Abstract
This is the first of two Sociological Review Monographs to focus on methods and values; issues that played a central role in the writings of the founding figures of the discipline and have come increasingly to preoccupy a subject suffering in recent years from a pronounced loss of confidence. If our present concern with methods and values can be associated with what Mike Savage and Roger Burrows (2007) have referred to as a ‘crisis of empirical sociology’, the classical sociological interrogation of these issues, in stark contrast, was bound up with the bold establishment of sociology as a distinctive science possessed of its own identity. This journey from disciplinary confidence to crisis sets the scene for the important task that Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury have taken on in bringing together this set of original papers that address some of the central dilemmas facing the discipline today.
The classical sociological focus on methods was necessary for a discipline seeking to go beyond and liberate itself entirely from philosophical models of homo clausus preoccupied with how individuals could ‘reach out’ from their enclosed minds to gain knowledge of the world beyond them (Elias, 1978). In this context, the discipline was confronted with the need to adopt and develop techniques that would generate reliable interpretive as well as statistical and comparative data. This step was vital if sociologists were to transcend controversies surrounding the possibility of acquiring knowledge, and concentrate their energies instead on the analysis of research findings. It was a step also commensurate with the wider public acceptance of a discipline dedicated to the possibility of cumulative progress.
The classical sociological concern with values was just as necessary if the discipline was to explore a modern Western world in which norms associated with the consolidation of social orders in traditional societies seemed no longer to ‘fit’ the rationalized, differentiated nature of the new secular industrial era. In this context, it is not surprising that, in addition to guiding the accumulation of theoretically informed knowledge of social existence, one core feature of sociology would turn out to be a sustained search for alternative sources of meaning and significance that could inform individual actions and provide a basis for understanding collectivities. Having embarked upon this search for individually, interactionally and collectively created norms, it did not take a great visionary leap to recognize that sociology was itself involved in the instantiation, or at least the consecration, of value (Turner and Maryanski, 1988).
In dealing with matters of method and value, moreover, the founders of sociology recognized that these were interrelated phenomena. This was evident in how Weber (1949), following his engagement with the writings of Rickert, discussed the problems generated by the value-bound researcher, value-relevant topics of research and the possibility of value-neutral methods of research (Bruun, 2001). It seemed, at the very least, that the most basic conditions associated with measuring social entities and gathering data on social actions, institutions and trends was bound up with attributions of significance effected by the researcher. This was evident not only in Weber's own deliberations on the empathetic demands associated with verstehen, a method that validated the existence of the interiority of social subjects, but also in its valorization across sociological analyses. It was manifest, for example, in disciplinary concerns with the ethics of the metropolitan personality, the pre-contractual bases of social contract, and the challenges associated with seeking to illuminate and explain (without performing a reductive analytical violence upon) elementary human beliefs and practices through the employment of methodologically generic ‘social facts’.
Traditional methods such as those derived from the Weberian and Durkheimian traditions of research were enormously successful in helping to consolidate a new academic discipline that was oriented toward establishing and interrogating the valued sphere of ‘the social’. As the discipline developed, however, its methods came under increased scrutiny over such issues as the distinctions it posited between facts and values, the objective and the subjective, the researcher and researched, and whether the methodological frameworks sociology constructed effected an ethnocentric distortion of the subjects of their investigation. Influential critical publications such as C. Wright Mills' 1959 The Sociological Imagination and Alvin Gouldner's 1970 The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology highlighted further something of what was at stake in the relationship between the methods and values of sociological research, insisting that the discipline was bound inextricably to the values of social classes and groups and needed to acknowledge its implication in power relations.
During the latter decades of the twentieth century, traditional sociological approaches to these issues confronted an even more fundamental challenge from writings influenced by postmodern and poststructuralist philosophies that heralded ‘the end of society’ and called into question the validity of any set of methods or values based upon conceptions of normatively integrated collectivities or subjects. As the century closed, the more constructive of these critical interventions wrestled with the consequences of how methodological purchase could be gained during an age in which the proliferation of information meant there was no ‘outside’ to the flows of data in which we were ensconced (eg Urry, 1999; Lash, 2002).
Sociology may rarely have been short of intra-disciplinary announcements of crisis, but the cumulative impact of these developments generated a sense among many that what may have seemed in retrospect to be a period of relatively ‘normal’ social science was coming to an end (Kuhn, 1962). Focusing on the loss of confidence in its own identity, together with the huge profusion of data from a period Thrift (2005) refers to as ‘knowing capitalism’, Savage and Burrows (2007, 2009) captured the spirit of this insecurity in pointing to ‘a world in which commercial forces predominate; a world in which we, as sociologists, are losing whatever jurisdiction we once had over the study of the “social” as the generation, mobilization and analysis of social data become ubiquitous’ (Savage and Burrows, 2009: 763).
This latest Sociological Review Monograph addresses core features of the present crisis in method and value. Individual papers explore the threat that transactional data poses to the expertise of sociologists, the capacity of apparently benign and ‘proper’ ethics procedures to alienate data from subjects, the harvesting of such alienated data for commercial and political purposes, and the tendency for sociology to replicate what C. Wright Mills referred to as the dualism between abstract empiricism and grand theory. These papers also, in many instances, seek to go beyond the discipline's current problems through fascinating analyses that demonstrate the validity of Lisa Adkin's and Celia Lury's editorial argument that ‘questions of measure and value should not be confined to the sociological past’.
The editors' introduction to this volume highlights the many important contributions made by the analyses that follow, but without pre-empting their explication of these valuable analyses I want to mention two themes that reoccur throughout this volume and signify its significance to contemporary debates in and beyond the discipline. The first concerns the diverse ways in which measuring is itself a performative technique that creates values of various sorts. In the contemporary era marked by a major assault on public sector services, for example, modes of assessment ascribe values to institutions that can result in their restructuring. Methods are political. The second concerns the very fate of sociology as a subject. While the collection and analysis of vast data sets may indeed be eroding the lines between sociologists and other professions, this can be seen as expansion of sociological consciousness and an acceleration of that ‘double hermeneutic’ analysed by Giddens (1984) as much as it can be viewed as a threat to the sociological profession. If this broader consciousness is focused upon measurement, moreover, perhaps this reinforces the historic importance of the discipline as the provider of theoretical sensitivities and sensibilities. At a time when funding bodies responsible for postgraduate training in the social sciences in the UK and also beyond are seeking to promote increasing levels of methods training, perhaps there is an equally strong case for re-stating the far wider founding ambitions of the discipline. We should perhaps be wary that the current focus on methods does not turn into ‘methodolatry’; the debilitating pursuit of ever more ‘sophisticated’ techniques of data collection or manipulation at the expense of sociological ideas, theories and imagination (see the concerns expressed by Weber, 1949; Mills, 1959; Gouldner, 1965).
The Sociological Review Monograph series consists of collections of refereed papers and could not continue without the goodwill, advice and guidance of members of the Board of the Sociological Review, and of those anonymous referees who assess and report on each of the papers submitted for these special editions. I would like to thank all of those involved in this process, especially Liz McFall, Rolland Munro, Denis Gleeson, and also the editors of Measure and Value for having produced such a stimulating and interesting volume.