The relevance of histories of methods expertise for studying sociocultural change

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The relevance of histories of methods expertise
for studying socio-cultural change
www.cresc.ac.uk

• Mike Savage
• CRESC Sociology
• University of Manchester

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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

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1 Issues of theory and method
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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 gt
  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

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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 gt
  structuralism gt 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)

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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 un-researched, roles in shaping
  socio-cultural change.
• The interview formalises the elicitation of
  personal accounts
• The sample survey generates concerns with
  emergent individuals, governmental change

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2 The emergence of the interview
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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
  post- war welfare state

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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.

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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.
• Titmusss 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.

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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 dont honestly know? I tend to live from day to
  day. Im 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 theyd be reasonable companions for
  each other. Its 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 dont 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 Ill
  go and make a cup of tea, Im thinking. Ive done
  more talking than Ive 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
  Im the hub of his home I hope a companion as
  well as a wife.

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3 The strange history of the sample survey
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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
• 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),

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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 Lockwoods critique
  of tick-box research which initiated the
  Affluent Worker project, as well as Bourdieus
  concerns with survey research.

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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 (1957gt). 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

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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)
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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)

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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 1964gt
  Butler and Stokes Runciman Nuffield Mobility
  Study)

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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.

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4 Some contemporary provocations
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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 Quantitative
• Interview National sample survey
• Interpretative Positivist/ scientific
• Narrative 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

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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.

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.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).

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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

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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.

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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.