Transcript Narratives and Numbers in the history of social science

www.cresc.ac.uk
The relevance of histories of methods
expertise for studying socio-cultural
change
Mike Savage
CRESC & Sociology
University of Manchester
Reading methods as part of the
story…
• Issues of theory and method
• The emergence of the interview
• The strange history of the sample survey
• Some contemporary provocations
1: Issues of theory and method
Methods and Socio-Cultural Change
• The rise of the post-war social sciences is one of the
most important, yet un-researched, aspect of post-war
change.
– Social scientists are 3% of UK academics 1948 > c. 45% 2001
– Social scientists play pioneering role in elaborating new
‘technologies of the social’ in post-war years
• National sample survey (from 1930s)
• The ‘user questionnaire’ (from 1960s)
• The qualitative interview (from 1950s)
– Social scientists generate ‘epoch descriptions’ which come to
embed change into the social itself
• ‘Affluence’ (1960s)
• Post-industrialism (1970s)
• Globalisation (1990s)
• Conceptions of change themselves are dependent on
the methods which social scientists champion
Yet, social scientists largely remain
blind to their own ‘footprints’
• We still rely on teleological/ institutional histories
(e.g. Abrams, Halsey, Platt) produce
– Disciplinary self-understanding couched in terms of
‘theoretical currents’ (e.g. functionalism >
structuralism > post-structuralism, etc) rather than in
terms of their ‘modes of ordering’.
– Mobilise current orthodoxies as a means of
interpreting past events
– Focus on ‘insider’ disputes, rather than about the
deployment of disciplines within wider networks
• Critical histories mostly study either the natural
sciences (STS), or the colonial social sciences
(Mitchell, Dirks)
My argument….
Two major UK social science research
repertoires - the national sample survey
and the in-depth interview - gained
(sudden) precedence in the 1950s, and
come to play vital, though still largely unresearched, roles in shaping socio-cultural
change.
• The interview formalises the elicitation of
‘personal accounts’
• The sample survey generates concerns
with emergent individuals, governmental
change
2: The emergence of the
‘interview’
1945-1955: The power of ‘gentlemanly
social science’
• Academic social sciences are not conceived as
‘empirical’ disciplines.
• The hold of evolutionary syntheses.
• The dominance of ‘observation’ as the privileged method
• ‘Social problems’ define the questions asked
• The dominance of (gentlemanly) economics
• Fuses the medical, moral, and social
This gentlemanly social science actually advances in
immediate post-war years under influence of:LSE synthetic sociology (Hobhouse).
early impetus associated with British Sociological
Association (1951+)
New opportunities for research associated with postwar welfare state
1947+: the methods challenge from
‘psy-science’
• Focused on the Tavistock Institute and Human Relations
• Dominated by issues of ‘war’ not ‘welfare’ (morale,
mobilisation, leadership, etc)
• Introduces new technologies
– Organisational ethnography (Jacques et al)
– The ‘interview’ (Robb, Bott)
• Introduces new concerns with ‘relationality’
– Lewin and ‘field analysis’
– Trist and the ‘role’
– The concept of ‘network’ (Moreno, Bott)
• Scientistic, yet not interested in the sample survey, but
strongly vested in the ‘case study’.
The genealogy of the ‘interview’
• Is initiated out of a particular debate about norms and ‘reference
groups’, yet remains inscribed long after that debate recedes.
• The interview was not readily accepted as an effective research
method.
– Titmuss’s preface to Family and Social Networks: ‘ultimately they
resolved, to put it simply, to favour readability… this has meant that
some chapters now have an impressionistic flavour’
• Emerges out of contestation between social workers and academic
sociologists, in which the social problem problematic is necessarily
displaced in order for sociologists to command jurisdiction
• Involves a way of abstracting individual narratives from a ‘social
landscape’. Key exemplars include
– Willmott and Young, Family and Kinship in East London, 1956
– Stacey Tradition and Change, 1960
• Involves the ‘masculinisation’ of the research process (pioneers
included Dennis Marsden, Brian Jackson, Ray Pahl, John
Goldthorpe, David Lockwood) and a mode of research which forces
‘discursive justification’ on behalf of the respondent.
The new politics of ‘interviewing’
1962: A young male sociologist knocks on suburban doors
in the name of social scientific knowledge. Extract from
interview with a ‘young housewife’ reads as follows…
What things do you really look forward to?
I don’t honestly know? I tend to live from day to day. I’m not looking forward to
the baby getting older… but I do look forward to the complete family. (four)
is a reasonable number. Not too many. And they’d be reasonable
companions for each other. It’s as many as we could possibly afford
Do you prefer the company of males?
Yes, perhaps I identify myself more with males than females (confusion) what
sort of Freudian thing are you going to make of that. I don’t know what I
mean’
What about your husband?
‘I suppose he uses the home mainly as a resting place and an eating place. He
enjoys his home life but….. what am I trying to say? I think I’ll go and make
a cup of tea, I’m thinking. I’ve done more talking than I’ve done for ages.
What does your husband see?
‘I hope he sees a place he can come home to and discuss his work and find
peace and rest. A place that stimulates him outside his work. I suppose I’m
the hub of his home… I hope a companion as well as a wife.
3: The strange history of the
sample survey
Issues
The national sample survey is seen by many
quantitative social scientists as the key
research technology. We need to recognise,
however, it broke from received scientific
notions of social research, e.g.those associated
with the census
1. It constructs ‘public opinion’ from the 1930s (Osborne and
Rose), though there is considerable early resistance and
scepticism.
2. It becomes a key government technology from Second
World War (1942)
3. It provides an inscription device for ‘individual’ development
(Cohort studies).
4. It allows the isolation of ‘social groups’ as definite bounded
entities (notably in 1960s ‘white heat’).‘
5. The survey co-produces the social scientific habitus itself
(through enlisting educated’ researchers),
1: Surveys and public opinion
• Rose and Osborne (2000) argue that polling creates a new
conception of ‘public opinion’
• This jostles with, and comes to displace, notions of ‘national
character’ (c.f. Mandler) which had predominated beforehand.
• However, until the 1960s, there was considerable suspicion of, and
resistance towards polls (e.g. no one believed their prediction that
Labour would win the 1945 election).
• (Partial) respectability only comes during the 1950s. As late as 1964
it was noted that educational research was
– ‘something of a bandwagon (to which) individuals and bodies with
scanty experience and minimal competence are now turning their
attention to… some of these are commercial interests who skilfully
conceal their origins or convince a reputable educational organisation
that they will finance research without strings. Others are self appointed
pressure groups with innocent and high sounding titles… questionnaires
are a favourite instrument of such groups, since they appear simple to
construct and interesting to fill’
• Consider also Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s critique of ‘tick-box’
research which initiated the ‘Affluent Worker’ project, as well as
Bourdieu’s concerns with survey research.
2. As governmental technology
• The first national survey, under government aegis, in 1942. The
OPCS becomes the main body to conduct national surveys till the
1960s.
• Key devices of post-war government begin to deploy survey
measures, for example the ‘retail price index’, linked to the Family
Expenditure Survey (1957>). Surveys construct notions of the nation
as ‘modern imagined community’.
• The survey becomes the key device for establishing ‘government
departmental’ expertise in the ‘white heat’ of the 1960s Labour
government, defining the client groups of departments (e.g. the
‘poor’, the ‘ill’)
• supplementing the ‘gentlemanly’ Royal Commissions.
– Fulton Commission (Civil Service reform)
– Plowden Report (educational reform)
– Radcliffe-Maud Report (local government reform)
• Surveys were not seen as ‘re-usable’, but as ‘one-off’ inquiries
• Academic social scientists still work at some remove from surveys
Up until the 1950s many teachers, most educationalists,
and nearly all politicians envisaged educational research as
a mildly interesting and marginal activity… the periodic
reports of the Central Advisory Council… formulated their
recommendations by the time honoured means of
canvassing opinion and seeking a consensus. Recent
reports, however have illustrated a revolutionary change.
Crowther, Robins and Plowden were not content with
mainly canvassing opinion… they proceeded to seek out
facts.
(National Foundation of Economic Research, 1967-68)
3. As device for eliciting the ‘individual’
• Until 1970s public surveys rarely focus on national
random samples, but focus on specific ‘problem’ groups,
notably children.
• Cohort Study (1946) and National Child Development
Study (1958) pioneer studies of the ‘developmental
individual’ using innovative panel study design
• During the 1960s, extensive surveys of children and
young people were common.
–
–
–
–
Youth Survey 1961, 1962, 1963
Child Chest Survey, 1966
Buckinghamshire child survey, 1961
Politics and the English child, 1969
• Educational reform and ‘comprehensivisation’ depends
on survey research (e.g. consider the National
Foundation for Educational Research)
4: As elaborating on ‘social groups’
• In contrast to field analysis, surveys permit the sampling
of pre-specified social constituencies, often remarkably
fine-grained, e.g.
– Interviews with the ‘poor’ (numerous)
– interviews with ‘handicapped’ (1968) (N = 12738)
– Attitudes on International Affairs among African Students in
Britain (1963) (N= 291),
– Survey of aircraft noise near Heathrow (1961, 1969, N = 4699)
– Surveys of phone users.
• The national random sample survey only has marginal
position and the impetus comes from political science
(British Election Survey 1964>; Butler and Stokes;
Runciman; Nuffield Mobility Study)
5. As eliciting the social scientific habitus
itself
• Numerous surveys are about students themselves, including
surveys at Cambridge, Essex, Edinburgh, Manchester, Nottingham,
UCL, Exeter
• National Survey of 1960 University graduates, surveys of trainees,
of the ‘impact of schemes’
• Remarkable enthusiasm for surveys of University teachers (1964
Halsey; 1969, Ministry of Labour)
• MENSA plays a role in pioneering user surveys (e.g. 1969 survey to
see if MENSA members are ‘upwardly mobile’)
• New Society pioneers the ‘user questionnaire’.
The social scientific habitus is elicited around
concerns with change, development and
technological modernity.
4: Some contemporary
provocations
The challenge to the ‘methods
settlement’
•
•
The ‘methods settlement’ was set between 1950 and 1970 and has
proved highly obdurate.
This agenda institutionalised key divides
–
–
–
–
•
•
•
Qualitative
Interview
Interpretative
Narrative
Quantitative
National sample survey
Positivist/ scientific
Numbers
The idea of ‘sampling’ is the point of contact between traditions
Observation, previously dominant, stands outside this ‘methods
settlement’
These oppositions do not do useful work
– They obscure more innovative deployments of numbers and narratives
– They obscure the challenge of digital knowledge in an era of ‘knowing
capitalism’
•
We are seeing a return to the politics of ‘whole populations’
The challenge to ‘depth’ models
In defining their identities and activities, sociologists invoke
‘depth models’, implicit in positivist, realist, and
hermeneutic approaches.
• Both the interview and the sample survey are ‘inscription
devices’ for delving into, and revealing, ‘hidden’ social
processes.
• Both allow ‘inference’, ‘abstraction’ and the search for
regularities, a ‘causal’ social science in which
particularities are subsumed to ‘underlying’ forces
• Digital transactional data
– works through surfaces using data on whole (sub-)populations.
– is concerned not with ‘exposing the hidden’, but with arraying
surface data in visible and accessible form.
– It generalises through particularising methods.
– Is implicated in an audit and commercial ‘neo-liberal’ culture.
– Can be seen as part of ‘descriptive turn’….
….the ‘descriptive turn’
Recent thinking re-instates the discredited role of the
‘descriptive’ in a way that is amenable to the use of
transactional data.
• Historian of science John Pickstone identifies four
distinct ‘ways of knowing’ (i) classificatory, (ii) analytical
(iii) experimental and (iv) hermeneutic, and argues that
(ii) should not be seen as definitive.
• US sociologist Andrew Abbott attacks conventional
‘multi-variate’ analysis with its problematic assumptions
of ‘general linear reality’ in favour of descriptive methods.
• Social theorist Bruno Latour criticises the delineation of
the ‘deep’ social.
• Deleuze and Guattari on the ‘immanence’ of the social,
with links to chaos theory, etc (cf Delanda).
The role of networks
• We have seen that the rise of the sample survey in the
mid 20th century depended on discrediting the ‘field
analysis’ approach, in which it was deemed essential to
study whole populations (e.g. Tavistock Institute).
• Despite the early prominence of British network research
in the 1950s (Barnes, Bott, Mitchell) this tradition faded,
as it is not easily amenable to study using either sample
surveys or in-depth interviews. SNA now increasingly
championed by physicists (Barbarasi, Watts, etc).
• Transactional data allows the deployment of network
methods, where understanding the links between
transactions, and not the attributes of the individual
‘transactor’ becomes a central research issue.
• E.g. Amazon; Tesco loyalty cards; marketing research, etc
The power of visualisations
• The survey and the interview has historically involved
abstracting from the visual either through prioritising
numbers or narratives. Some theorists (Martin Jay) talk
about the ‘denigration of vision’ in the academic
endeavour. However,
– The reporting of transactional data routinely deploys hybrid
mixes of text, number, and the visual in ways which mutually
inter-relate.
– The visual, textual and numerical play off each other, and rely on
a hermeneutic of accessibility and engagement
– Examples include network sociograms, web pages, maps, etc
• The following examples are networks of mobile phone
connections….
Conclusions
• The ‘methods settlement’ allowed social scientists to get caught up
in their own internal disputes (between quant and qual, etc) and they
have not been attentive to the deployment of new methods that
deploy radically different forms of the ‘whole social’.
• We should not dismiss this new work as ‘un-scientific’: it is highly
‘scientific’ (note its affiliation with the natural sciences), and it
actually speaks to recent theoretical currents.
• Social scientists need to critically engage with transactional
research on its own terrain, e.g. by questioning its classifications,
assumptions, procedures, etc
• We need to reflect on ‘the politics of method’ in which academic
social scientists do not enjoy a legislative position but are – at best –
intermediaries between numerous agents.
A focus on ‘description’ could be a way of
staging a debate between academic social
scientists and work using ‘transactional data’.