the effectiveness of the manipulation, on the next page, participants rated the extent to which they would describe the conflict as a war vs. occupation from 1 (war) to 10 (occupation). Next, in randomized order, participants completed the fusion with the out-group (α = .96) and the activist identity scales (α = .94), followed by one item measuring normative protest intentions, and two items measuring extreme protest, r(232) = .53, p < .001, as in the previous studies. Because of the absence of SDO effects in the first two studies, the variable was not measured.

Results

Manipulation check.

The manipulation check indicated that the experimental manipulation was successful. In an univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA), the conflict type manipulation predicted perceptions of the conflict being an occupation rather than war, F(2, 231) = 17.71, p < .001, ηp2 = .13. Post-hoc tests with Bonferroni correction showed that participants in the occupation condition, to significantly larger extent (ps < .001), described the conflict as an occupation compared to participants in the control condition (M = 7.30, SE = .28, 95% CI [6.76, 7.85] vs M = 5.64, SE = .26, 95% CI [5.13, 6.16]), but especially compared to participants in the war condition (vs. M = 5.11, SE = .26, 95% CI [4.59, 5.63]). The latter two conditions did not differ significantly from each other (p = .467). No unmoderated, main effects were observed on the mediators (i.e., fusion with the out-group: p = .970; activist identity: p = .623) and dependent variables (i.e., normative protest: p = .682; extreme protest: p = .167).

Moderated mediation model.

We set out to estimate first-stage moderated mediation models [72] in which the treatment type manipulation moderated the effects of political orientation on fusion with the out-group which, in turn, was expected to predict higher levels of normative and extreme protest. Before conducting the analyses, we created two dummy variables, one comparing the oppressive occupation prime to the control condition and one comparing it to the war condition. All predictors were mean-centered. As expected, in the moderated regression model with fusion with the out-group as dependent variable, Leftist political orientation significantly interacted with the dummy variable that compared the oppressive occupation with the war prime (see Table 4). As simple slopes indicated, when the Kurds were described as victims of oppressive occupation, Leftist political orientation predicted higher levels of fusion with the out-group, but not when they were described as being part of a war (see Fig 4). While the interaction with the dummy variable comparing the oppressive occupation to the control condition was non-significant, simple slopes showed that political orientation also was unrelated to fusion with the out-group in the control condition. None of the interactions were significant for activist identity (see Table 4). Because the skewness and kurtosis of activist identity (skew = 1.94, kurtosis = 3.64) and fusion with the out-group (skew = 1.75, kurtosis = 2.74) fell within the normal range [68], we did not re-estimate the models with log-transformed variables.

Fig 4. In Study 3, Leftist political orientation predicted more fusion with the Kurdish out-group when they were described as being victims of oppressive occupation but was unrelated to fusion with the out-group in the control and war condition. aB = -.01, SE = .04, p = .760, 95% CI [-.10, .07]; bB = .03, SE = .05, p = .531, 95% CI [-.07, .14]; cB = .13, SE = .05, p = .014, 95% CI [.03, .23].

Table 4. Moderated regression models with fusion with the out-group and activist identity as dependent variables in Study 3 are displayed.

Given that the mediator variable of fusion with the out-group, in turn, predicted more normative and extreme protest (see Table 5), we used model 7 of the PROCESS macro [73] to test our full moderated mediation model. In these models, political orientation was expected to have indirect effects on normative and extreme protest, mediated by fusion with the out-group, when the Kurds were described as victims of oppressive occupation but not when they were described as part of a war. Because the macro does not provide standardized coefficients and p values for indirect effects, we present unstandardized coefficients with upper and lower 95% confidence intervals here. As predicted, bootstrapping showed that leftist political orientation had significant and positive indirect effects on normative (B = .08, SE = .04, 95% CI [.03, .19]) and extreme protest (B = .08, SE = .03, 95% CI [.03, .15]) when the Kurds were described as victims of oppressive occupation, while the indirect effects were non-significant in the war condition (normative protest: B = -.01, SE = .04, 95% CI [-.08, .07]; extreme protest: B = -.01, SE = .03, 95% CI [-.07, .06]). While the extreme protest variable had acceptable skew (skew = 1.75, kurtosis = 2.87), we re-estimated the indirect effects with a log-transformed normative protest variable as it was positively skewed (before transformation: skew = 3.16, kurtosis = 9.63; after transformation: skew = 2.28, kurtosis = 4.10). Replicating the previous results, the indirect effect on the log-transformed normative protest variables was significant in the occupation condition (B = .01, SE = .01, 95% CI [.01, .03]) but not in the war condition (B = -.001, SE = .01, 95% CI [-.01, .01]).

Table 5. Correlations between variables in Study 3 across conditions are displayed.

Preliminary discussion

As predicted, when the Kurds were described as victims of oppressive occupation rather than as being engaged in symmetrical war, being Leftist resulted in more fusion with Kurds and, consequently, more willingness to engage in non-normative extreme protests on their behalf (and, to a smaller extent, normative protest as well). Hence, we were able to demonstrate that being Leftists makes people fuse only with out-groups that are perceived to be victims of the asymmetrical oppression that clashes with Leftist political ideology. This finding provided critical insight into why Leftists fuse with some out-groups and not others.

Study 4

So far, we have investigated whether fusion with out-groups can explain a hypothetical willingness to engage in extreme and non-normative activism for out-groups. But, a question that remains is whether our framework can also be applied to those who are actually interested in risking their lives for a distant out-group. To test this, we sampled aspiring foreign fighters for the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (i.e., YGP) in their fight against ISIS.

Another goal of this study was to integrate our framework with research suggesting that people feel morally obliged to enforce the kinds of relationships and values they endorse [74]. For instance, in the fight for equality against oppression, people are especially likely to support an out-group when the norm is to feel moral outrage about the group’s maltreatment [51, 75, 76]. Because fused people tend to be especially likely to uphold their moral standards even if their life is at-risk [21], we hypothesized that a Leftist political orientation should predict more fusion with Kurds insofar as people feel morally compelled by their political ideology to support the Kurds’ struggle.

Importantly, because many countries have experienced terror attacks by ISIS and are militarily involved in the fight against them, we also assessed and controlled for whether high fusion with one’s own group would be an alternative motivator to join the YPG. Finally, in this study we aimed to rule out two alternative explanation for why Leftists fuse with Kurds: 1) that they perceive them to have the same political orientation as themselves and, thus, that our results simply reflect fusion with the same political group [8] or 2) because the enemy group (i.e., ISIS) has a divergent political orientation and, thus, that our results simply reflect a desire to fight those with contrasting political views.

Materials and methods

Participants.

A total of 83 participants (Mage = 31.6, SDage = 8.8; men = 96.3%) were recruited for a study on “motivations to join the Kurdish YPG” through Facebook pages for people interested in volunteering as foreign fighters in the Kurdish militia fighting ISIS (e.g., the page “Lions of Rojava”). To be asked to participate, participants had to have made at least one post explicitly requesting information about how to volunteer for the Kurdish militia. They came from a total of 24, predominantly Western, countries and mostly from the U.S. (45.7%), the U.K. (9.9%) and Canada (6.2%). None were from a Middle Eastern country or reported to have Kurdish parents. Of all participants, 9.6% had already joined the YPG. Participants completed the following measures on 7-point Likert scales ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree) unless stated otherwise:

Leftist political orientation.

On the same scale as in the previous studies, participants indicated their political orientation, which was reversed-scored so that higher values represented more Leftist political orientation.

Political moral obligation.

On a scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 10 (to very large extent), participants completed the question, “To which extent do you think that people with your political orientation have the moral obligation to support the Kurds in their struggle?”

Perceived orientation of Kurds and ISIS.

On the political orientation scale from the previous studies, participants were asked to rate the political orientation they believed most Kurdish people and most ISIS people had. Responses were reverse-scored.

Fusion with the in-group and the out-group.

With the same scales as in the previous studies, we measured fusion with Kurds (α = .87) and fusion with participants’ own ethnic in-group (α = .92).

Extreme group behavior.

Three items (e.g., “I would fight someone physically threatening a Kurd”) adopted from Swann et al. [23] were used to measure extreme group behavior (α = .65).

Self-sacrifice.

Two items (e.g., “I would sacrifice my life if it saved a Kurd’s life”), also adopted from Swann et al. [23] measured willingness to self-sacrifice, r(77) = .58, p < .001.

Likelihood to join YPG.

On a sliding-response scale ranging from 0% to 100%, participants indicated how likely it was that they would join the YPG.

Results

Participants reported more fusion with Kurds than with their own ethnic in-group (see Table 6). They also perceived Kurds to have a more Leftist political orientation than ISIS.

Table 6. Means, Standard Deviations and Correlations between variables in Study 4 are displayed.

Moderation analyses.

We ran a regression model to test whether moral obligation, perceived Kurdish political orientation or perceived ISIS political orientation moderated the effects of participants’ own Leftist political orientation on fusion with Kurds. Here, we also controlled for identity fusion with one’s own racial/ethnic group as it was positively related to fusion with the out-group (see Table 6). The predicted interaction between one’s own Leftist political orientation and moral obligation was significant (see Table 7). Simple slopes showed that when participants experienced a high political moral obligation to support the Kurds, Leftist political orientation predicted more fusion with the out-group but not when moral obligation was low (see Fig 5). This model was not re-estimated with a log-transformed fusion with the out-group variable because it was relatively normally distributed (skew = -.74, kurtosis = -.12).

Fig 5. In Study 4, Leftist political orientation predicted more fusion with the Kurdish out-group when aspiring foreign fighters experienced that they had a high moral obligation to support the Kurds.

Table 7. Moderated regression models for fusion with the out-group in Study 4 is displayed.

Moderated mediation model.

Given that fusion with the out-group was associated with higher levels of extreme group behavior, self-sacrifice and likelihood to join the YPG, we estimated moderated mediation models using model 7 of the Process macro based on the model estimated above. Bootstrapping showed that Leftist political orientation indirectly led to a higher likelihood to join the YPG, more extreme group behavior, and willingness to self-sacrifice because it increased fusion with the out-group when participants experienced high moral obligation, but not when they experienced low moral obligation (see Table 8). While the skewness and kurtosis of the likelihood to join the YPG (skew = -1.97, kurtosis = 4.65) and extreme group behavior (skew = -1.79, kurtosis = 4.31) variables fell within the suggested cutoffs [68], the values of the willingness to sacrifice variable exceeded this cutoff (skew = -2.67, kurtosis = 9.15). Hence, we log-transformed and reversed the variable (skew = -1.09, kurtosis = .77) and re-estimated the indirect effects. Replicating the previous results, Leftist political orientation had an indirect effect on willingness to self-sacrifice when perceived moral obligation was high (B = .01, SE = .01, 95% CI [.001, .03]), but not when it was low (B = -.003, SE = .01, 95% CI [-.02, .01]).

Table 8. Indirect effects of Leftist orientation on dependent variables mediated by fusion with the out-group at different levels of the moderator perceived moral obligation in Study 4.

Preliminary discussion

Using a sample of aspiring foreign fighters, here we successfully replicated our framework and, thus, provide crucial ecological validity to our paradigm. Strikingly, participants in this unique sample were more fused with the Kurdish out-group than their own ethnic in-groups. This finding is similar to research on in-group fusion by Whitehouse et al. [19] showing that about one half of a group of Libyan rebels were more fused with their battalions than with their families. Moreover, we found that Leftist were more fused with Kurds, and thus more willing to fight on their behalf, when they felt that their political orientation morally compelled them to support the Kurdish struggle. This further supports and extends our overall argument that people fuse with out-groups when the way this group is treated (e.g., being oppressed) clashes with one’s core political worldview and ideology. In contrast, personally having a political orientation that overlaps with that of the Kurds or is in opposition to that of ISIS were both unrelated to such willingness to fight on their behalf, ruling out these two alternative mechanisms. In other words, it is not simply one’s degree of perceived political similarity towards the out-group, or one’s dissimilarity with the out-group’s enemies, that drives the political orientation–fusion with the out-group pathway we have demonstrated.

General discussion

From individuals aspiring to become foreign fighters in the Kurdish militia’s struggle against ISIS to Americans risking their lives for Palestinian rights, there are many examples of those willing to engage in extreme and risky support for out-groups based on their personal or political orientations. Building on previous research that demonstrated that feelings of “oneness” with distant in-groups at various levels of abstraction (referred to as "extended identity fusion" [7]) can lead people to engage in extreme solidary efforts, the present paper demonstrated that the process of fusing with groups one originally did not belong to may even motivate extreme efforts in support of out-groups. Importantly, we also demonstrated that perceiving the out-group’s treatment as violating one’s own political ideology and morals motivates such fusion with the out-group.

Across various cultural contexts (e.g., U.S., Norway), populations (i.e., general population and aspiring foreign fighters) and conflicts (Israel-Palestine, Kurdish, war against ISIS), four studies supported this general pattern of findings. Specifically, in Study 1, the more politically Leftist individuals were, the more fused they were with the Palestinian out-group, which led to increased willingness to engage in extreme protest on their behalf. In Study 2, Leftists demonstrated this pattern more with Palestinians than Kurds. In Study 3, we directly investigated why this might occur, hypothesizing that the reason is that Palestinians more than Kurds are perceived as a fitting case for Leftist ideological support for the downtrodden of the world. Supporting this prediction, we found that experimentally framing the treatment of Kurds as clashing with Leftist ideology (by describing them as victims of oppressive occupation) increased fusion with the out-group and, in turn, willingness to engage in extreme protest on their behalf among Leftists. Finally, in Study 4, Western Leftists aspiring to be foreign fighters for the Kurdish YPG fused more with Kurds when feeling morally compelled by their political orientation which, in turn, resulted in stronger intentions to fight against ISIS.

The main theoretical contributions of this research are two-fold. In an ever more globalized world, our research provides the first empirical demonstration of the role of fusion in explaining extreme solidary action on behalf of distant out-groups. Moreover, it did so in a variety of contexts that allowed for a clear operationalization of fusion with an out-group. Specifically, participants in our studies shared no racial/ethnic group membership with the respective out-groups and, except for Study 4, were not engaged in the same conflict as the out-group. In accordance with previous research on fusion with one’s own group (e.g., [20]), we found that fusion with an out-group had its effects primarily on non-normative extreme protests. Indeed, this was the case even when controlling for a range of alternative variables stemming from the social identity and social dominance approaches to collective action [48, 50]. Since we observed relatively consistent effects across contexts and when controlling for a range of alternative predictors, we suggest that the process of fusion with out-groups should be integrated into models of solidary collective action, particularly when the aim is to explain extreme support of out-groups.

The second main contribution of this research is that it highlighted one potent mechanism explaining why and under which circumstances people fuse with out-groups. Specifically, it showed that fusion with a former out-group occurs when the way the out-group is treated clashes with people’s own political orientation and ideology. This finding is consistent with previous research demonstrating that individuals may fuse with their in-groups especially when they perceive sacred values to be threatened [12, 13].

Both of these theoretical contributions open up several avenues for future research in the fields of intergroup relations. For instance, a vital next step could be to explore fusion with out-groups among Right-wing individuals. While our results could be interpreted as Right-wing individuals showing especially low degrees of fusion with out-groups [77], it is entirely possible that, while de-fusing from low-power groups (i.e., the oppressed), they simultaneously fuse with high-power out-groups (e.g., the oppressors or dominators) involved in the same political conflicts. Retrospectively, this might explain why thousands of non-German (and “non-Aryan”) volunteers joined, and often lost their lives for, the Nazi’s Waffen SS in the Second World War. Future studies should test this proposal with contemporary scenarios. For instance, it could be tested whether Right-wing individuals would fuse with ruling, authoritarian political out-groups when subordinate groups challenge their position and whether the degree of existing societal inequality or oppression amplifies the potential for violent retaliation in this case (cf. [78]) Moreover, following research and theorizing on the role of sacred values [12–14], such future research may profitably replicate our paradigm by directly assessing the extent to which participants endorse a certain set of values rather than, as we did, measuring their broader political orientation.

We also encourage future research to use more comprehensive multi-item scales to measure extreme group behavior. We used two-item scales to measure extreme protest in Studies 1 through 3, and two- and three-item scales to measure self-sacrifice and extreme group behavior in Study 3, all of which were adopted from previous social identity [60, 61] and identity fusion research [23]. The correlations between the two items of the extreme protest scale used in Studies 1 through 3 were moderately strong (rs = .44 to .53). This raises potential questions regarding the unidimensionality of the scale. While the first item measured a personal willingness to engage in violent protest, the second item captured whether one saw violent protest as “the only mean” to achieve social change. Despite the fact that these items have been assumed to measure the same construct in previous research, it is possible that each captured somewhat different sub-facets of violent protest. The use of more elaborative multi-item scales with higher reliability may hence be advisable for future research. Moreover, several of the variables, and here in particular the normative and extreme protest measures, tended to be skewed. This was not very surprising as the phenomena under investigation would be expected to be relatively uncommon in normal populations. Although results held when log-transforming skewed variables so that they met assumptions of normality, future research may aim to gather data from more extreme groups (such as the one in Study 4), in which a general willingness to engage in extreme group behavior is higher.

Another important avenue for future work is to identify mediators of the effects of fusion with out-groups on non-normative extreme out-group support. In contrast to previous work (i.e., [79]), we found that none of the classic social identity mediators accounted for the observed effects of fusion with out-groups. Yet, future research might examine recently proposed social identity factors such as the emotion contempt which may predict non-normative social action to larger extent than anger [80]. We also note that it could have been meaningful to include a multi-factorial measure of social identity, including the solidarity facet, because in previous research it predicted extreme group behavior, albeit to significantly less extent than identity fusion [23]. However, additional alternative mediators that are not part of the social identity framework were likely at play in the present research. As suggested by previous work on identity fusion with one’s own group [7, 20], we suspect that feelings of invulnerability or high risk tolerance may also mediate effects of fusion with out-groups on extreme out-group support. Indeed, such findings would explain why the fused aspiring foreign fighters in our last study were dedicated to join the fight against ISIS despite extensive publicly-available footage showing the brutal executions of their antagonists. Future research may also benefit from comparing antecedents and outcomes of fusion with out-groups to those of in-group fusion. For instance, one might expect that individuals who believe that groups share an inherent essence (as in essentialist beliefs [81]) may be more likely to fuse with in-groups, as suggested by previous research [20, 82], but less likely to fuse with out-groups. In contrast, participant who perceive some higher-order shared group membership [83, 84], such as a common humanity [85], may show more fusion with out-groups.

Furthermore, comparing the outcomes of in-group fusion and fusion with out-groups in zero-sum scenarios between both groups, including moral dilemmas, may be informative. In previous research, in-group fusion predicted more self-sacrifice to save in-group members at various levels of abstraction but not self-sacrifice for out-group members [10]. How would individuals who are fused with both groups respond to these dilemmas? And, would individuals who show stronger fusion with the out-group than the in-group–as was the case for most participants in the last study–sacrifice in-group interests or even in-group members if it saved out-group members? Such perspectives may also help understanding recent societal events such as White Americans risking their lives to rally against White Supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. Research could test whether such protesters were more fused with ethnic out-groups (that are the enemy of White supremacists) than their White ethnic in-group.

We acknowledge that it is possible that some participants may have shared some group memberships with Palestinians/Kurds on dimensions other than race/ethnicity. For instance, we did not assess participants’ religious group. It may be that some of the participants had an Islamic belief in common with the out-groups. In light of previous research demonstrating the role of fusion with religious groups for extreme group behavior [32], it is therefore possible that Muslim identification or fusion also was at play. However, Kurds and Palestinians both are predominantly Muslim as are the groups with which the Kurds (but not Palestinians) are in conflict with, which to some extent attenuates concerns about such an alternative predictor. It is also important to note that Muslims are a very small minority among White Americans and Norwegians, so that such a process would have applied to very few of the participants in most of the studies. Similarly, we did not measure whether participants had out-group friends, which could have fostered a fictional sense of kinship. Future research should thus measure and control for such additional variables to further establish the unique effects of fusion with out-groups.

Relatedly, one may also ask the question whether fusion with an ethnic out-group may be more accurately described as in-group fusion. As described in the introduction, we used the term “out-group” to denote a group that participants did not belong to in terms of their ethnic background before fusing with it. Indeed, when asked about their ethnic group, all participants whose data was analyzed indicated to belong to other ethnic groups than Kurds/Palestinians. Hence, at least in terms of actual kinship, both can be seen as out-groups. Also, Kurds and Palestinians constitute national out-groups, which is a strength compared to previous identity fusion research in which participants ethnicity often was nested within, or covaried with, the group they fused with. To be sure, following a social identity perspective, for participants who fused with Palestinians or Kurds, the respective group likely formed a part of their self-concept. As such, once individuals fuse with the out-group, obviously they may come to regard it as their in-group, and this group may even appear more relevant to them than pre-existing ethnic categories (as arguably was the case in the last study). The point of the present research is that it is indeed possible to feel a sense of visceral oneness with ethnic groups that clearly share no biological ancestry with oneself: fusion processes nevertheless account for the solidary action one is willing to take on their behalf. Crucially, what appears to lead to this stage of extended fusion is the relational perception that the way the out-group is treated violates one’s political ideology.

Conclusion

In sum, the present research extended the concept of identity fusion by showing that not only does it explain extreme behavior for one’s own group, but also for what is initially one’s ethnic out-group with which one shares no biological ancestry. This fusing with out-groups appears to be driven and motivated, at least in part, by perceiving them as being treated in a way that clashes with one’s own political beliefs.

Supporting information

S1 Fig. Reversed mediation model for Study 1. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190639.s001 (TIF)

S2 Fig. Moderated mediation model for Study 2, in which fusion with the out-group is replaced with knowledge about the conflict. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190639.s002 (TIF)

S3 Fig. Moderated mediation model for Study 2, in which knowledge about the conflict is controlled for. Non-significant paths are displayed in grey. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p ≤ .001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190639.s003 (TIF)

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