Elucidating Social Science Concepts

An Interpretivist Guide

Frederic Charles Schaffer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415893244
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136710643
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Concepts have always been foundational to the social science enterprise. This book is a guide to working with them. Against the positivist project of concept "reconstruction"—the formulation of a technical, purportedly neutral vocabulary for measuring, comparing, and generalizing—Schaffer adopts an interpretivist approach that he calls "elucidation." Elucidation includes both a reflexive examination of social science technical language and an investigation into the language of daily life. It is intended to produce a clear view of both types of language, the relationship between them, and the practices of life and power that they evoke and sustain. After an initial chapter explaining what elucidation is and how it differs from reconstruction, the book lays out practical elucidative strategies—grounding, locating, and exposing—that help situate concepts in particular language games, times and tongues, and structures of power. It also explores the uses to which elucidation can be put and the moral dilemmas that attend such uses. By illustrating his arguments with lively analyses of such concepts as "person," "family," and "democracy," Schaffer shows rather than tells, making the book both highly readable and an essential guide for social science research.

1 Why Do Concepts Need Elucidating?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203814932-4

In this chapter I unpack what it means to adopt an interpretivist rather than a positivist approach to concepts and explain why students of the social world should take an interpretivist approach seriously. These are not easy tasks, for they require unsnarling—surprise—knotty conceptual issues. I untangle these issues step by step. I begin in the section below by explaining what I mean by “positivism” and “interpretivism.” I then lay out what I take to be the key features of the positivist and interpretivist approaches to concepts; I call the positivist approach “reconstruction” and the interpretivist alternative that I put forward “elucidation.” To show what positivist reconstruction looks like in action and to explicate concretely the value of elucidation, I next describe and assess a set of conceptual guidelines foundational to positivist political science and its application to the concept of “family.” Central to that discussion are three critiques that I make of positivist reconstruction, critiques that correspond to the three elucidation strategies that I work out in chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the book.

Positivism and Interpretivism

Positivism and interpretivism represent two different conceptions of social science or, more precisely, two different methodologies that the scholar may bring to the study of the social world.¹ By methodology, I mean basic presuppositions about the aims of inquiry, ways of knowing (epistemology), and the nature of the reality being studied (ontology). The reader should not confuse methodology with methods, which are techniques for gathering and analyzing information—interviewing, statistical analysis, and the like. Which methods are chosen and how they are used depend on more fundamental methodological commitments (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012, 4–5).

A widely shared methodological commitment of positivism, as I understand it, is a belief that social scientists can directly and neutrally observe a social world that is made up of entities (like families and classes and revolutions) that enjoy, or are treated as if they enjoy, a real existence independent of how people think of them. The aim of much positivist inquiry is, correspondingly, to formulate propositions about these entities based upon the identification and measurement of regularities within and between them. An interpretivist approach to social science, in contrast, usually starts from the dual premises that there are no “real” social entities, only culturally mediated social facts, and that social science is always perspectival and entwined with the pursuit of moral or material goals. The aim of much interpretivist inquiry, consequently, is to shed light on how shared meanings and their relation to power inform or structure the social world and the study of the social world (Hawkesworth 2014, 29–41; Marcus and Fischer 1999, 17–44).²

Whether one brings a positivist or interpretivist orientation to the study of the social world matters for how one thinks about and works with concepts. But to see exactly how requires some effort, for two reasons. On the one hand, scholars working within the positivist tradition have written extensively on conceptual issues, but they rarely juxtapose their approach to that of interpretivists. On the other hand (and relatedly), few scholars within the interpretivist tradition have given conceptual issues the explicit attention they deserve, and those who have written about concepts have tended to do so in a piecemeal way. In the two sections that follow, I knit together diverse strands of work and thought in an effort to articulate what I take to be the key differences in how positivists and interpretivists typically approach concepts.

Experience-Distant and Experience-Near Concepts

To understand the divergent conceptual consequences of adopting a positivist or interpretivist orientation, it is first necessary to recognize what they share. In this context, I find the distinction introduced by Clifford Geertz (1983, 57) between “experience-distant” and “experience-near” concepts to be helpful. Experience-distant concepts are “one[s] that specialists of one sort or another … employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical aims.” Experience-near concepts, in contrast, are “one[s] that someone … might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on, and which he would readily understand when similarly applied by others.” Experience-near concepts are commonplace words used in everyday contexts, whereas experience-distant concepts are words employed in extra-ordinary ways by certain kinds of specialists. “Love,” as Geertz explains, is an experience-near concept whereas “object cathexis” is experience-distant.

The distinction between experience-near and experience-distant is not, however, binary. For one, as Geertz points out, “the matter is one of degree, not polar opposition—‘fear’ is experience-nearer than ‘phobia,’ and ‘phobia’ experience-nearer than ‘ego dyssyntonic’ ” (ibid.). In addition, even the most distant concepts are to some degree parasitic on the near. “Liquidity preference” is an experience-distant concept of economists, but it presupposes and is therefore tethered to experience-near concepts such as “money,” “profit,” “cost,” and “risk” (Winch 1977, 148–49).³ Finally, many concepts are both experience-near and experience-distant. That is, the same word can have everyday meanings that differ to some extent from technical meanings attached to them by specialists. As we shall see later in this chapter, experience-near and experience-distant meanings of “family” can diverge significantly. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, it suffices to see that (complications notwithstanding) there is a difference between language used in everyday ways and the experientially remote language employed by certain kinds of specialists, including social science specialists.

As far as I can tell, all social scientists—both positivists and interpretivists alike—make use of experience-distant concepts to varying degrees (indeed, “experience-near” and “experience-distant” are themselves experience-distant concepts). Interpretivist scholars, even when attending carefully to what Bronislaw Malinowski (1922, 25) called “the native’s point of view,” employ some kind of conceptual scheme external to that point of view, for experience-distant concepts are necessary to frame many questions that they want to ask. When Lee Ann Fujii asks, in her interpretive study, what motivated so many neighbors to kill neighbors in the ghastly events of mid-1990s Rwanda, she formulates her question with experience-distant concepts such as “state-sponsored ethnicity” and “genocidal violence” (2009, 11, 14). When Timothy Pachirat asks in his interpretive study how slaughterhouse workers understand their own participation in industrialized killing, he uses experience-distant concepts such as “surveillance” and “the politics of sight” to articulate why such a study is important to undertake (2011, 1–19). When Samer Shehata asks in his interpretive study what it means to be a textile factory worker in Egypt, he structures much of his analysis around experience-distant concepts such as “class formation” and “the labor process” (2009, 3, 57).

There are good and varied reasons for interpretivist scholars like Fujii, Pachirat, and Shehata to use experience-distant concepts. Perhaps most importantly, if they were to eschew experience-distant concepts altogether, they would risk, to paraphrase Geertz, imprisoning themselves in the mental horizons of the people they wish to understand, “an ethnography of witchcraft as written by a witch” (1983, 57). This is not to deny the fundamental importance of grasping the witch’s point of view, but only to recognize that the outside observer might find it necessary to depart from (though not disregard) the witch’s self-understanding (Taylor 1985).⁴ Nor is it to deny the value of “native anthropology” (Jones 1970) or “auto-ethnography” (Greenhalgh 2001, 5), but merely to acknowledge that even a “native” or “self” ethnographer needs to be, as the anthropologist Kirin Narayan (1993, 672) put it, “bicultural in terms of belonging simultaneously to the world of engaged scholarship and the world of everyday life.” Susan Greenhalgh (2001, 52) has something like this in mind when she emphasizes how her own auto-ethnography of seeking treatment for her chronic pain draws “a clear demarcation between the person observed, whose thoughts, feelings, and experiences are described, and the author-analyst, in whose voice the study is written.”

To engage the concerns of a specialized scholarly community requires being able to speak the language of that community. Greenhalgh’s auto-ethnography is framed to inform academic interest in the experience-distant, Foucauldian concept of the “medical gaze.” Surveillance, class formation, and genocidal violence are, similarly, all points of concern for various communities of social scientists, and Pachirat, Shehata, and Fujii use such experience-distant concepts to intervene in and shift debates about those points of concern.

Positivist Reconstruction versus Interpretivist Elucidation

What distinguishes positivist and interpretivist social science is not the use or non-use of experience-distant concepts. What differentiates the two methodologies, I submit, is the role that experience-distant and experience-near concepts play in conducting research.

Conceptual Reconstruction in Positivist Methodology

Within the positivist tradition, phenomena like power, kinship, ideology, social class, and the welfare state are usually treated as if they have a real and independent ontological existence that does not depend on the language people use to enact them. Positivists tend to think of experience-distant concepts as tools to describe that brute reality: the relationship of concepts to the empirical world is one of “ideas” to “facts” (Collier and Adcock 2001, 529).The main conceptual task, as two positivist political scientists put it, is thus “to represent phenomena in the empirical world as they actually exist” (Goertz and Mahoney 2012, 207; emphasis added). Correspondingly, many positivists seek to fashion concept-tools to represent this actually existing reality as accurately as possible. This is different from simply writing with clarity. Accurate representation involves identifying and isolating the essential attributes of the phenomenon of interest. One widely shared conceptual aim of positivist-oriented social scientists, consequently, is to define the objects of their investigation and theorizing as accurately and precisely as possible, without ambiguity or vagueness, in a way amenable to theoretical reflection as well as empirical observation, measurement, and comparison.

What complicates this endeavor is that most experience-distant concepts are built up from the social scientist’s own everyday language. True neologism—coining completely new terms—is rare in my own discipline, political science, as it is in most other social sciences (Schaffer 2005). Words like “class,” “power,” and “interests” are both commonplace terms people use in their day-to-day lives and specialized tools employed by social scientists. Even jargony social science concepts like “political culture,” “identity formation,” and “liquidity preference” are fashioned out of stock words such as “culture,” “identity,” and “preference.” But in everyday usage, words like “class,” “power,” and “preference” have a tangle of meanings that make them in the eyes of many positivist social scientists poor tools for accurate description. By this view, experience-near concepts are ambiguous and vague, making them ill-fit for use in theory building or observation sorting.

It follows that many positivist social scientists find it necessary to reconstruct everyday words to meet their research needs. They tinker with the meanings of words to make them precise, useful tools of reflection, measurement, and comparison. Robert Dahl (1961, 344), for instance, reconfigures “power” to refer only to situations in which actor A “can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” This relatively unambiguous definition makes power easier to identify and measure insofar as it removes from consideration other situations in which power might be found, such as when a person has the power to do something on his or her own.

Some scholars refer to this conceptual manipulation—what I am calling reconstruction—as concept “formation.” I use the term “reconstruction” rather than “formation” because positivists do not usually form (in the sense of fabricating) concepts anew. Nor are they simply putting into formation (in the sense of organizing) all the meanings of a term like troops marching in a drill. They are, for the most part, refashioning already existing terms in an effort to remove deficiencies such as ambiguity and vagueness. The project is, in effect, reconstructive insofar as it entails rebuilding something already existing with an aim of improvement. In the words of Giovanni Sartori, a pioneer within political science in thinking about concept reconstruction, “whatever else ‘science’ may be, its necessary, preliminary condition resides in the formulation of a special and specialized language … whose distinctive characteristi[c] is precisely to correct the defects of ordinary language” (1984, 57–58; emphasis added).

For positivist social scientists who find truth in this kind of statement, the generation of a specialized, technical vocabulary that departs from and corrects everyday language is a sine qua non of scientific progress. Positivist methodology thus often leads scholars to ask how good particular concepts are in fulfilling their function as tools of precise description and to reconstruct them as necessary in an effort to make them better. This endeavor has spawned many positivist studies devoted to reconstruction.⁵

Within positivist methodology, researchers often draw upon and rework their own experience-near language in crafting experience-distant concepts, as we have seen. The experience-near concepts of the people being studied are another kettle of fish. Researchers typically treat these concepts as pieces of data about individually held opinions, attitudes, beliefs, or understandings that they can aggregate and analyze within a rubric of categories provided by their own experience-distant conceptual apparatuses. Survey researchers who examine, for instance, how people un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Editor Page
• Frontmatter Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Why Do Concepts Need Elucidating?
• 2 Grounding: Elucidating How People Understand a Concept
• 3 Locating: Elucidating Historical and Linguistic Specificity
• 4 Exposing: Elucidating Power
• 5 The Ethics of Elucidating
• References
• Index