How Max Weber got it mostly right about the role of values in social research

1. How Max Weber got it mostly right about the role of values in social research Martyn Hammersley The Open University, UK Helsinki-Copenhagen Colloquium on Evidence in Social Inquiry Workshop #1: The Role of Values in Social Enquiry, University of Copenhagen, December 2013

2. Max Weber in 1917

3. An issue characterised by three C’s • Caricature – of some of the positions proposed. • Complexity – a range of difficult issues, concerning: the legitimate products of social research; the role of various sorts of value in its pursuit; the institutional requirements for such research; evaluation of its consequences; and so on (see Proctor 1991; Kincaid et al 2007). • Confusion – a variety of terms are employed to mark out different positions, but these do not have clear or unambiguous meanings: ‘value neutrality’, ‘value freedom’, ‘objectivity’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘partisanship’, ‘perfectionism’, etc.

4. Caricature • Critics, and even some supporters, formulate the idea that social inquiry can be ‘value-neutral’, ‘value-free’, or even ‘objective’ in ways that misrepresent its original form. • Weber’s work is frequently ignored or misinterpreted. There is some slight excuse for both these tendencies: ‘value-free’, ‘value-neutral’, and ‘objective’ are problematic terms; and Weber does not clearly express his position in a way that is immediately intelligible. (But see Bruun 2007.)

5. Weber was no positivist • Weber was a post-enlightenment thinker, influenced by neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche. He did not believe, like Comte and Durkheim, that science can diagnose social pathology. Nor did he believe, like Hegel and Marx, that there is a set of values, built into human nature, whose realisation is the End of History. • If we try to understand his views as if they were a form of positivism or historicism we will be led astray.

6. Assumptions that the value-neutral principle does NOT imply/require • That research involves no reliance upon values. • That making value judgments is quite independent of facts about the world. • That there is a metaphysicaldichotomy between facts and values (Putnam 2002). • That value judgments are necessarily irrational leaps of subjective faith. • That because discussion of values cannot be scientific it cannot be rational.

7. Complexity: Is social inquiry value-neutral/value-free/objective? Can it be? Should it be? Besides these 3 questions, there are at least 3 others that need to be addressed, with a view to reducing confusion: • How are we defining ‘social inquiry’? • What do we mean by ‘value’? • What do we mean by ‘neutral’/‘free’/‘objective’?

8. Types of social inquiry • Academic research: aimed at building up disciplinary knowledge. This was Weber’s primary focus. • Practical research: aimed at supplying information needed by practical actors – governments, citizens, consumers, etc. • Inquiry-subordinated-to-another-activity, for example police inquiries, legal research, civil service research, and much ‘action research’. All three can be of great value, but they are different in character (Hammersley 2002:ch6).

9. What does ‘value’ mean? Two meanings in Weber: • A principle that specifies a good/bad contrast. Very often there are multiple versions of the same principle, for example justice/injustice can take retributive or distributive forms. Moreover, all value principles must be interpreted in order to be applied to particular cases. • A value-judgment = an evaluation of some person, situation, object, course of action, etc in terms of a set of value principles (and, also, on the basis of various factual assumptions).

10. Weber’s treatment of values • Weber argues that we are faced with plural value principles, and that for this and other reasons there are usually conflicting but equally reasonable (as well as unreasonable) value judgments about any object. [Correct!] • He believed that how we choose among or assign priority to value principles cannot be decided by reason. [Wrong but salutary!] • However, he thought that value judgmentswere open to rational scrutiny as regards their derivation from principles, and also in terms of their ‘realism’. [Correct!]

11. Weber on vocations 1. We choose particular vocations, and this will lead us to prioritise some values over others. Western society involves institutional specialisation, and a rationalisation process requiring us to pursue vocations objectively. 2. Whatever our vocation, we will often find it uncomfortable because of conflict among values. 3. Those following different vocations, like those brought up in different cultures, may struggle to reach agreement and sometimes even to understand one another.

12. Epistemic and non-epistemic values Social scientists are, by the nature of their task, committed to epistemic values: their sole operational goal is to produce knowledge. So, in many contexts, they prioritise truth over other values. At the same time, the practical, that is non-epistemic, values to which they are committed as people can serve as a value-relevance framework for their research. (There will also be practical values that operate as ethical constraints on how the research is carried out, see Hammersley and Traianou 2012).

13. What is value ‘freedom’/‘neutrality’? • Value freedom/neutrality requires that only factual research questions are investigated; and that in seeking to find answers to those questions the researcher tries to be neutral as regards non-epistemic values. • The implication is not that publication of the findings of a study will be politically neutral in its effects, in the sense of being equally favourable or unfavourable to all political or practical commitments. However, it will not be systematically favourable or unfavourable to particular positions in its consequences.

14. Assumptions underpinning value neutrality • Factual conclusions are distinct from value conclusions; even though value judgments involve factual assumptions, and factual conclusions must usually be value-relevant. • Social science can only validate factual claims, not value conclusions. It can legitimately claim expertise, though not infallibility, about factual matters. It cannot claim legitimate expertise as regards value-judgments. To do so would amount to scientism, and would thus undermine democracy.

15. What is objectivity? At least three meanings, the first applying to knowledge claims, the others to research strategies. ‘Objective’ as: • ‘Corresponding to objects in the world’ = ‘true’ • ‘Following procedural rules rather than making idiosyncratic decisions’ • ‘Taking proper account of what is relevant, and only of what is relevant’. (There is, of course, room for uncertainty and dispute about what is relevant.) This third sense was the one that Weber used, it is a component of a commitment to value neutrality.

16. Bias: the conceptual complement to this third sense of ‘objectivity’ Bias = distortion of the pursuit of some goal as a result of the influence of values or interests that are not relevant to it. For example, bias in job selection or in legal trials. In the case of research, of course, ‘bias’ refers to deviation from the most effective path to finding true answers to factual questions (see Hammersley 2000:ch6). What constitutes bias in pursuing an activity depends upon its goal(s).

17. Value relevance Unlike natural science, social research focuses on explaining individual phenomena, rather than aiming at universal laws, and these phenomena must be selected for investigation on the basis of practical values, and studied from within a particular value-relevance framework. A value-relevance framework defines what is at issue, but is not partisan in the sense of favouring only one view about that issue, and does not provide a basis for drawing value conclusions as part of the research.

18. Illustrating value relevance Levels of poverty or social mobility, and reasons for changes in these, are factual issues that are value-relevant from a variety of political perspectives (though not from all). Contrasting views can be taken about them, and the research findings are likely to be relevant to many different political views. How we define ‘poverty’ or ‘social mobility’ can vary, partly depending upon value assumptions, but value-neutrality requires us to explore the consequences of different definitions for our findings.

19. Has social science ever practised the principle of value neutrality? Not very systematically, for at least two reasons: • There are continual demands on social science for value conclusions, not just from outside but also from social scientists themselves. • While, in the mid-twentieth century, there was widespread appeal to value-neutrality, in practice researchers nevertheless often assumed that value conclusions follow directly from the facts, for example on analogy with the (misleading) case of medicine.

20. The current situation Today, across many fields of social science, and especially where qualitative approaches have made inroads, any commitment to ‘value neutrality’, ‘value-freedom’, and even ‘objectivity’ is generally rejected, usually as ‘positivist’ (but see Letherby et al 2012). Value conclusions are frequently presented as well-established by evidence, and as warranting acceptance as valid by anyone. Yet it is rarely made clear why these value-judgments should be treated as authoritative, and they are often open to reasonable doubt.

21. The lost ground • The means previously used to infer value conclusions from factual premisses – religion, natural law theory, nationalist ideology, organic social theories, or historicism of a Hegelian or Marxist kind – have been largely abandoned by social scientists today. • We need not, and should not, adopt an irrationalist position, but we must recognise that it is much harder for rational discussion about values to produce consensus than is the case with factual matters. This is because there is rarely a single, true answer to a value question.

22. Proposed alternative approaches Researchers as organic intellectuals explicitly committed to some set of practical values or to some interest group (whether marginalised or involved in government). MacIntyre (1990), Root (1993), Burawoy (2005), and Turner (2007) all seem to propose versions of this. The contractual model: researchers offer their services on the market, doing research that supports clients’ value positions, on the model of lawyers as advocates. This may be disguised via appeal to some notion of the common good.

23. Problems with these alternatives Social inquiry loses all internal coherence and comes to lack clear boundaries, merging into the activity of pressure groups of various kinds. Bias as regards factual conclusions will be encouraged, along with misuse of the authority of science. Public funding is hard to justify since research is serving partial interests. Given this, what research focuses on, and the conclusions it reaches, will be determined even more directly by funding source than currently.

24. Two corollaries of the value-neutrality principle • The primary duty of researchers is to pursue inquiry in such a way as to try to ensure that their findings are true. • A secondary responsibility is to try to ensure that the discussion of research findings, and of other factual information, in the public sphere pays attention to the distinction between facts and values and the ways they are interrelated. At present, the social science community does not always match up well to these obligations.

25. Summary and Conclusion • Current situation: the principles of value neutrality and objectivity are widely rejected; social scientists routinely present value conclusions as validated by research. • There is little clarity about the basis for these value conclusions, and why they are legitimate. • Rejection of value neutrality is largely based on misinterpretation and caricature. • The alternatives proposed – the organic intellectual or the hired advocate – are undesirable: they increase bias, encourage scientism, and thereby threaten democracy.

26. An advert! The Limits of Social Science: Causal Explanation and Values, London, Sage, 2014. Martyn Hammersley Chapters include: On the role of values in social research From facts to value judgments? A critique of critical realism Can social science tell us whether a society is meritocratic? A Weberian critique We didn’t predict a riot! On the public contribution of social science

27. References Bruun, H. (2007), Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (Second edition), Aldershot, Ashgate. Burawoy, M. (2005) ‘For Public Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, 56, 2 pp259–94. Derman, J. (2012) Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hammersley, M. (2000) Taking Sides in Social Research, London, Routledge. Hammersley, M. (2002) Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice, London, Paul Chapman/Sage. Hammersley, M. (2014) The Limits of Social Science: Causal explanation and values, London, Sage. Hammersley, M. and Traianou, A. (2012) Ethics in Qualitative Research: London, Sage. Hutchison, T. (1964) Positive Economics and Policy Objectives, London, Allen and Unwin.

28. References contd Kincaid, H., Dupré, J., and Wylie, A. (eds) (2007) Value-Free Science: Ideals and illusions, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Letherby, G, Scott, J and Williams M (2012 ) Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research. London: Sage.MacIntyre, A. (1990) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, London, Duckworth, pp23-4 and passim. Proctor, R. N. (1991) Value-Free Science: Purity and power in modern knowledge, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press. Putnam H. (2002) The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and other essays, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press. Putnam, H. and Walsh, V. (eds) (2011) The End of Value-free Economics, London, Routledge. Root, M. (1993) Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford, Blackwell. Turner, S. (2007) ‘Public sociology and democratic theory’, Sociology, 41, 5, pp785–798.