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Introduction: Researching Change and Continuity
This is a book about researching change in personal and social life. It showcases methods that privilege the temporal. We hope that you will be able to use it in a range of ways. Through case studies you will see how different methods work in practice, as well as understanding these as located in particular times and places. In combination, the chapters will give you an understanding of the epistemological and ethical dimensions of research that seeks to capture dynamic processes. This is not a book about using research to make change (Greenwood and Levin, 2006), or even researching people who are changing the world (see Andrews, 2007). Rather it is a book about the kind of research that we do and we admire, qualitative research that takes temporality seriously.
The genesis of this book is shaped by some of the temporal motifs that we explore within it â coincidence and remembering. Coincidence in that we met in 2000, finding that we had both designed studies that sought to explore common processes of personal and social change, that we shared methodological and theoretical interests in temporality, discovering the same conceptual tools to help us in this work. We soon became aware of others thinking along similar lines and converging trajectories of academic and popular thought, seeking to forge a dynamic understanding of social processes. It was at this point that we decided that we would like to write a book about the challenges of researching social change, drawing on the qualitative research traditions that had shaped us and that we employed in our own practice. This undertaking was an expression of friendship, a desire to collaborate and to make concrete our meeting and our affinities.
The project also demanded that we locate this endeavour in time and place, leading us to trace different research traditions and to re-engage in literatures and to remember what had come before and how we had arrived at this point. This remembering was both personal and academic, and we have enjoyed the opportunity to map the literatures that surround our chosen methodologies, to discover and rediscover classics and to bring these to a contemporary audience. In this introductory chapter we outline some of the theoretical and methodological motifs that run through the book. We then outline the structure of the book and the rationale for its organization.
Telling stories about social change
In 1965 the British historian Peter Laslett published a book called The World We Have Lost in which he critiqued the tendency of Marxist accounts to read the past through theory. He criticized the way this work employed linear histories in order to focus on the assumed rupture of industrialization and the creation of a mass society from one based on the family as the unit of life and the home as the site of industry. Laslettâs solution was to replace the narrative approach of ârecounting historyâ with a comparative approach in which pre-industrial and contemporary society are counterposed, enabling the analyst to see more of what is the same then and now, as well as what is different. He recognizes that such an approach may âseem unhistorical in the final sense, since it abandons the method of explanation by telling a storyâ (1965: 232), yet warns against the seductions of nostalgic narratives. In his words:
there is more to it than a wrong account of how things have changed. Our whole view of ourselves is altered if we cease to believe that we have lost some more humane, much more natural pattern of relationship than industrial society can offer. [âŚ] In tending to look backwards in this way, in diagnosing the difficulties as an outcome of something which has indeed been lost to our society, those concerned with social welfare are suffering from a false understanding of ourselves in time [âŚ] historical knowledge is knowledge to do with ourselves, now. (1965: 236â7)
In 2007, the British historian and sociologist Jeffrey Weeks played on Laslettâs title in a book called The World We Have Won in which he seeks to challenge what he sees as a widespread popular and academic ânostalgia for a more settled and ordered moral culture than we apparently have todayâ (2007: ix). The target of Weeksâ polemic is not the historical materialism of Marxist sociologists, but a body of cultural pessimists (in which he includes moral conservatives, communitarians and radical scholars) who fail, in his view, to recognize and celebrate âchanges in sexual and intimate life that are transforming everyday life and the rapidly globalizing world we inhabitâ (p. ix). For Weeks, we are living âin a world of transition, in the midst of a long, convoluted, messy, unfinished but profound revolution that has transformed the possibilities of living our sexual diversity and creating intimate livesâ (p. 3). His book provides a balance sheet of the gains and losses that contribute to the character of these changes over a 30-year period. His project is not simply to show that things have changed, but also to argue that they have changed for the better. In constructing his case he warns against a series of myths: the progressive myth which âall too readily forgets the contingencies of history, the tangled roads that have brought us to the presentâ; the declinist myth associated with moral conservatives which âcelebrates a history that never was, a world that was not so much lost as nostalgically reimagined to act as a counterpoint to the presentâ; and a âcontinuist mythâ associated with feminist and queer scholars who âstress the recalcitrance of hidden structures, but in doing so forget the power of agency and of the macroscopic impact of subtle changes in individual lives that makes up the unfinished revolution of our timeâ (2007: 7).
Weeks argues that each of these positions âocclude what seems to me to be the inevitable reality: that the world we have won has made possible ways of life that represent an advance not a decline in human relationships, and that have broken through the coils of power to enhance individual autonomy, freedom of choice and more egalitarian patterns of relationshipsâ (2007: 7). Echoing the sentiments of Peter Laslett, he cautions against theoretically-laden accounts of social change, instead arguing that it is only by gaining âa handle on the links, the tendencies, the interconnections of past and present in our present history and our historic present that we can measure our gains and losses, the successes and failures, the possibilities and intransigencies, the pleasures and dangersâ (p. 3). For Weeks, having a sense of the past enables us to hold âthe present to account, denaturalizing and relativizing it, demonstrating that it is a historical creation, suggesting its contingencyâ (p. 3).
In counterposing these two examples we can see how enduring are questions about the status of claims regarding social change and continuity, involving debate over political positions, theoretical frameworks and empirical methods. While the targets of the two polemics are different, both share a scepticism towards the theoretical and sentimental narratives that shape the way in which temporal processes are conceptualized, as well as sharing an interest in the ways in which empirical practices can contribute towards and disrupt our understandings of the interplay of past, present and future. These are sentiments that we share, although we are less motivated by a desire to demonstrate or celebrate/mourn change than by exploring practical strategies that may enable us to document, imagine and represent temporal processes and to explore the relationship between personal and social dynamics.
Methods and moments
We write this book in an interesting cultural moment, characterized by a proliferation of increasingly anxious discussions of social change and the future. Theories of postmodernity, late modernity, high modernity and reflexive modernity all point to an epochal shift equivalent to the industrial revolution that is in the process of transforming economic, material, social and personal relations. Whether such accounts construct this transformation in terms of the âendâ of modernity or the âbeginningâ of a new, reinvigorated phase, they nevertheless share an interest in narrating processes of transformation. A vocabulary of detraditionalization, disembedding, reflexivity and individualization constructs an understanding of the individual at the centre of social and historical processes, facing a landscape of increasing uncertainty. In temporal terms, we encounter an âextended presentâ (Adam, 2003, 2004) that disrupts modernist temporal orderings (Harootunian, 2007). Brian Heaphy has characterized such theoretical orientations as a âreconstructive turnâ â similar in many ways to âconstructiveâ founding narratives of modernity (Marx, Durkheim, Freud and Weber) which shared a taste for âknowing the direction of social change and the part that human agency played with respect to thisâ (2007: 26). The reconstructive turn is characterized by a shift to a more optimistic tone and to a temporal register that shrugs off the determinations of the past, concerning itself with the ways in which the future is created in the present. Notions such as the choice biography (Beck, 1992) and the reflexive project of self (Giddens, 1991) draw heavily on phenomenological traditions and the notion of the extended present. It is argued that such biographical forms are historically new, existing independently of the past, without memory, roots or traditions.
Our contemporary moment is also characterized by the recognition of our implication in discourses of change and self-consiousness as to the contingency of our knowledge claims. Heaphy suggests that this ambivalence arises from a âdeconstructive turnâ â the coincidence of poststructuralist âincredulityâ towards grand narratives (which turn upon the notion of modernity as movement with a direction; Heaphy, 2007: 65) and other deconstructive impulses (initially simple and increasingly radical) emerging from feminism, queer and postcolonial scholarship which problematized the claims of social science to neutral, objective and legitimate knowledge. Central to both intellectual trends has been Foucaultâs proposal for genealogies that make the present strange by identifying discontinuities and contingencies that give rise to particular power/knowledge relations that in turn produce regimes of truth and subjects. The deconstructive turn leads to a reflexive and ambivalent position from which âsociology must acknowledge that it is involved in narrative production, and that it is in the business of producing contingent knowledge that is open to contestation and, at best, can provide the basis for diverse interpretations of the social worldâ (Heaphy, 2007: 43).
The work of US political theorist and feminist Wendy Brown (1995) captures the ambivalence of this position perfectly. On one hand, she warns feminism of the dangers of its own narratives, in which injuries of the past are perversely defended in that they provide the basis for identities in the present. Yet she also calls on feminism ânot to reproach the history on which it is bornâ (1995: 51), suggesting that it is possible to maintain an attachment to subjectivity, identity and morality without indulging in ressentiment (a term derived from the work of Nietzsche to capture the reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of oneâs own inferiority onto an external scapegoat). For Brown, our very ability to create political identities is dependent on our ability to be free from such dependencies in order to imagine a future, which in turn demands a âsense of historical movementâ (2001: 9). Accepting the deconstructive inheritance of poststructuralism and radical difference does not mean abandoning politics, but it does mean relinquishing simplistic historical narratives. Brown argues that âas the past becomes less easily reduced to a single set of meanings and effects, as the present is forced to orient itself amid so much history and so many histories, history itself emerges as both weightier and less deterministic than ever beforeâ (2001: 5).
A turn towards time
You will see from our approach in this book that we have been influenced by the reflexive inheritance of the deconstructive turn. We are interested in histories rather than history, and self-conscious of our own implications in the sociological and empirical narratives that we forge. Yet we do not wish to abandon the project of locating ourselves and others within historical and cultural perspectives, and we seek practical and empirical strategies that capture the interplay of past, present and future while also acknowledging how social, cultural and disciplinary positioning shape the resulting narratives and the questions we ask of methods. In his 2004 book After Method, John Law makes an impassioned plea for a new kind of social science methodology that recognizes that methods produce the realities that they understand, and which are able to capture âthe ephemeral, the indefinite and the irregularâ (p. 4). In Lawâs words, âwe need to find ways of elaborating quiet methods, slow methods, or modest methods. In particular, we need to discover ways of making methods without accompanying imperialismsâ (p. 15). In this book we have not sought to invent new methods, but instead have looked at what we already have, but which we believe have some of the qualities outlined by Law. These are all methods that capture something of the fleeting character of the ephemeral and the interplay of the subjective and objective dimensions of time. They are methods that through different forms of âdurationâ â in fieldwork and/or analysis â recognize movement, exchange and dynamic process.
Twenty years before Law, in an introduction to a collection of papers on historical psychology, Kenneth Gergen (1984) identifies three âromancesâ or underlying myths about time that circumscribe the discipline. The first of these is the privileging of synchronic over diachronic analysis â a focus on static entities (such as social class) rather than states across a temporal period (such as social mobility). The second is an adherence to research methods which truncate temporal patterns rather than allowing for periods/flows of time. Here Gergen points to how familiar features of everyday life all require extended time horizons: whether this be phenomena at the micro-level (âholding a conversation, playing games, teaching a lesson, having a fight, making loveâ (p. 8), or phenomena that take place against a wider time horizon (âgetting an education, developing friendships, carrying out a romance, raising a child, getting ahead occupationallyâ), or even those macro-phenomena that qualify as historical and social changes. The third romance about time is what he terms âthe privileging of phenomenological immutability over temporal contingencyâ (p. 8) â the search for laws rather than situated meanings and the attempt to exempt the research process from a contingent location alongside the data. More than 20 years later, we feel that the turn towards time in social research, of which this book is a part, goes some way towards overturning these romances. This is an interdisciplinary impulse, and in privileging sequential patterns one is better able to articulate the temporal and the spatial. It is a methodological project that needs to be historically aware, drawing on insights and traditions from across the social sciences and the arts, requiring recognition of its place at the intersection of a number of methodological and disciplinary histories. For historians, this may appear naĂŻve, but a generous reading of the field can recognize its necessity.
Methodological motifs
The book reviews six methodological traditions: memory-work, oral/life history, qualitative longitudinal research, ethnography, intergenerational and follow-up studies. These are overlapping approaches; some of our case studies could have appeared in more than one chapter and the same âmethodsâ are employed within the different traditions. In reviewing these approaches we have become aware of a number of recurrent themes, which are, in turn, implicated in our theoretical orientation. Before outlining the structure of the book we discuss each briefly.
Historicizing of method
Research methods are the products of times and places. They have histories and the forms of knowledge that they produce are in turn productive of powerâknowledge relations (Alastalo, 2008). The âinventionâ of questionnaire-based survey methods and ethnographic fieldwork at the end of the 19th century enabled representations of the present, replacing a reliance on narrative and library-based approaches, which Peter Burke (1992) describes as an expression of a new moment in modernity and a shift in influence from the old Europe to the new world. The rise of biographical and narrative methods in the 1980s and 1990s spoke to the rise in influence of new social movements and a turn to subjectivity within western cultures and across academic disciplines. More recent talk of the âcrisis in empirical sociologyâ, including anxieties about the lack of purchase of survey and interview methods in the face of commercial information technologies or real-life documentary genres, can be seen as yet another moment in this history of social research methods (Savage and Burrows, 2007). Talk of a âdescriptive turnâ in the context of a new empiricism suggests a move away from causality and explanation as an ideal towards more connected, thick and theorized accounts (Latour, 2005; Savage and Burrows, 2007).
Each of the methods we feature in this book have had their moments in the sun, when they produced enthusiasm with researchers giving rise to new forms of representation and understanding which in turn forged a new sense of possibility. Memory-work thrived in the 1980s yet is rediscovered regularly in different places. The heyday of oral history coincided with the heyday of feminist and socialist reclaiming of their pasts. Qualitative longitudinal methods are popular as we write, and ethnography has a complex history spanning the last century, both reviled and reclaimed in different times, places and disciplines. Intergenerational approaches which emphasize psychic and material transaction become salient in moments of crisis and rapid change. With the rise of digital technologies the potential of data archiving and data sharing becomes more compelling, and as the Baby Boomers mature they become increasingly interested in revisiting their earlier studies. By attempting to tell the story of a range of different research approaches, each of which has some purchase in capturing processes of continuity and change, we hope to show the ways in which research methods are themselves historically situated techniques producing situated forms of knowledge.
Historicizing the subject, including the researcher
Much has been written about the role of the researcher in producing knowledge in research encounters and their role in producing reflexivity (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). Our explorations have helped us understand why the researcher can never be outside the process of knowledge production and data generation. By thinking in temporal and historical terms, both the researcher and the researched are located together within a hermeneutic circle. The extent to which we actually notice the presence of researchers in research accounts or data depends in part on the methods employed and the genre of reporting. For example, a deliberate commitment to reflexivity and accounting for oneself in the data produces an autobiographical representation of the researcher. The production of field notes as part of data generation forges a voice that can be represented directly or indirectly in research accounts. Revisiting data (whether in follow-up or secondary analysis studies) or revisiting oneself, as in returning to oneâs earlier work, in qualitative longitudinal research or memory-work, also provides a way of producing the persona of the researcher as part of the data record. If we take the perspective of the intellectual biographer (of self or others) we could see the researcher in their choice of subject matter, or theory, and more subtly in what is and what is not seen in the data and the kinds of recognitions and omissio...
