Abstract
This is the second successive Sociological Review Monograph to address the value to sociology of research methods. The choice of topic reflects a growing concern about the purpose, relevance and distinctiveness of the discipline at a time when sociologists in the UK and elsewhere face questions regarding their contribution to the study of social life and threats to their intellectual autonomy. These challenges are manifest in various forms, but are related centrally to (1) the apparent transformation of sociology's traditional subject matter (as an unprecedented profusion of data from new media and a proliferation of associated life-worlds raises fresh questions about the nature of ‘the social’), and (2) contemporary systems of governance that are seeking to manage intellectual production on the basis of ‘impact’ agendas directed towards economic growth, national security and a narrow range of other utilitarian measures. Against this background, Les Back and Nirmal Puwar have assembled together in Live Methods a set of original and stimulating articles that, in reflecting upon the history of methods and in interrogating the sociological potential of new tools of investigation, map important dimensions of the difficulties facing the discipline and invite us to think again about ‘what sociology was, is and might be’.
In probing these questions further, it is worth recalling what was specific about the project of sociology as it emerged in the West out of an Enlightenment context characterized by a decline in Christian notions of divine order and the rise of the idea that human life was amenable to rational reflection and intervention. Philosophy addressed this situation by seeking to identify variously the limits of what could be known, transcendent principles against which could be assessed existing institutions, and the creative and nihilistic potentialities of the human will. The later emergence of sociology, in contrast, tended to encourage the combination of theoretical construction, substantive analyses and empirical investigations, explorations that required the development of methodologies and the design and deployment of research methods in order to assist human understanding of the modern world. This was evident in the emphasis Durkheim (1982 [1895], 1951 [1897]) placed upon social facts and the use of statistical data to explain variations in suicide rates, for example, and in Weber's (1991 [1904–1905]) development of hermeneutics within sociology via his concern to identify through a variety of data and inference the meanings, emotional parameters and motivations associated with the Protestant ethic.
If the origins and early development of sociology brought together theory, analysis and research in an attempt to illuminate social life and provide the potential for people to achieve a degree of control over their surroundings, the mid-twentieth century witnessed a degree of disciplinary specialization that was judged by critics to be a narrowing of vision that dislocated sociology from its founding ambitions (Shilling and Mellor, 2001). There was no more sweeping or perhaps powerful indictment of this tendency for sociology to become divided into either Parsonian style ‘grand theory’, concerned with ‘the associating and dissociating of concepts’, or ‘abstract empiricism’, in which there is fetishism for the ‘how’ of research that results in confusion between the methods and object of study, than that contained within C. Wright Mills' 1959 The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 2000 [1959]: 26, 51).
The importance of Mills' assessment and agenda for sociology echoes throughout the contributions to Back's and Puwar's Live Methods. There are good reasons for this. Mills detailed how disciplinary specialization and fragmentation had detracted from sociology's capacity to understand ‘problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within social structures’, and to ascertain those structural changes required to help people understand their lives and enlarge the sphere in which explicit decision-making is possible (Mills, 2000 [1959]: 143, 174). If sociology had abdicated its founding mission, moreover, the imagination that was once central to it seemed for Mills increasingly to be practised outside the discipline. These tendencies appeared to be compounded by growing evidence that the turn to abstract empiricism, identified by Mills as the dominant orientation within American sociology, was facilitating bureaucratic control and marginalizing ‘the great social problems and human issues of our time’, by harnessing research to ‘the direct service’ of state and commercial interests (Mills, 2000 [1959]: 73, 80, 85).
Mills' challenge to sociology may have been of its time but it has found strong resonance amongst present generations of sociologists concerned with what has become of their vocation. As evident in Back and Puwar's introduction to this collection of articles, Live Methods does not just highlight concerns about the current state of the discipline. It is also very much concerned to engage with possible futures for sociological research and the manner in which potentially new methods might be developed that would enable the discipline to gain an emboldened sense of mission and purpose. Each article in this contribution addresses from its own vantage point the question of sociology's value in a potentially new ‘information age’, in which the distribution and redistribution of social research have become important issues. Each displays a keen sensitivity for what Back in his own contribution refers to as a sociology, ‘able to attend to the fleeting, distributed, multiple and sensory aspects of sociality through research techniques that are mobile, sensuous and operate from multiple vantage points’.
In this context, and without pre-empting the editors' introduction, I want to highlight some of the major questions and debates raised by the contributors to Live Methods. These can be framed within Noortje Marres' explication in this volume of optimistic and pessimistic visions of where current developments in digital social research may lead us in years to come. However, they also reach beyond this distinction in questioning the novelty of these developments and in returning to issues that have been recurrent within sociological debate. In so doing, they demonstrate how contemporary ‘big data’ (research occurring under such banners as the ‘digital economy’, ‘e science’, and ‘transactional data’) can be conducted sociologically at the very time that governments and commercial organizations are employing this information to assess current levels of economic activity and to monitor and control people's online activities. We have in these contributions fascinating analyses of the uses to which such research has been put (eg Back, Lury and Uprichard), and debates about whether centralizing tendencies within current research methods can be responded to critically via an ‘amphibious sociology’ in which ‘there can be no single centre but only a middle, or rather many middles to be worked in, worked up and worked out’ (Lury), or through cross-disciplinary and cross-practice attempts to ‘map social and economic power as a whole’ (Toscano). Uprichard returns to C. Wright Mills' analysis of the importance, but also the historical relativity, of history in interpreting contemporary developments. Michael's ‘idiotic’ objects and methods proposes a way of interrupting our taken-for-granted knowledge of the technological world in a kind of revised Garfinkelian experiment with the (material) rules by which we live. Motamedi Fraser explores the potential of research to ‘provoke experience’ among the audiences and also the practitioners of research, while Gunaratnam highlights the outer parameters of the concern with data by exploring the practical import of inter-corporeal understanding at the borders of life's end when biographical, historical and structural issues intermesh at the point of pain and finality. Puwar and Sharma address another theme that pervades this collection and is key to C. Wright Mills' work, the distribution of sociological research both within and outside of sociology and amongst the public at large. Noting the significance of the Mass Observation studies in Britain, from their founding in 1937, Puwar and Sharma highlight the potential of ‘curating sociology’ as a means of extending and stimulating the sociological imagination through creative collaborations, publicness and exhibiting; activities which for them involve a degree of mutation within the craft of sociology.
If C. Wright Mills' concern with addressing the distinctiveness of the discipline through questions regarding the sociological imagination echoes throughout these contributions, so too does the interest that he and other sociologists have long displayed in the practical outcomes and purposes to which sociological research is put. This is not, it is important to re-emphasize, a matter of endorsing the type of impact agendas that have become common among governmentally funded sponsors of research, developments that appear to signify a realization of at least some of Mills' fears regarding the bureaucratization of social research. It does involve a concern with helping to both build and strengthen self-educating and ‘self-strengthening’ publics (Mills, 2000 [1959]: 186); a theme that possesses certain resonances with the concern manifest in the US, the UK and beyond over the last decade to promote a ‘public sociology’ (eg Burawoy, 2005).
Mills' discussion about sociology's potential contribution to self-strengthening publics builds on a central ambition in sociology to utilize the discipline to enhance society's capacities for ‘intelligent self-direction’ (Levine, 1995: 267). Of particular relevance to the debates in this volume is Dewey's (1989 [1927]) suggestion that improved communications technology could help create an informed, open and self-educating public through the circulation of information. The contributors to Live Methods add their own voices to this debate, even if they are sometimes sceptical of the type of body that is being constituted by addressing ‘the public’ and are concerned with the power implications of such a move. They also seek to address an additional strand of this debate, however, by considering the potential of a dialogue and collaboration that is driven not simply by discursive debate but which is sensory and immersed within a recognition of the multiple embodied capacities of the producers and audiences for research. This is evident in the inter-corporeal understanding suggested in Gunaratnam's work, for example, and in the programme for curating sociology reported on by Puwar and Sharma.
In widening our conception of how sociological research can be conducted, Live Methods asks us to reconsider and make more nuanced and differentiated the sociological distinction between the crowd that is characterized by emotion and the public that is characterized by discussion of a specific issue (Park, 1972). It also returns us to those issues that were central to the foundations of the discipline itself: how can and how should sociology combine theoretical construction with methodological approaches and research methods that can assist our understanding of the increasingly complex world in which we live? Given the dominance of instrumentalism in the current era, there is much to be said for returning here to Mills' (2000 [1959]: 211) reminder that it is the ‘imagination … that sets off the social scientist from the mere technician’, an imagination that goes beyond arid technical programmes of training in methods, but that requires its own apprenticeship in learning and understanding.
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 Jennifer Mason, Gordon Fyfe, Rolland Munro, Larry Ray, Tim Strangleman and also the editors of Live Methods for having produced such an engaging and timely volume.