Social Science and Historical Perspectives

Society, Science, and Ways of Knowing

Jack David Eller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317198246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This accessible book introduces the story of 'social science', with coverage of history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and geography.

Key questions include:

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• How and why did the social sciences originate and differentiate?

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• How are they related to older traditions that have defined Western civilization?

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• What is the unique perspective or 'way of knowing' of each social science?

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• What are the challenges—and alternatives—to the social sciences as they stand in the twenty-first century?

Eller explains the origin, evolution, methods, and the main figures, literature, concepts, and theories in each discipline. The chapters also feature a range of contemporary examples, with consideration given to how the disciplines address present-day issues.

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What is Social Science?

Key organizations

National Social Science Association (www.nssa.us)

Consortium of Social Science Associations (www.cossa.org)

Academy of Social Sciences (www.acss.org.uk)

Social Science History Association (www.ssha.org)

Key journals

Contemporary Social Science

National Social Science Journal

Social Science History

Society is our immediate everyday reality, yet we understand no more of it merely by virtue of living in it than we understand of physiology by virtue of our inescapable presence as living bodies. The history of [social science] has been a long and arduous effort to become aware of things hidden or taken for granted: things we did not know existed— other societies in distant places and times, whose ways of life make us wonder about the naturalness of our own; things we know of only distortedly—the experiences of social classes and cultures other than our own; the realities of remote sectors of our own social structure, from inside the police patrol car to behind the closed doors of the politician and the priest; things right around us unreflectingly accepted—the network of invisible rules and institutions that govern our behavior and populate our thought, seemingly as immutable as the physical landscape but in reality as flimsy as a child’s pantomime.

(Collins and Makowsky 1993: 1)

Humans always and everywhere have lived in societies, but they have not always taken the existence or nature of society as a mystery to be pondered, let alone a question to be systematically investigated. In fact, for the majority of societies throughout history, and arguably for a majority of people today, society is opaque and taken for granted, in need of no analysis and sometimes beyond questioning. To be sure, people may wonder how to make a better life for themselves, but they typically do so within the familiar constraints of their society, without asking why their society exists in the first place or whether that society could be managed or fundamentally altered.

Society has always been there (in fact, many non-human animals also live in societies), but the scientific study of society is a remarkably new enterprise. “Social science,” or perhaps more accurately “the social sciences” (because they are multiple and relatively distinct) were only invented in anything resembling their modern form in the mid-1800s, and they only reached their current form in the early 1900s. They certainly have much older roots, which is an important fact, but nobody was doing sociology or anthropology or psychology until very recently.

More, a discipline like history or psychology or anthropology is not just a body of facts to know. It is a specific way of knowing, in a number of senses. First, somebody had to divide knowledge into “historical know ledge” and “psychological knowledge,” and “anthropological knowledge” etc. Then each discipline must discover—or construct—its knowledge, based on its particular interests and questions, its terminology and theories, and its methods and tools. Further, each discipline must enshrine its knowledge— and its territory or “turf,” if you will—in specific institutional forms and perpetuate those institutions over generations. Social scientists refer to this process of the creation, perpetuation, transmission, and institutionalization of their own knowledge, and that of other sciences and of informal non-scientific knowledge, as the social construction of knowledge.

Before we can discuss how each social science constructs knowledge in its own distinctive way, we must first understand how knowledge is constructed in whatever field or domain—social science, natural science, or non-science. It may turn out, in the final analysis, that it is less proper to speak of knowledge than of diverse knowledges, each constructed by its own knowledge-practices and knowledge-traditions.

The Sociology of Knowledge

Knowledge, and even its building block, namely “the fact,” is not so much found as made; the very word “fact” actually derives from the Latin factum for “something done” (more basically from the verb facere or “to do”). We might define a fact as a true statement, but such a definition begs the question of what is true and how we know it.

As science marched along allegedly discovering more facts, scholars began to notice that our knowledge is not as factual or objective as we tend to think. Sociologist Karl Mannheim was one of the first to suggest a social approach to knowledge, including knowledge that is not about society. For Mannheim and the early sociology of knowledge, the fundamental question was “how the social location of individuals and groups shapes their knowledge” (Swidler and Arditi 1994: 305).

One of the early topics for Mannheim was the relation between knowledge and age or generation. In a 1923 essay, he urged us to consider that one’s generation profoundly affects one’s individual knowledge, because the individuals who occupy a generation share “a common location in the social and historical process” and therefore “a specific range of potential experience” (1952: 292). People of the same age, having lived through the same events, have in common “possible modes of thought, experience, feeling, and action” (292), resulting in what he called “the ‘stratification of experience’” (297), virtually guaranteeing that members of a society would not possess the same knowledge, perspectives, and attitudes.

The sociology of knowledge has grown since its first days, and Swidler and Arditi asserted that the “new sociology of knowledge” that emerged by the 1990s was interested in the more general question of “how kinds of social organization make whole orderings of knowledge possible”; further, it investigated all sorts of knowledge, “political and religious ideologies as well as science and everyday life, cultural and organizational discourses along with formal and informal types of knowledge” (1994: 306). Ultimately, it expanded “the field of study from an examination of the contents of knowledge to the investigation of forms and practices of knowledge” (304).

Teachers are especially aware of the social-knowledge function of schools and of themselves as agents of social knowledge. In a series of publications from the 1970s to the 1990s, Basil Bernstein studied the social processes of educational knowledge. Central to his analysis is the notion of the school as a “social classifier,” of both people and knowledge, through the three “common message systems” built into the school institution, which make it “an agency of socialization and allocation” to produce and reproduce social differences and boundaries (Bernstein 1975: 199).

The first of the three message systems is the curriculum or the “contents” of education. Someone must select, from among all of the possible things to know, the things that are worth knowing and appropriate for the level of the knower. We also refer to this as the “canon,” the body of information that “counts as” knowledge, that has been officially sanctioned for knowing and therefore for teaching. The canon of literature in America, for instance, contains Shakespeare and Dickens and other prominent authors; it does not contain Danielle Steele or James Patterson. In history, too, choices must be made about which events to include and exclude, how to emphasize them, and how to interpret them. There is no objective or non-social way to make such decisions, and they are therefore ripe for disagreement and controversy (see Chapter 2).

The second message system is pedagogy or teaching methods. Any academic institution, and any individual teacher, must decide how to teach, whether to encourage rote memorization or critical thinking, whether to employ textual or visual materials, whether to promote group work or individual work, what kinds of homework to assign, and so on. Finally, Bernstein listed evaluation as the third message system, including “testing” but also all of the other ways in which teachers evaluate students—and teachers are evaluated by administrators and parents.

Taking his thinking further, Bernstein identified two dimensions of the organization of knowledge itself. The first was classification, by which he meant the boundaries between subject areas in the curriculum, for instance, how firmly we separate math from history from art. These borders might be weak or strong. The second was frame, a variable of pedagogy, referring to teaching practices such as the degree of control that the teacher exercises over the learning process (e.g. the order and timing of activities). When classification and frame are both strong, Bernstein suggested that learning operates on the “collection code,” meaning that areas of knowledge are kept neatly apart and study is highly specialized, with loyalty to a subject expected by professionals (that is, a person becomes a psychologist or a sociologist). In the “integrated code,” when classification and frame are weak, subject-boundaries are porous, individuals and ideas can move across or between disciplines and perspectives, and students and professionals are freer to create, combine, and question knowledge.

Expert Knowledge

Knowledge is not only socially constructed but also socially distributed. Different individuals, groups, and communities within a society know different things or know things at different depths. One of the most important distinctions in the knowledge distribution, especially in regard to science, is that between the “expert” and the novice or merely the average member of society. Of course, experts exist not only in the natural and social sciences but in every walk of life, from music and law to sewing and sports.

According to Marissa McBride and Mark Burgman, expert knowledge is

what qualified individuals know as a result of their technical practices, training, and experience. It may include recalled facts or evidence, inferences made by the expert on the basis of “hard facts” in response to new or undocumented situations, and integration of disparate sources in conceptual models to address system-level issues. . . . Experts are usually identified on the basis of qualifications, training, experience, professional memberships, and peer recognition.

(2012: 13)

Expert knowledge is often “domain specific,” that is, limited to a specific subject area, but it can also be more general and integrative, crossing subject boundaries.

Construction of Knowledge in Early Childhood: Kindergarten as Boot Camp

“Student” is a specific social role, and elementary school is one location or site of social knowledge. No one is born knowing how to be a student, but it is a role that must be learned early and securely. Harry Gracey (1968) characterized the first year of formal schooling, kindergarten, as a kind of “boot camp” for future schooling and future life, in which the new recruit to the educational system had to master the basic skills of a student. Indeed, he claimed that kindergarten existed to teach the student role and its standard repertoire of behaviors and attitudes more than to teach any particular information. Conducting field observations inside kindergarten classrooms, Gracey determined that most of the teachers’ energies were dedicated to training young children in “school routines,” which were drilled into the students as surely as any military routines into a new soldier. Among the resources utilized by teachers were the physical structure of the classroom, with its different spaces and functions, and the social structure of interaction, with its timed and organized activities. Spontaneity had to be replaced with discipline, and one of the primary characteristics of this discipline was its arbitrary quality: teachers started and ended activities at their own time, and most of these activities were literally meaningless to the students. Gracey mentioned routines like pledging allegiance to the flag, which young students did not understand (and often garbled), as examples of routine for routine’s sake, but much of the “academic” experience was equally capricious, such as learning particular facts about foreign countries. The point of much of the activity in the kindergarten classroom—and in classrooms throughout secondary and even higher education— consisted of tasks assigned by the teacher and performed by the students simply because they were assigned. The “meaning” of the work to the students was often the fact that the students had to do it. But there was one other meaning to these routine tasks: once the students graduated from and left the school institution, they would find themselves increasingly in institutions (like the workplace) where they were expected to conform to routines imposed by authorities that had little meaning or sense for them. Thus, Gracey concluded that kindergarten “can be seen as preparing children not only for participation in the organization and structures of large modern school systems, but also for a lifetime of employment in the large-scale organizations and offices of modern society” (1968: 71).

Expert knowledge of this sort is obviously social in a number of ways, with several crucial social consequences. For instance, as already mentioned, the initial source of much expert knowledge is education, which depends on schools, teachers (themselves ideally experts in a subject and in teaching methods), and textbooks (ideally written by experts). In other cases, the acquisition of expertise involves learning techniques from a “master” of those skills. Brian Moeran (2014), for instance, describes his apprenticeship in Japanese pottery, during which he acquired expert knowledge in multiple aspects of the art, from selecting clays to heating the kiln to shaping the designs and even displaying and selling the wares. Further, experts often work in groups, and those groups may establish specialized sites of practice (like the laboratory) and professional organizations including guilds, unions, and academic departments. Experts commonly if not normally act as masters and trainers for the next generation of experts, transmitting their expert knowledge and shaping the subjectivity (the thoughts and feelings) of novices.

Experts provide services for the wider society. At the very least, they serve as repositories of knowledge which other members of society do not have but which they can call upon; a good example is the “expert witness” in court trials. Experts can apply their knowledge to answer specific questions or render judgments. Experts of course can and often do produce new knowledge, from scientific discoveries to technological breakthroughs. Individuals who are recognized for possessing expert knowledge enjoy a certain prestige and power, although not without some resistance (see later discussion): experts are often paid well for their expertise, and ordinary people often defer to and obey the recommendations of experts, even outside their area of expertise. Albert Einstein’s celebrated genius lent gravitas to his views on war and nuclear weapons.

Finally, in an attempt to quantify expert knowledge, Marie-Line Germain also suggested a number of social or personality qualities about the expert in addition to the obvious intellectual and technical competencies. To be sure, in her sixteen-item Generalized Expertise Measure (2006), the expert has knowledge and education, symbolized by formal credentials, but s/he is also “charismatic,” “self-assured,” “self-confident,” and “outgoing.”

Power and Practice

Bernstein’s conceptualization of educational knowledge together with the sociology of expert knowledge raises issues of power and of practice. One of the most influential thinkers of the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault, stressed the techniques of power by which individuals, groups, institutions, and societies shape the knowledge and actions of others. Such techniques certainly include curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation but also include more subtle tactics such as labeling and less subtle tactics such as punishment and physical constraint. Each particular social site or institution, from the school to the mental hospital, has its own repertoire of techniques of power (schools after all have detention and formerly had paddling), and such techniques for Foucault are also forms of knowled...