Methods for Social Theory

Analytical tools for theorizing and writing

Jan Ch. Karlsson, Ann Bergman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317096993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book constitutes a practical guide to the important skills of both theorizing and writing in social scientific scholarship, focusing on the importance of identifying relations between concepts that are useful for explaining social entities and of producing a text that convincingly advances the theory that has been constructed. Taking as its point of departure the distinction between the research process and the reporting process – between clarifying one's ideas to oneself and writing to express these ideas clearly to others – this volume concentrates on writing when theorizing as a way of thinking, emphasizing the series of relations that exist between ontology, epistemology and rhetoric upon which successful theoretical writing depends.

Richly illustrated with practical examples, the book is divided into two parts, the first of which presents techniques for theorizing based upon visualized and logical connections of ideas, concepts and empirical patterns in both free and systematic ways, and the second part providing techniques for structuring and presenting arguments in essays, papers, articles or books.As such, Methods for Social Theory offers a toolbox for the development and presentation of social thought, which will prove essential for students and teachers across the social sciences.

1
THEORIZING AND WRITING SOCIAL THEORY

This book provides you with the tools to help you, first, creatively play about with concepts to satisfy your own theoretical curiosity, then to creatively play around with arguments to arouse and satisfy other people’s theoretical curiosity. It is a toolbox for theorizing and writing social science, whether it is in connection with your very first essay to your teacher or fellow students, your master or PhD thesis or an article to a prestigious journal in your later professional career as a social scientist. Naturally, the tools are used somewhat differently and with varying skill at the different levels, but they all come from the same toolbox. With the phrase ‘social theory’ we simply mean theories produced within the social sciences.

It is a tricky thing for us all to present the social theories we work with to our readers, be they undergraduate teachers or fellow students, postgraduate supervisors or examiners, or the social science community at large. It is equally tricky for us all to develop those theories in the first place. Both tasks require hard work and a lot of playing about with concepts and arguments. Still, you are dealing with two quite different processes and in this book we discuss how to handle both of them. In the research process, we concentrate on some tools – or tricks of the trade (Becker 1998) – that help you theorize through considering and playing about with concepts and terms. One of these tools is drawing up displays to explore possible relations between concepts, another is constructing property spaces (such as fourfold tables) in order to more systematically explore conceptual connections. This means that this is not a book about social science theories, their history and the people who produced them; instead, it is a book in developing such theories (cf. Turner 1989: 8–18), an endeavour that we call theorizing. Further, in the process through which you create reports – essays, papers, articles, books – about the results of the research process, we suggest a model for building up a systematic argumentation to present them to your audience. The model helps you to play about with arguments in relation to other arguments in order to construct a strong case for the theory you produced in the research process.

In this chapter, we introduce the themes of the book. First, we discuss what a social theory is, as theories and theorizing stand at the centre of the whole book. This includes what social theories are about, what characterizes their objects, concepts and terms. Then we provide you with some examples of theorizing that we think are inspiring and worth following, and we also offer some principles for theorizing. Following that, we go into differences in writing in the research process and the reporting process, respectively. This distinction motivates the book being divided into two parts: Part I on theorizing in the research process, Part II on constructing the argumentation in the reporting process in papers, articles and books, presenting what you found out in your research. Finally, we make an overview of the contents of the rest of the book.

Social theory

What social scientists work with, and work on, are social theories. Theories do not come from nothing, but are related to their forerunners. Many have pointed out that the central concept of ‘theory’ is fuzzy, unclear and impossible to define. Here are a few examples:

The term theory is one of the most misused and misleading terms in the vocabulary of the social scientist.

(Mitchell 1968: 211)

Like so many words that are bandied about, the word theory threatens to become meaningless. Because its referents are so diverse – including everything from minor working hypotheses, through comprehensive but vague and unordered speculations, to axiomatic systems of thought – use of the word often obscures rather than creates understanding.

(Merton 1967: 39)

Few concepts have fared worse in the social sciences than that of theory.

(Bunge 1996: 113)

We do not have the ambition to clean up this mess, but we take our point of departure in the fundamental idea that everything in social science studies is made up of relations and relations between relations (Danermark et al. 2002: Ch. 5). The objects of social science are what they are by virtue of the relations they enter into with other objects. At the same time, researchers can only think, talk and write about them through language, by putting words on these objects and relations. We simply regard a theory as interrelated statements that claim that a certain entity (thing, object, process) exists in the world and often what this entity can do, that is, which mechanisms it possesses. Social theories are, then, arguments or series of interrelated arguments about something existing in the social world and commonly what social mechanisms are parts of the entity. The latter characteristic is especially important as mechanisms are what social scientists refer to in explanations. Theories are explanatory and what social science ultimately aims at is explaining the social world.

The statements or arguments of theories are specified in the form of concepts – concepts being units of meaning. All social science arguments include concepts, specifying what the argument is about. Using concepts in thought operations is the kernel of the work of social scientists from their first days as students to their heydays as professional researchers. But in opposition to everyday knowledge, social scientists not only think with concepts, but also about those concepts. Social theories are thereby examined conceptualizations (cf. Sayer 1992: Ch. 2). The work of doing such conceptualizations is also to build theory. When we talk about theorizing, we talk about examining and eventually changing social theories. To make it easier to think and communicate about entities in the social world, however, researchers put words on the concepts – called terms. A term is, then, a linguistic label on a concept.

In sum, there is a relation between a social theory, an entity in the world, a concept or a number of connected concepts as thought objects referring to that entity, and terms labelling the concepts:

Social theories build upon concepts and relations between concepts. A concept refers to a particular body of thought, to a certain meaning. The concept must be distinguished from the term we use to express this meaning, and from the object or the properties in reality, to which the concept is supposed to refer.

(Danermark et al. 2002: 121)

There is a parallel between social entities and social theories: social entities are composed of relations and relations between relations; social theories are constructed by relations between examined concepts. The correspondence is situated in the basic role of relations, but there are a few things that are important to note about these relations. To begin with, there are a number of different types of entities in the world (Fleetwood 2004, 2005) and social theories are concerned with only some of them. There are, in other words, limits to what social theories can be about. One type of entity is, of course, social objects such as organizations, genders and classes. The reason they are called social is that they are dependent on human activity for their existence – even though they, in their turn, influence human activities. Second, social entities must be distinguished from discursive entities such as language, ideas, symbols, beliefs – and concepts and theories. Third, we can talk about artefactual entities, which are made by human beings, for example houses, cars and meatballs. And fourth, material entities, which would exist even if there were no human beings on planet Earth, such as weather, mountains and the moon. Social theories can be about social and discursive entities, but not artefactual and material ones in themselves. Social theories can be used as explanations of why some organizations but not others require their employees to use their emotions in their relations with customers, why women perform the majority of domestic labour or the reasons for the income gap between the classes in the Western world having increased during recent decades. Social theories can also suggest explanations of why certain ideas flourish in connection with sports as compared to music or why Christianity has a different geography from Islam. Conversely, social theories cannot explain houses, cars and meatballs, which requires physics and chemistry, for example. Social theories can, however, explain social and discursive aspects of houses, cars and meatballs, such as the distribution of which social groups live in private houses and which live in flats or the coming and going of architectural fashions. And they can explain the social variation of ingredients in meatballs in different regions or which seasoning is considered tasty among which classes (or why there are no such variances). Social theories cannot explain the existence of weather, mountains or the moon, but why it seems politically impossible to stop negative human influence on the climate, why mountains are considered romantic places (or not) and why some states have spent so much money on going to the moon – or for that matter, why the moon has sometimes been believed to consist of cheese (if it ever has). In sum, social theories deal with social and discursive entities, but also with social and discursive aspects of artificial and material entities. This also means that many social theories span more than one type of entity.

Further, the relation in conceptualizing between the concepts of a social theory and the entity should not arbitrarily try to catch empirical patterns, but instead, what makes the entity what it is and not something else (Ackroyd and Karlsson 2014). Concepts are abstract – they specify properties that are essential for the entity, disregarding all other elements. This is what makes conceptualization such a crucial process in the work of social scientists. That is why we can spend two-hour seminars on discussing what the concept of class or work or gender or culture should mean. Conceptualization is to build theory and to form new concepts, which makes it possible to see new things. This also means that all knowledge social scientists produce by conceptualizing and forming theories can be wrong – it is fallible. A lot of the endeavours of social scientists go into improving existing theories or showing that they are false. But this is good rather than bad news, as it means that our knowledge can progress, our theories can be developed. Scientific knowledge is not only fallible – it is also corrigible.

While the relation between concepts and entities is such that concepts refer to specific properties or entities in thought, the relation between terms and concepts is often more arbitrary. A simple example is words in different languages: ‘alienation’ in English, ‘Entfremdung’ in German and ‘främlingskap’ in Swedish are different terms for the same concept. But a common criticism of social science, perhaps especially sociology, is that there is a strong inflation in terms: all researchers try to put forward their own terminology for concepts for which there already exist several sets of terms. The only thing we have to say about this is that, although they can be arbitrary, terms are important in communicating theoretical knowledge. Some terms simply transmit the thought content of a certain concept better than others do.

Finally, theories are not only used in explaining empirical patterns by referring to the mechanisms of entities that have produced them, they also guide empirical observations – observations which, in their turn, can corroborate a theory or concept or put them in doubt (Danermark et al. 2002: 124–48).

Theorizing

If social theory is constructed by relations between statements in the form of examined concepts, theorizing is experimenting and playing around with such relations in order to build theory. Conceptualizing and theorizing or developing theory is everything from the first guesses about the things that aroused your curiosity to the full-fledged and well-worked-out theory. We agree with this definition: ‘the expression “to theorize” refers to what one does to produce a theory and to the thought process before one is ready to consider it final. While theorizing is primarily a process, theory is the end product’ (Swedberg 2014a: 1). We would add that such end products are never really final. Theories can always be revised, even refuted by their originators or by someone else. Social science knowledge is, as we say, always fallible and thereby also corrigible. If social entities are made up of relations and social theories are relations between concepts, theorizing means playing around with different relations between concepts in search for those that you think are the most fruitful for explaining what you are curious about. Sometimes, theorizing is regarded in a rather romantic light as requiring inspiration and specific forms of creativity, but we want to put the main emphasis on this process as a craft – and as in all crafts it requires learning to handle tools. Therefore, one should ‘regard theorizing as an integrated part of research methodology’ (Danermark et al. 2002: 115). And as theories are there to explain, those who discuss theorizing agree that this activity is an explanatory endeavour (Danermark et al. 2002; Layder 1998; Swedberg 2014b).

There are several ways in which theory has been developed in the history of the social sciences – from the invention of new and revolutionizing theories to some modification of a single concept of an existing theory. In the following, we relate some examples of theorizing. There are no sharp boundaries between them, they often overlap and they can be combined. This little catalogue is far from exhaustive – we just want to give you an idea of what theorizing might mean in social science and perhaps inspire you to try it. One important lesson is, however, that theorizing, although the word might sound ambitious and grandiose, usually is a piecemeal activity. It advances in small steps such as changing a term of a concept or relating two formerly unconnected concepts. Therefore, this journey starts with the earliest reflexions on theoretical matters at the undergraduate level – and it never stops as long as you do academic work. Further, it is not only an activity that goes on during the whole research process (Layder 1998: 25), but is often strengthened by ideas you get when writing about the research for someone else.

The first step of theoretical development is often an empirical observation. The theory of aesthetic labour originated, for example, from a researcher noticing ‘a number of job adverts in the UK press for the hospitality and retail sectors asking for potential employees who were “stylish”, “outgoing”, “attractive” or “trendy”, and “well-spoken and of smart appearance”’ (Warhurst and Nickson 2001: 17). The research group eventually formulated the theory of ‘aesthetic labour’, meaning corporeal dispositions in people that employers can commodify and exploit to their advantage when competing with other firms, and that these dispositions can be further trained and developed once the employee has been hired. The catch phrase is ‘looking good and sounding right’, while the theory is given precision in its conceptual structure by contrasting it with the theory of emotional labour and finding inspiration in the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Witz et al. 2003). The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theorizing and writing social theory
• Part I Tools for theorizing in social science
• Part II Tools for writing social science
• Appendix: from Bergman, Ann, Jan Ch. Karlsson and Jonas Axelsson (2010) ‘Truth Claims and Explanatory Claims – an Ontological Typology of Futures Studies’, Futures, 42(8): 857–65
• Index