Social Research and Reflexivity

Tim May, Beth Perry

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780761962847, 9780761962830
• eBook ISBN: 9781446245057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

What are the critical gaps in thinking about reflexivity and social research?

How is reflexive practice shaped by the contexts and cultures in which researchers work?

How might research practice respond to twin demands of excellence and relevance in the knowledge-based economy?

Thinking reflexively about the inter-relationships between social research and societal practices is all the more important in the so-called knowledge economy.

Developing reflexive practices in social research is not achieved through applying a method. Where and how researchers work is fundamental in shaping the capacities and capabilities to produce research as content and context lie in a dynamic interaction.

This book not only provides a history of reflexive thought, but its consequences for the practice of social research and an understanding of the contexts in which it is produced.

It provides critical insights into the implications of reflexivity through a discussion of positioning, belonging and degrees of epistemic permeability in disciplines. It is also highly innovative in its suggestions for ways forward in research practice through the introduction of active intermediaries.

Overall, the book offers an exciting new position on reflexive research that will generate much debate through its successful achievement of two difficult feats: providing essential reading for orientations on reflexivity and social research in the twenty-first century and making a landmark contribution to thinking and practice in the field.

Social Research and Reflexivity is suitable for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and social researchers in general across a number of disciplines including geography, social research, management and organizations; economics, urban studies, sociology, social policy, anthropology and politics, as well as science and technology studies.

PART 1

CONTENT

1

COMMITMENT, CRITERIA AND CHANGE

In the Introduction I noted that reactions to the call to reflexivity are variable. For some they are unduly philosophical. At best they are of marginal significance to social scientific practice and at worst, destructive. For others these critiques serve as the legislative forums in which what counts as the ‘truth’ is to be subjected to continued deconstruction in order to expose the myth of a ‘modernist dream’. While aspects of these perspectives assist in generating a greater sensitivity to the issues that inform practice, the overall result can be so unhelpful that it tends to polarize debates and achieves little for advancing our understandings of the limits, strengths and role of social research in the constitution and understanding of social relations.

The production of reflexive thoughts on social scientific activity takes place against a background of pre-reflexive assumptions. This may seem like a paradox, but it prevents a paralysis in action. Some set of assumptions is necessary in order to practice in the first instance. They might subsequently be open to revision in order to learn from the ebbs and flows of history and accompanying changes in contextual knowledge. To this extent we have the benefit of hindsight through an open-endedness that subjects ideas and practices to revision, rejection and qualification. After all, ideas and experiences from the past inform the present and future.

Reflexivity is a guard against hypodermic realism: that is, the assumption that there is an unproblematic relationship between the social scientific text and its valid and reliable representation of the ‘real’ world. It also guards against the assumption that textual openness reflects a fluid world in which choice is equally distributed within and between different populations. Writings on reflexivity exist on a sliding scale from those who seek to represent the real while recognizing such an enterprise must be open to revision through the production of new knowledge, to those for whom such an enterprise is pointless and ultimately, arbitrary.

Within the following histories we will see sets of reasons that drove writers to clarify their relationship to a range of ideas and issues that informed the contexts in which their work was produced (Hughes 1979). By moving beyond a relativism that threatens to collapse into solipsism and the sort of ad hominem denunciations that relieves hearers and readers of the need for systematic, relational thought, we can open up a productive dimension and see what those ideas may still offer us in seeking to understand current times. In the process we can admit of a socio-historical dimension to our activities without which social research would have no capacity to produce meaning and insight in its studies. We have much to learn from history in order to improve our current practices, as well as from imagining futures that have the capacity to correct some of the defects of the present.

Overall, this process can set up a continual scrutiny in order to develop ideas and practices for knowing the social world. Degrees of ‘fixity’ of assumptions are required on the part of the social scientist, without which one would collapse into infinite regress, in order to examine the social world in the first instance. The question is not whether this occurs, but how and with what implications for our understandings? It is a willingness to consider the content and context of social scientific practices and how that relates to its process and product and then refine its insights as a result, that separates lay from social scientific reflexivity. I now turn to an examination of those ‘fixities’ in different traditions and how they have provided distinct and novel answers to these issues.

Commitment and Criteria

Our brief history could start a very long time ago. In celebration of ‘classical rationality’, for example, we find a concern with reflection as means for prioritizing a stability which then allows the analyst to cast an objective gaze upon social reality. Reflexivity then emerges as a focus because the dynamics of change inform an increasing need to understand the socio-historical context of knowledge production (Sandywell 1996). Thus, at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Fichte, writing in the post-Kantian idealist tradition, argued that the ‘I’ was an activity that was aware by limiting itself through an awareness of a ‘non-I’. As he put it: ‘All possible consciousness, as something objective for a subject, presupposes an immediate consciousness in which what is subjective and what is objective are simply one and the same. Otherwise, consciousness is simply incomprehensible’ (Fichte 1994: 114). George Herbert Mead, working in the pragmatist tradition in the early part of the twentieth century, then wrote: ‘Inner consciousness is socially organized by the importation of the social organization of the outer world’ (Mead 1964: 141).

What we see in this shift are more socially and historically sensitive approaches to ideas as exemplified in philosophical and social scientific critiques of Cartesian dualism. Our concerns, however, are not just philosophical, but relate to the implications of these changes for an understanding of the place and practice of social research in society.

Commitment

Taking these insights into the realm of methodology, a neo-Kantian view holds that conceptualizations of the world order what would otherwise be chaotic, through the capacity of transcendental reason present within the minds of individual investigators. Kant divided his ideas on reality into the noumenal – those things ‘in themselves’ that exist independently of human cognition – and the phenomenal – those things that are knowable in relation to human cognition. Because we cannot know all of the reality that we inhabit through cognition, we are led to examine the forms through which reality is represented to us. For Max Weber (1949), the practice of social research must replicate the same qualities that Kant found within the human mind. They cannot simply be about the collection of social facts, but reflexive practices in terms of being ‘ideas of ideas’ (Albrow 1990: 149). His ‘ideal type’, which has been the subject of much writing, thereby serves as an analytic instrument for the ordering of empirical reality.

A difference between the social and natural sciences is said to exist because the former produce understandings of the ways in which history and culture are themselves changed by human actions. Therefore, in seeking to understand a dynamic environment, they too will exhibit a conceptual and methodological dynamism. What we then find are Weber’s methodological writings combining influences from Wilhelm Dilthey’s emphasis on the meaningful ‘inner’ experiences of people (understanding), together with an analysis of the observed regularities of human behaviour (Weber 1949). In the name of a social science, Weber sought to fuse the intentionality of conduct with an analysis of cause and effect. Meaning could then be understood and explained through reference to the social conditions of action.

An overall concern with the social sciences and the study of the meaning of action meant that it was not possible to turn to law-like generalizations for analytic purposes. Nor was it possible for reflection to turn unproblematically into a social scientific methodology that ruled out reflexivity as an unnecessary preoccupation. Weber shared with the Austrian economists a concern with the idea of choice driven by ultimate values, but without allusion to an abstract model of a rational person that persists in so much social science to this day.

Reference to ultimate values was based upon a methodological individualism that appeared to work as a corrective to the grander claims of Weber’s time. Yet what we often see in his work is a mixture of ethical pluralism and reference to the nation as an ultimate value. His works were informed, in various ways, by his political predispositions, philosophical influences, interdisciplinary engagement (at one time he referred to himself as a ‘social economist’: Holton and Turner 1989) and a refusal to read off human actions according to the dictates of universal explanations (whether based on individual rational calculation or read off from some concept of social totality).

The sum of influences upon Weber constitute a powerful set of ideas that still resonate with contemporary issues. Weber’s recognition of the reactions of social research to the changing conditions in which they find themselves provides a core dynamic for the philosophy of social research as it seeks to understand the grounds for the status of disciplines (Williams and May 1996). The relevance of social research lies in refracting the social landscapes it studies because it is a part of those and their corresponding cultural practices. It does not reflect, but mediates through the deployment of particular tools of inquiry. Perhaps Weber was insufficiently aware of this relationship in terms of its implications for research practice, but he was only too aware that disciplines are bound to evolve through a need to reflect changes in their environments (Weber 1949).

Max Weber’s understandings of processes of rationalization ultimately reveal a tension between his methodological writings and historical sociology. Ruling out instrumental rationality as sufficient grounds for the explanation of human conduct and allowing for the importance of substantive rationality as a sphere of value choice into which social research should not venture, became an undertaking that led to an emphasis upon voluntarism in the face of the iron cage of modernity. Contingency then unfolds as necessity with the hope of transcendence residing within the isolated subject. As one form of rationality was unfolding ‘externally’ to mould the subject in its image and so stifle imagination and freedom, it left the other to emerge through an apparently autonomous process of ‘internal’ choice.

The implications of this line of thought had a particular effect upon Weber. Here was an extraordinary thinker seeking to bring together Kant and Nietzsche with Marx as the significant ghost, who poured scorn upon traditional approaches to morality, knowledge and truth. At this point Goethe appears as the figure that allows Weber to seek an active resolution of these conflicts (Albrow 1990). In subscribing to an ethic of ultimate ends and it being no business of the scientist to enter into political judgements, the search for his own meaning must lie elsewhere. What then appears for Weber is the same fate as he was to leave for the rest of us: that is, an individual matter in the face of the forces of detraditionalization and scientific progress, leading us into further disenchantment. It is at this point that the persona of heroic scientist, rather than scholar whose meanings should be related to a context, gained its hold with particular consequences for Weber’s own well-being and intellectual legacy. We can see this in both ‘Politics as a vocation’ and ‘Science as a vocation’. In these essays he alludes to the facts of environments in order that his audiences may see the choices that face them. There is nothing beyond personal responsibility for choice: ‘Scientific pleading is meaningless in principle because the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other’ (Weber in Gerth and Mills 1970: 147). Then, in discussing differences in age, he writes: ‘Age is not decisive; what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and measure up to them inwardly’ (Weber in Gerth and Mills 1970: 126–7). We end up with an ethic of responsibility deriving from the inevitability of individual choice given the impersonality of social forces. Behind and moving through these forces stand politics and the threat of violence with the accompanying demand that social scientists make a clear differentiation between facts and values in their work.

In ‘Science as a vocation’ Weber wrote of the value of commitment, as well as the need for intellectual integrity. This is over eighty years before the philosopher Bernard Williams (2002) was to extol such virtues as a source of hope for the future and a means of counterattack against those who preferred irony to the demands of the production of truth. Yet if we end up with a radical situatedness in which these matters become the sole province of the individual, how can the social sciences be sustainable, cultural practices? Culture and context become secondary to a space in which the individual is left to face these inevitable burdens alone.

A resulting tension between an ethic of responsibility for the production of accurate accounts and the ethic of conviction that motivates us to do so in the first place, while subsuming our own substantive values, is individualized. Yet how is this to be reconciled with a continual need to seek new ways of understanding social life within the unfolding of history (Weber 1949)? The dialectic of individual transcendence with its utopian ideals and empathic understanding may be just too great a burden to place upon our shoulders without supportive cultures of inquiry.

With the above noted in this unfolding journey, we can take from Weber matters of continued importance. There is the issue of there being no universalistic standpoint upon which to base the foundations of a social scientific methodology. Instead there are only particular perspectives making choices problematic, if not impossible. The Kantian separation of art, morality and science was placed in question by Weber and his studies on rationality. Subsequent postmodernist writings have sought to de-differentiate these spheres or to blur their boundaries, the basis and consequence of which can be seen in the debates that took place between Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas (see Holub 1991) and the accompanying interventions of Richard Rorty (1992).

It is at this point that the tragedy which Charles Turner (1990) highlights in Weber’s writings is so apparent: between that of needing to hold onto one’s convictions in order to maintain dignity, while also recognizing the existence of so many others such that their realization is far removed from any likely reality. Yet the ‘Weberian move away from an (ironic) “totalising perspective” refuses to substitute for an ethical “totality” a series of postmodern partial standpoints. For a standpoint worth adopting is one which … never abandons its secret desire to be the only one worth adopting’ (C. Turner 1990: 115). Weber exposes the illusion that a general standpoint can act as final arbitrator and that it is not necessary to cease our investigations at the partiality of different viewpoints. Instead, as a matter of practical importance, we can learn from mediating between different cultures of inquiry (Hall 1999).

We also have the importance of the context of knowledge production, as well as reception. It is clear that Weber was sophisticated in his understanding of, for example, the consequences of the material relations between commerce and the university (Tribe 1994), but there is a need to go further if we are to productively deploy his legacy for contemporary understandings. We can do this by taking a strategic, rather than strictly methodological position, in Weber’s writings on value freedom (J. Scott 1997). By taking the latter we end up in a situation in which the fact-value dichotomy becomes so entrenched it does not take us forward in terms of understanding, while also being indefensible at the level of practice.

If reflexivity works in the service of research to deploy ontological, epistemological and methodological fixities – often to define the difference between science and common sense – we set limits on reflexive thought that do not enable us to see the relations between what is produced and how it is received in the public domain. Simply asserting that one sphere of activity is value laden while the other is not, undermines the productive potential of social science where its findings are contestable in the public domain. They are contested because they are invested with meaning and its product often assumes that there is a separation to be made between knowledge and action. Introducing history into this relationship allows us to move from the idea of an ontological or logical separation between facts and values to one of ‘natural proximity’ (Pels 2003). What is allowed for is a greater reflexive vigilance in understanding their relationship in practice which allows us to see the value of respective knowledges in social life.

Criteria for Doing

For Alfred Schutz, Weber failed to recognize the episodic nature of human conduct and hence that causal adequacy was bound by sociological and historical understanding (Schutz 1973). For Schutz the meaning is the event, or an act is a meaningful process. From this point of view verstehen (see Outhwaite 1986) is not a method for doing social research, but what social scientists should study, for it represents the ‘experiential form in which common sense thinking takes cognisance of the social cultural world’ (Schutz 1979: 29).

The mediation of first and second order constructs should be a topic of reflexive concern. A common-sense stock of knowledge orientates people to apply meaning to their own actions, those of others and the events that they encounter. The lifeworld exhibits the basis for a primary experience that enables people to orientate their actions through taking its self-evidence, or pre-reflexive constitution, for granted: ‘I find myself always within an historically given world which, as a world of nature as well as a sociocultural world, had existed before my birth and which will continue to exist after my death’ (Schutz 1970: 163–4).

The generation of social scientific knowledge (second order) should concern itself with the explication of Husserl’s ‘natural attitude’ by rendering apparent the ‘taken-for-granted’ in everyday life. It follows that social phenomena are constituted as meaningful before the researcher appears on the scene. These basic ‘meaning structures’ are then analytically rearranged by social research with the consequence that it does not accurately reflect social relations. To guard against this, Schutz argued that social scientific constructs must satisfy the ‘postulate of adequacy’ by being compatible ‘with the constructs of everyday life’ (Schutz 1979: 35).

Schutz presents a clear argument for the study of ‘lay’ reflexivity. This is not a subjective state of affairs, but an intersubjective one that represents a process of acculturation as manifested through publicly available forms of communication, including language. In order to adequately grasp the meanings used in everyday life the ‘postulate of adequacy’ should be followed: ‘Compliance with this postulate warrants the consistency of the constructs of the social scientist with the constructs of common-sense experience of the social reality’ (Schutz 1970: 279).

Although moving the analytic focus of social research towards a representation of everyday life and meaning production, Schutz leaves an important issue to one side. Recalling Heidegger’s insights, interpretative procedures produce meanings that are oriented only to the context in which they are produced. Therefore, this may be interpreted as suggesting that the ‘truth’ of these procedures cannot be established outside of these contexts. Social research is then destined to become a relative and descriptive endeavour. However, at this point a Kantian element in Schutz’s work appears in terms of the discovery of the organizing principles of our ‘being-in-the-world’ that ‘consists in spelling out the transcendental condi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Motivations for a Contribution
• Part 1 Content
• Part 2 Consequences
• Part 3 Context, written with Beth Perry
• A Way Forward: Active Intermediaries
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index