Transcript Cultural Research

Cultural Research
Structures and Approaches
Reality - what is it?
• The debate over what reality is is a very longstanding one in western philosophy (all the
way back to the Ancient Greeks)
• For much of this time the focus was on
whether reality was something outside us
(realism) or was something we could only
ever grasp internally (idealism)
Plato’s Cave
Reality is beyond our grasp - all we can ever
see is its shadows
Plato’s Cave
Seen by some as an apt metaphor for today’s
mediatised society
Reality - what is it?
• The debate today is polarised along somewhat
different lines.
• The main philosophical approaches are:
– Positivism
– Relativism
– Social Constructionism
• Despite this, “alternative” approaches such as
historical materialism (Marxism and its offshoots) still
retain some of their strength
Positivism
Positivism
• Positivism is (part of) the legacy of the
French thinker Auguste Comte (17981857), who is widely believed to the be
the first modern (western) sociologist
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
• Comte believed that human society had
gone through three phases:
– Theological
– Metaphysical
– Scientific
• He also termed the scientific stage the
“positive” stage
Auguste Comte
• Little of his hugely ambitious theories
remains, beyond a belief that
mathematical approaches provide the
basis for the most “scientific” study of
society
Positivism
• Research using positivist
methodologies tends as a result to be
characterised by large-scale survey
procedures whose results are
subjected to quantitative analysis
Positivism
• The resulting models do not claim to
represent reality exactly, but to be valid
enough and reliable enough to allow
useful and practical decisions to be
made
Positivism
• These approaches are characterised by
two kinds of “externality”:
– “reality” is external to us all, and can be
counted, measured, modelled and so on
– In an important sense the researcher is
also “external” to the research itself
Positivism
– In principle, at least, the research can
always be replicated: in other words, it can
be carried out by any researcher and, so
long as the same procedures are followed,
will produce the same results
– This allows positivist research to claim
important levels of generalisability
Relativism
Relativism
• Relativism shares with positivism the belief
that there is only one, “external” reality
• However, it differs from positivism in
foregrounding the idea of differential
experience
• In this sense, it is to some extent a much
weakened continuation of phenomenology
The Founding Fathers of
Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl
M. Heidegger
M. Merleau-Ponty
“Being-in-the-world”
• In their different ways, the
phenomenologists insisted on “beingin-the-word” and the embodied nature
of experience
“Being-in-the-world”
• Relativism argues that, though there is only
one “external” reality, our experiences will
differ according to factors such as:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Gender
Age
Class
Colour
Location
Occupation and so on
Relativism
• Research carried out within this framework
uses so-called “ethnographic” methods, in
other words methods which involve direct
contact with those being “studied”:
– Interviews
– Focus groups
– Participant observation
Relativism
• Since it is about capturing their experiences
(rather than producing models of
experiences in general), this kind of research
insists on hearing others’ “voices”
• The “subject” speaks for him or herself rather
than being integrated into a statistical model
as a datum
• This (usually spoken) text is then analysed
by the researcher
Relativism
• Research within this paradigm can match neither the
scale achieved by positivist research, nor its claims
to generalisability
• In the language of 19th C German hermeneutics, it is
about “understanding” (“Verstehen”), i.e. the
generation of insights, rather than “explanation”
(“Erklären”), the generation of laws.
Relativism
Graph showing how the numbers involved vary depending on the level of
personal involvement of the researcher, which is much higher in relativist
methodologies than in positivist ones
Source: Peter Worsely, Introducing Sociology, Penguin Books, 1980
Relativism
• Despite these limitations (if we accept
that that is what they are), this kind of
research is capable, if carried out
properly, of producing great insights
Social Constructionism
Social Constructionism
• The social constructionist (or
constructivist) paradigm was launched
in 1956 by American academics Peter
Berger and Thomas Luckmann (the
latter German by birth)
The foundational text
And a more recent
contribution
by American philosopher John Searle
Social Constructionism
• Berger and Luckmann’s aim was to
counteract the dominance of (though
not necessarily to demolish) positivism
Social Constructionism
“It should be clear, however, that our approach
is non-positivistic, if positivism is understood as
a philosophical position defining the object of
the social sciences in such a way as to
legislate away their most important problems.
All the same, we do not underestimate the
merit of ‘positivism’, broadly understood, in
redefining the canons of empirical investigation
for the social sciences” (p. 188-9)
Social Constructionism
• From a social constructionist perspective reality is
multidimensional, consisting of a material (objective,
measurable) dimension, and a symbolic
(intersubjective) dimension, as well as a dimension of
personal (subjective) experience
• The symbolic dimension (the domain of meaning) is
not an add-on: we live simultaneously in all three
dimensions and they are inextricably intertwined
Social Constructionism
• The physical world we inhabit is not just a
realm of objects (houses, cars, foods and so
on), it is simultaneously a realm of meaning
• Our houses, cars and food (if we have these)
say something about us: though we may
appropriate and inflect these meanings, we do
not create them ourselves - they are created
intersubjectively
Social Constructionism
• Dominant meanings tend to become objectified in
institutions, their structures and processes
• Resources flow to these institutions allowing them to
reproduce themselves, thereby bringing about the
continuation of those meanings
• Meanings, however, are always the object of struggle:
as positions of dominance change old institutions die
away and new ones appear
Social Constructionism
• Language is of particular importance to Social
Constructionists as the primary mechanism through
which the struggle over meaning takes place on a dayto-day basis (violence in general being reserved for
“critical” situations or what are seen as gross
transgressions)
Social Constructionism
• Social Constructionist approaches can be found in a
wide variety of fields:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
History of institutions
Organisational theory
Management theory
Political theory
Communication theory
Leisure research
and so on
Social Constructionism
• Research carried out within the Social Constructionist
paradigm can use a wide range of methods:
– Ethnographic methods (interviews, focus groups etc.)
– Interpretative methods (Discourse Analysis, Conversational
Analysis)
– Semiotics
• But the focus is always on the dimension of
intersubjective meaning
A personal note
• All my own research is located within
the social constructionist paradigm
• If you find yourself reading something
by me, you should, therefore, read it
with that in mind
Marxism
Marxism
• Though now deeply unfashionable
(having enjoyed a period of dominance
in the sixties and seventies),
approaches based on Marxist theory
continue to offer useful insights for
cultural analysis
Marxism
• As is well known, Marx believed that
the driving force behind “history” was
the class struggle
• Marxist analyses therefore focus on:
– The political economy of cultural
production
– The ideas and values “inscribed” in the
products
Marxism
• There is no precise set of techniques
which could be described as “Marxist”
• It is more a question of overall focus
and the attempt to link cultural
production to larger social and historical
processes
Hegemony Theory
• Hegemony theory, developed by the
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (18921937), has escaped the more general
loss of prestige of Marxist theory
overall, and is much used in certain
fields of cultural analysis
Antonio Gramsci
Hegemony
• Hegemony is leadership by consent rather
than by coercion
• It takes the form of a struggle for the
constitution of “common sense”, of what is
“too obvious for words”
• This struggle takes place primarily in civil
society rather than in the political arena
Hegemony
• Popular culture is a key site of
hegemonic processes
• Gramsci encouraged the analysis of
detective novels, the sporting press and
so on
Hegemony
• He was interested in how these
“harmless” products nonetheless
reproduced the values of the dominant
classes, and ways in which they might
be “appropriated” to express counterhegemonic views
Mixed Methods
(Triangulation)
Mixed Methods
• Mixed Methods (also known as triangulation)
is becoming an increasingly common way of
approaching research
• The idea is not in itself new: in the early 20th
C the German sociologist Max Weber
claimed to bring “understanding” and
“explanation” together to form “explanatory
understanding”
Max Weber
A founding figure of European sociology
Mixed Methods
• Although Weber used (very) large scale
survey techniques, he was not located
in the positivist paradigm
• He is in fact viewed as the father of
“interpretative” sociology
Mixed Methods
• For example, some kind of large-scale
survey can be used to provide an initial
map of the broad contours of the field
• On that basis, decisions can be made
as where best to carry out ethnographic
research
Mixed Methods
• This can work well, so long as the premises
of the overall methodology (research
paradigm) are not breached
• Using statistics is not in itself equivalent to a
positivist approach, and these can be
integrated within a relativist framework, so
long as it is the assumptions of that
framework which dominate overall
Mixed Methods
• It is not (philosophically) possible to reconcile
the positivist and the social constructionist
paradigms, so while Mixed Methods offers
interesting possibilities, make sure you do
not try to combine assumptions which are
mutually contradictory
Many thanks