SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODS 2013-2014: SPRING TERM Qualitative Research Methods and Analysis and Philosophies of Social Re

1. SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODS 2013-2014: SPRING TERM Qualitative Research Methods and Analysis and Philosophies of Social Research Week 18: What is the Social? Dr Des Fitzgerald Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine King’s College London des.fitzgerald@kcl.ac.uk

2. What is the Social? Who Cares? • Consider just some of the ways we use this term, ‘social,’ today…. • Social science; Social enterprise; Social work; Social welfare; Social security; Social cognition; Social neuroscience; Social network; Social media; Social medicine; Social research; Social Economy; Social marketing; Social care; Social justice; Social policy; Social responsibility; Social change; Social psychology… • What is this word – 'social' – doing here? • Does ‘social’ mean the same thing every time? • Is it doing the same work every time? (See here for a recent conference at Warwick that posed similar questions: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/news/new_social-ism.pdf)

3. In this lecture, we want to be a bit more critical about what the word social is doing when we talk about ‘social science’ or ‘social research methods.’ • We want to think about: • What it means; • Where it comes from; • What ideas and methods it entails; • What ideas and methods if excludes; • What it makes possible; • What it make impossible; • What it asks us, as researchers, to do; • What it asks us, as researchers, not to do; • …and so on

4. We’ll do three specific things in this lecture: Set out a ‘classic’ account of ‘the social’ as a series of social facts and then unpack some of the assumptions embedded in this account. Think about an alternative account that disputes this positivistic view, and argues that the world is made up of social constructions. Using especially the work of Bruno Latour, look at one contemporary intervention that tries to transcend this debate .

5. Across these three points, we’ll try to keep in mind this key question: How do our assumptions about what ‘the social’ is, and about the zone of investigation it identifies, and about the kinds of people and things it is interested in, and about the tools and methods it requires, shape (1) our attempts to do social science research, and/or (2) the world in which that research takes place? (Don’t worry – we’ll unpack this as we go).

6. Health warning: • We’ll need to hold two strands of analysis in our heads for what follows: • An ontological strand (is there a thing, an area, an object, a bunch of stuff that is actually ‘social’?) • An epistemological strand (how might we go about producing knowledge about this thing, this object, this area, this bunch of stuff?) • Don’t get too hung up on this! But do try have the distinction in the back of your head as you think through these issues.

7. ‘The Social’ consists of Social Facts

8. What is the social? Actually, this is easy… Durkheim solved this 120 years ago, right? There is ‘a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him. Subsequently, since they consist of representations and actions, they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena... Thus they constitute a new species and to the them must be assigned the term social .’ Durkheim 1895 (1982), The Rules of Sociological Method, p.52

9. What is the social for Durkheim (and many of the scholars who came after him? • It’s an external force • with a law-like structure • outside the individual, • made up of the beliefs, tendencies and practices • of a group, taken collectively. • It’s a kind of ‘collective custom’ • that has an objective reality, • that constrains the individual’s sphere of action & understanding • and pushes her along a sort of ‘collective current.’ • It’s not biological; • it’s not psychological. • It’s….the social

10. What are the methodological implications of defining the social in this way? ‘Social phenomena are things and should be treated as such…they are the sole datum afforded the sociologist. A thing is in effect all that is given, all that is offered, or rather forces itself upon our observation. To treat phenomena a things is to treat them as data, and this constitutes the starting point for science. Durkheim, op. cit., p.69

11. Some background: where does this come from? Sociology as a new science (and, in fact, at the time potentially a biological science) The social as an emerging space of ‘problematization’in politics and government

12. The invention of the social pre-Durkheim: government, order, control ‘“The social,” that is to say, does not represent an eternal existential sphere of human sociality. Rather, within a limited geographical and temporal field, it set the terms for the way in which human intellectual, political and moral authorities, in certain places and contexts, thought about and acted upon their collective experience….The political rationalities that have played so great a part in our own century - socialism, social democracy, social liberalism - may have differed on many things, but on this they agreed - the nation must be governed, but one must pose the question of how to govern from 'the social point of view’…’'The social' became a kind of 'a priori‘ of political thought: order would have to be social or it would cease to exist.’ Nikolas Rose (1996) ‘The Death of the Social. Economy and Society 25(3): 329-330

13. The world is made up only of social constructions

14. What if ‘the social’ isn’t a thing like ‘the biological’ at all? ‘Social constructionism is a general term sometimes applied to theories that emphasize the socially created nature of social life….[It] emphasize[s] the idea that society is actively and creatively produced by human beings. [Social Constructionists] portray the world as made or invented—rather than merely given or taken for granted. Social worlds are interpretive nets woven by individuals and groups’ Scott and Marshall (2012) A Dictionary of Sociology ‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after…’ Geertz, C. (1973)The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, p.5

15. Where does this come from?? • Philosophical roots (idealism, nominalism, hermeneutics) • Alternative sociological histories (intepretivism) • Politics and critical theory (what politics is possible when we imagine the social world as an objective reality?)

16. What is the social in social constructionism? • From a social constructionist perspective, ‘the social’ is not, as it is for Durkheim, an objective thing out there waiting to be discovered by the right methods – it’s something more like: • an inescapable, • and collectively-shared • web of human meaning, • which entangles all (most?) of the things in the world, • as well as the kinds of methods we can use to understand these , • none of which are now given, • or natural, • or obvious, • but are only the products of historically- and culturally-specific human understandings. This can be both or either an ontological claim about how the world is, or an epistemological claim about how we can know things about it.

17. These distinctions are not hard and fast, but if we could locate Durkheim’s sociology somewhere on the left of this table, think of ‘social constructionism’ as a gentle drift towards the right hand side…

18. What does this account of the social do for social science research? • It shows us that individual phenomena are often not so individual. • It shows how phenomena we thought of as psychological, or specific to individuals, are actually part of broader currents • It argues that many things we thought were natural and universal are entangled in human collective ideas (here is the big departure from Durkheim). • It makes change thinkable; it's about critique • (here is the even bigger departure form • Durkheim)

19. What kinds of methods, and methodological assumptions are required by such a view? • No facts: only the interpretation of facts; • No positive, universal law-like structure; only culturally and historically-contingent human conventions; • No objective reality 'out there'; only internal and subjective realities 'in here'; • No unbiased viewpoint; only the multiplication of biases • No empiricist generalizations; only locally-valid empirical situations • No observing of experiment, only the reading of text;

20. Qualifier 1: Objects, ideas, situations • Ian Hacking in The Social Construction of What? - no one is a 'social constructionist' as such. People pursue social constructions in different ways, and about different kinds of things. • To say that gender is a social construction might be to say that: • The way we think about and understand our bodies is socially produced (idea) • Our bodies themselves are socially produced (thing) • The sciences that talk about our bodies are engines of social construction (knowledge) • The politics of our bodies are made up socially-constructed gender ideologies (situation) • Each requires a different research programme, and a different method.

21. Qualifier 2: Social constructionism as social change: politics and critique ‘Social construction work is critical of the status quo. Social constructionists about X tend to hold that: (1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is […] […] (2) X is quite bad as it is (3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed.’ Hacking, I.(2000) The Social Construction of What, Boston: Harvard UP.

22. The debate between ‘facts’ and ‘constructions’ is a false debate

23. Bruno Latour's dilemma: If everything is social, more-or-less; and if the social is only a collectively-held web of meaning; and if therefore there can be no factual knowledge, only interpretive knowledge; and if there is no objective view from which to judge between interpretations... ..then what happens to the facts we actually want to hold onto?? What happens, for example, when groups who oppose climate change, or support intelligent design, start to appropriate social constructionist arguments?

24. Here's what Latour wants to do: • Can we believe in the 'realness' of facts without ignoring what we know about the way that facts get made? • Can we have some kind of firm, concrete knowledge, while acknowledging all the interpretive work that needs to get done in making that knowledge? • Can we have a world of social facts without giving up on social change? • Can we believe in the realness of climate change, without having to accept, for example, the immutable nature of gender roles. • Bruno says yes! Others ‘seemed to operate with the strange idea that you had to submit to this rather unlikely choice: either something was real and not constructed, or it was constructed and artificial….it flew in the face of everything we were witnessing in laboratories: to be contrived and to be objective went together.’ • Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: OUP, p.90

25. Here's the trick: Everything in the world is social... But non-humans are social actors too.

26. Matters of fact and Matters of concern. • Yes (contra Durkheim) the social world is not simply a things out there; • But also (contra the social constructionists) they're not just a set of human ideas and conventions: • The social worlds is made up of human ideas, but also bits of machinery and technical equipment, and almost certainly some gases, and some other elements (carbon, for sure), and also biology, and flesh and blood, and politics, and history, and religion, and metal, and wood, and plastic, and sensation, and love, and hair, and fat, and electrons, and water, and ideology, and meanness… • The interesting thing –for Latour – is to understand how things come together (are assembled) and also how they stay together (are stable)

27. An example: What is a law? We can imagine the Durkheimian view – laws are manifestations of specific, objectively-existing collective wills and spirits. And we can imagine the social constructionist view: laws are historically- and culturally-specific human inventions, probably with an ideological purpose. For Latour, laws are made up of ‘Files – grey, beige or yellow, thin or thick, easy or complex, old or new…stamps, elastic bands, paperclips, and other office paraphernalia…a multitude of tiny actions of surveillance and vigilance performed by humble brigadiers, researchers, town council secretaries, meteorologists, and invoice clerks…established, accepted, reference and asured texts…’ Latour, B. (2002) The Making of Law. Cambridge: Polity, pp.71-6

28. Methodological implications • We can know stuff; there are real things out there. • But real things are complicated; they're hybrids of human and non-human things, of material and non-material things. • Non-humans are active (social) participants in making stuff • Pay attention to objects; no more anthropocentrism ‘You have to follow the actors themselves, that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make fit it together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish’ Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: OUP, p.12

29. Key Points • Social constructionism may not be as radical as it thinks it is. • We might not have to choose between facts and constructions. • We might be able to believe in real things, but sill have a politics of social change. • We may not have to choose between approaches rooted in 'science'or 'culture,' or between positive and interpretivism – there's no difference between the two. • To understand something is only to understand (and follow) the actors involved in it. I took this photo last week!

30. Related authors worth checking out: • Donna Haraway (When Species Meet) • Karen Barad (Meeting the Universe Half-way) • Isabelle Stengers (Cosmopolitics I and II • Myra HirdThe Origins of Sociable Life • Jane Bennett Vibrant Matter

31. Lecture Summary: Even for people who imagine themselves ‘social scientists,’ it is not always obvious what ‘the social’ actually is. Historical debate has fluctuated between those who think the social is a real objective thing that can be studied scientifically, and those who think it is an inescapably human construction that needs to be interpreted. This is not just a sociological problem: it has long philosophical roots in idealism versus realism, nature versus culture, human versus animal, etc. Recent scholarship has begun to wonder if these are not false dilemmas. In either case, whatever your commitments are to what ‘the social’ is will have methodological implications – and vice versa.

32. For seminars: • Read (short!) pieces by Ian Hacking and Bruno Latour • Are you more convinced by claims that the social world is a thing like biology or the sun or a stone is a thing, or that it is a series of human conventions the way dances or laws or haircuts are human conventions? • Do we need to distinguish between humans and non-humans, and/or between material and immaterial things in our accounts of the social world? Why/Why not? • If you were to ‘follow the things; in your project, what might you do? • Consider: what version of ‘the social’ is implicated in your project? How is this commitment entangled in the kind of methods you’ve chosen?