Abstract
Schram, S. F. and Caterino, B. (eds) (2006) Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Methods. New York: New York University Press.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Colorado, all PhD candidates were required to take a course entitled ‘Introduction to Professional Political Science’. Taught by Lawrence Dodd, the course provided a rich overview of paradigms of political science ranging from pure formal modelling (what Gabriel Almond calls inference without evidence) to ‘thick description’ (what Almond calls evidence without inference) (Almond, 1996, p. 52). Our term reading and seminar discussions started with Hempel's (1966) Philosophy of Natural Science, Kuhn's (1970) Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Fay's (1975) Social Theory and Political Practice and Almond's (1990) ‘Separate Tables’ essay to address questions of the philosophy of science before focusing on social scientific paradigms and political science research, illustrated most notably through Axelrod's (1984) Evolution of Cooperation, Geertz's (1973) ‘Balinese Cockfight’ and Fenno's (1978) Homestyle. The point of the course was to demonstrate the many different ‘ways of knowing’ available to political scientists, to encourage the idea of methodological pluralism (without lapsing into Feyerabend's extreme relativism) and for us to find our own epistemological position and methodological approach that we would apply to political puzzles at the forefront of our inquiring minds (Feyerabend, 1975).
The course was a great introduction to how political scientists look at the world, what they do, what problems motivate their research and how they carry out systematic research to answer significant problems confronting the world. The lessons have stayed with me as my career has developed and many of the insights have informed my research as well as my own work in the area of comparative methods (see Landman, 2000; 2003; 2008; and Landman, 2006, pp. 58–74). It is against this backdrop of methodological pluralism that I read with great interest Making Political Science Matter, which of course draws its title from Bent Flyvbjerg's (2001) Making Social Science Matter, a book on which I wrote a short note for Political Studies in 2001 (Landman, 2001). It is thus a book about a book and seeks to narrow the disciplinary focus to political science and address a number of ‘perennial dualities’ that persist in debates about why and how we do political science, as well as how political science can make a difference by providing answers to real-world political problems.
The dualities that the chapters in the book raise most notably include explanation versus understanding, universality versus particularity, qualitative analysis versus quantitative analysis, nomothetic deductivism versus hermeneutic interpretivism, methodological unity versus methodological pluralism, value-free versus value-laden political science and method-driven versus problem-driven political science research programmes. These dualities are perennial since they have featured throughout debates in the philosophy and history of science and, in particular, debates in political science. The dualities and associated debates have been brought into sharper focus with the advent of the ‘Perestroika’ movement and the publication of three seminal works on social science methods: King et al.'s (1994) Designing Social Inquiry, Brady and Collier's (2004) Rethinking Social Inquiry and George and Bennett's (2005) Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. The Perestroika movement has been in large part an effort to redress a perceived imbalance in political science (American political science more properly) between rationalist approaches, formal modelling and quantitative analysis on the one hand and critical perspectives, qualitative analysis and holistic case studies on the other. The main arguments of the movement have focused on both the career possibilities in the discipline as much as the types of research that have found their way into significant journals and university presses in the field.
The arguments between the Perestroikans and non-Perestroikans have often relied on an appeal to one or more of the perennial dualities, which in my view have often been constructed in ways that seek to make explicit contradictions and draw extreme differences between academic approaches for pedagogical and rhetorical reasons, while in reality many of the distinctions are much finer than formally stated, and in many cases simply represent false dichotomies that have hindered the accumulation of knowledge in our discipline. Most of the chapters in Making Political Science Matter address these dualities in some way, where some seek to resolve them or show how different approaches to political science research can accommodate such differences and others engage in a hegemonic attempt to define the ‘correct’ way of doing political science.
Most of the chapters restate Flyvbjerg's main argument, celebrate his attempt to rescue Aristotle's notion of practical wisdom (or phronesis) as a way to make social science matter and then proceed with a string of criticisms on why his attempt has thus far failed. The harshest critique of Flyvbjerg's phronetic approach comes from David Laitin, whose chapter ‘A Perestroikan Challenge to Social Science’ calls for a tripartite method for social science research that includes narrative, formal and statistical analysis against which Flyvbjerg himself offers a defence. But what is Flyvbjerg's position? How have scholars sought to use and develop it? And how has it been adjudicated in this particular book?
Flyvbjerg challenges fundamentally the desire and attempt within the social sciences to emulate the natural sciences. He draws on a short passage in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (1976 [350 BCE]) on the ‘chief intellectual virtues’ to build a framework for conducting more holistic social scientific analysis that pays greater attention to the rich complexity of context, while offering a deeper understanding of politics that moves beyond the narrow techno-rationalism of certain dominant strands in contemporary social (and political) science. In particular, he uses Aristotle's virtues of knowledge (episteme), craft (techné) and practical wisdom (phronesis) to build what he sees as a more complete approach to studying social phenomena. Where episteme refers to abstract and universal knowledge (e.g. the rational individual) and techné to the specific ‘know-how associated with practicing a craft’ (e.g. multivariate regression analysis), phronesis comes from an ‘intimate familiarity with the contingencies and uncertainties of various forms of social practice embedded in complex social settings’ (Caterino and Schram, 2006, p. 8). Of course, many have referred to this idea more colloquially as ‘getting your feet wet in the mud’ through knowing your cases and the political contexts in which you are working. Phronesis is thus ‘situated practical reasoning’ (Caterino and Schram, 2006, p. 8) and for Flyvbjerg, it ought to be at the centre of social science research. While he does not seek to displace episteme and techné altogether, which he sees as the essential features of the natural science model of social inquiry, he does want to recapture phronesis and place it on an equal footing with these other two elements. His theoretical position is linked with that of Nietzsche and Foucault, especially as he is concerned with the exercise of power as an object of inquiry and a force in the production of knowledge itself.
If one accepts the list of ‘perennial dualities’ outlined above, a first reading of Making Social Science Matter would suggest that Flyvbjerg's phronetic social science clearly places understanding before explanation, particularity before universality, qualitative before quantitative, hermeneutics before deductive approaches and value-based and problem-driven research before value-free method-driven research. But a careful reading shows that: (1) these dualities are overdrawn; and (2) Flyvbjerg's position is more balanced than some assume. His approach does not dismiss the other side(s) of the duality (dualities) as is evident from the title to his riposte to Laitin's critique in the volume under review here: ‘A Perestroikan Straw Man Answers Back’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Rather, he asserts that his approach seeks a balance for qualitative and quantitative methods (both of which he has used in his own work), an emphasis on problem-driven research and a role for contextually specific knowledge and value-based social inquiry that ‘involves the judgements and decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso social actor’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 68).
This latter idea of the ‘virtuoso social actor’ is expanded in great degree by Leslie Thiele (2006), whose chapter on experiential learning, tacit knowledge and intuitive thinking makes appeals to the kind of intuitive knowledge that all of us have after mastering any skill-based activity, such as riding a bicycle, playing a musical instrument, playing chess, touch typing or using sleight of hand. The accumulated ‘muscle memory’ and other forms of intuitive knowledge involved in sports, music, conjuring and other specialised activities become embedded in our unconscious store of capacities, which is ultimately reinforced and improved through ‘practice and pedagogy’ (Thiele, 2006, p. 200). Much like a chess master uses cognitive ‘chunks’ or groups of moves to control different parts of the chessboard, the well-seasoned scholar draws on his or her intuitive knowledge in studying and researching social phenomena of interest. While Thiele is critical of Flyvbjerg for not bringing science to bear more fully on his effort at establishing a phronetic social science, he nonetheless welcomes the approach and its emphasis on practical wisdom.
Both Flyvbjerg's original volume and this new volume provide fairly comprehensive discussion of the philosophy of science, the challenges and limitations of the social sciences and the paradigmatic battles within political science, but are relatively thin on providing examples of real-world applications of phronetic social science. In the original volume, Flyvbjerg (2001) offers examples and illustrations from his own work on Aalborg in Denmark, a discussion that is complemented with other examples of phronetic approaches, such as Foucault's (1979) Discipline and Punish and (1980) History of Sexuality, Hacking's (1995) Rewriting the Soul, Bourdieu's (1998) Acts of Resistance, Bellah's (1985) Habits of the Heart, Brown's (1995) States of Inquiry, Cruikshank's (1999) The Will to Empower and Putnam's (1993) Making Democracy Work. I would add other examples to his list, including Scott's (1976) Moral Economy of the Peasant and (1985) Weapons of the Weak, Tarrow's (1989) Democracy and Disorder, Harvey's (1998) The Chiapas Rebellion and Payne's (2000) Uncivil Movements. Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 163; 2006, p. 81) laments the fact that ‘contemporary political science does not place at its core the questioning of values and power that was central to classical political science’. In Caterino and Schram (2006), his Aalborg work is once again used as a prime example of phronetic social science (Flyvbjerg, 2006) along with similar citations. Unfortunately the book contains only one chapter out of a total of fourteen on a case study of the Women's Community Revitalisation Project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Shdaimah and Stahl, 2006), which demonstrates the utility of the phronetic approach. More examples like this one would have strengthened the book in my view.
But in defence of the approach and the relative dearth of examples, particularly in political science, it is clear that the history of ideas and ‘movement’ within the philosophy of science is slow and incremental, which is a function of awareness and dissemination of alternative approaches; viability, utility and applicability of new approaches; and the ability for a new approach to overcome disciplinary fiefdoms, protected research communities and structures of power in the hierarchies of universities and research funding organisations. Flyvbjerg and his sup-porters thus face a large challenge in carving out the intellectual space for this particular approach to social science. The nature of the critique offered in Making Political Science Matter is one that respects Flyvbjerg's attempt, challenges his portrayal of the failure of the social sciences, urges his engagement with scientific method and calls for more concrete empirical work to be carried out in order to gauge the additional analytical leverage that his approach offers to social science, and political science more specifically.
Caterino and Schram (2006) praise the approach, outline its broad elements and locate it with respect to political science. Laitin (2006) criticises the approach for its hasty dismissal of mainstream social science and its use by the Perestroikan movement in political science to challenge certain hegemonic practices in the profession. Flyvbjerg (2006) offers his answer by restating the main aims and objectives of Making Social Science Matter, while calling into question Laitin's misrepresentation of the phronetic approach. Patrick Jackson (2006) uses a baseball analogy (which ironically casts his argument in quite ethnocentric terms) to show that the goal of methodological unity in the social sciences is a chimera. Theodore Schatzki (2006, p. 133) argues that Flyvbjerg needs to work harder to demonstrate the poverty of social science prediction (a point I made in my review of Making Social Science Matter), and that at present both his critique of mainstream social scientific theory and his depiction of phronetic research are ‘narrow and incomplete’. Mary Hawkesworth (2006, p. 152) argues that Flyvbjerg (2001) has not sufficiently moved beyond old debates, nor offered solutions that ‘offer much hope for a systematic reorientation of the social sciences in general and or of political science in particular’. Stewart Clegg (2006, p. 180) claims that ‘theory and analysis are best cultivated not in an ideal world of paradigm consensus or domination but in a world of discursive plurality’.
The final section of the book discusses how political science can matter and seeks to address Flyvbjerg's larger project for meaningful social scientific research that is grounded in the kind of practical wisdom that he so fears has become marginalised over the years. Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (2006) paints a realistic picture of how difficult it is to achieve the right balance in methodological pluralism, especially demanding new graduate students to take on board all these issues in their own intellectual formation and to find their own voice while conducting their own problem-driven research agendas. Greg Kasza (2006, pp. 222–3) offers a ‘programme for graduate students’ that allows them to interrogate the claims of ‘hard science’ approaches in political science by asking three core Perestroikan questions of the discipline: (1) ‘what is the character of political life?’ (2) ‘how and what can we know about politics?’ and (3) ‘what purpose should political knowledge serve?’. Finally, David Kettler (2006) seeks to rejoin political theory and political science through an appeal to Franz Neumann, while Timothy Luke (2006, p. 268) restates Flyvbjerg's main approach through an appeal to a phronesis that does not ignore techné or ‘surrender to a social science seeking legitimacy only as episteme’.
Overall, the essays offer a mixed assessment of the foundations of phronetic social science, its applicability to political science and its robustness as an alternative to other approaches in the discipline. Apart from Laitin's chapter, the assessments generally welcome Flyvbjerg's approach and then push him to develop many of its elements further. The general tone of the volume is one that celebrates methodological pluralism, but cautions against eschewing mainstream approaches and calls for establishing and maintaining minimum standards of scholarship for the whole discipline. In my own work on comparative politics, I have stressed the need for scholars to make ‘reasoned, informed, and intelligent analytical statements’ about the political world, which ‘consists of empirical puzzles to which political scientists apply a set of theories and methods in order to provide meaningful explanation and understanding’ (Landman, 2003, p. xviii). My analysis of much of the extant work in comparative politics shows that scholars constantly face trade-offs between the ladder of conceptual abstraction and the number of countries that feature in any one comparison, where each level of analysis and method of comparison offers different advantages and disadvantages for the explanation and understanding of social and political phenomena. I argue further that research design, selection of cases, operationalisation of variables (qualitatively and quantitatively) and use of different types of systematically collected evidence are a function of the type of research question that is asked, the epistemological orientation and skill set of the scholar, as well as the availability of resources for carrying out the research.
Finally, après Weber, it is perfectly possible and desirable to apply the theories and methods of political science to questions that are of normative importance. Indeed, in the field of human rights, there is much political science research where valid comparisons of human rights protection between and among different countries have been carried out to examine empirically the universal claims that are made normatively (see Landman, 2002; 2005; 2006). Beyond the field of human rights, a large number of scholars are asking a range of normatively informed questions and do engage in systematic research that in my view contains all three elements of episteme, techné and phronesis, albeit in different degrees and with different levels of emphasis. Making Political Science Matter reminds us of the need for balance and offers only partial solutions to enduring controversies in our discipline.