No. 075 SOCIOLOGY AND HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: by TR Young
RED FEATHER INSTITUTE
This Article first appeared in The American Sociologist, 1981, 16-2, May, in commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of American Sociology. Reprinted with Permission. |
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SOCIOLOGY AND HUMAN KNOWLEDGE:
SCIENTIFIC vs. FOLK METHODS OF ORGANIZING SOCIAL LIFE
The kindest thing one might say about American
Sociology after seventy-five years of activity is that it has aided greatly the capacity
of the human race to reflect upon its own behavior in undistorted ways... that it has
provided people with the intellectual tools with which to assess and to assert that
quality of life most cogent to the human process. The most unkind thing one might say is
that American sociology has produced just those theories and just those methods by which
to legitimate and perpetuate oppressive forms of social life.
The truth is more complex. One might rightly say that both views have merit. The fact is
that American sociology has a history of considerable genius in the development of
quantitative techniques and infuriating idiocy in such areas as criminology, urbanology
and rural sociology. It is the very genius of American sociology which I would like to
critique in this paper. Briefly, I would like to offer the thesis that scientific methods
subvert folk methods of knowledge constitution. This subversion is, I think, innocent
enough in an enthusiasm to perfect its intellectual and research tools. The point of this
paper is to end that innocence by making that subversion more visible than it has been to
date in a rather parochial profession. With the end of innocence comes something more
human--personal and collective responsibility as well as the capacity to act upon that
responsibility. The task requires that American sociology be understood as a knowledge
industry and that this industry be contemplated from a sociology of knowledge perspective.
The sociology of knowledge takes as its quest the relationship between human ways of
understanding and different ways of organizing society (Mannheim, 1936:264). In this
paper, I'd like to try to sort out the social basis of two ways of knowing: on the one
hand there are folk methods for constituting positive knowledge and on the other hand
there are scientific methods of acquiring accurate, positive knowledge. Both kinds of
methods try to solve the problem of subjectivity: privately, individually held states of
knowing and understanding. In this endeavor, the very existence of social reality is at
stake. If persons have, internally, states of understanding which are different from each
other in any persistent and significant way, their behavior will be at cross purpose or to
no human purpose and gradually behavior will drift irreconcilably apart. There are, of
course, subroutines by which to re-synchronize behavior but these, too, are folk methods
challenged by scientific methods. And, too, society itself has no positive knowledge of
its own behavior--if private states of knowledge even if shared--vary in any permanent way
from actual results, impacts, directions, and actual activities, that society is unable to
control its own behavior and unable to adjust its own "mis"behavior. The process
by which a society is able to reproduce its social life on down through the generations is
impaired.
While, indeed, a good deal of social change arises from the misunderstanding by a society
of its own behavior--a false consciousness about what results the behavior of its members
does, in fact, produce--and while that is sometimes highly desirable, still the danger to
a society unable to control itself is death. One would not want to preclude the
desirability of sure and certain death for some social formations nor would one want to
defend too strongly the claim that the good earth itself benefits from the presence of
human society--these do inflict such great harm on all life systems--all the same there
are few who would argue there is no niche in the biosphere for a good and decent society
making limited, reversible inroads on the ecosystem. I reckon that the good earth could
suffer some ten to forty billion humans on it if it were possible to know what harm
different forms of social organization do to the earth. And there is no good reason to
inflict indecent forms of social organization upon the rest of the living species on the
earth even if, some time sooner or later, the earth itself will disappear from the vast
cosmos of moving matter.
All this is to say that there is some human purpose to which authentic human knowledge is
put and which justifies folk method as well as scientific method of knowledge
constitution. Notice I did not say knowledge acquisition or knowledge accumulation. The
emphasis here is on the knowledge constitutive process.
Constituting Knowledge: Folk and Scientific Method. Before I focus fully on
the main point, I would like to present the notion of folk methodology and contrast that
notion with scientific methodology in order to make clear the reasoning of the analysis to
follow. It is necessary to grasp the main difference between the two approaches in order
to understand the strategic political advantage which impels the transition from folk to
scientific social research.
I begin with the marxist point that knowledge does not exist objectively but rather is an
interactive (dialectical) process by which people understand social reality in the process
of creating and interpreting various forms of social relationship--indeed for Marx, this
knowledge constitutive behavior was the uniquely human form of labor. The revolutionary
animus in Marxian thought is directed against all those forms of social organization which
impair the knowledge constitutive process. In that such activity involves insight,
involvement, judgment, wisdom and a share in the means of producing knowledge, the concept
of praxis was a useful way to embrace the heart of the idea. In that certain social forms
impaired praxis, revolution was necessary as a way to transform those forms. Law, religion
and morality were knowledge constitutive processes which, in the hands of a class, feudal
(and certainly, bureaucratic) elite, systematically impaired the role of people in
instituting--thus knowing intimately and collectively--work relations, family relations,
political and religious relations as well as market relations. The literature of critical
sociology is filled with instances in which workers, voters, consumers, soldiers, and the
residents of occupied countries resist the knowledge constitutive processes when that
process is controlled by elite. Indeed, a theory of underground literature requires one
examine the loss of control over the routine means of constituting knowledge (Young,
1980).
When we reflect upon how it is that we are in a social relationship-that of
Mother-daughter, owner-worker, doctor-patient, docent-student, master-slave,
prostitute-John, it is clear that in the first instance meaning arises through a complex
symbolic interactive process the rules of which we learn as we grow in mastery of the
culture in which these meanings are found. The interactive process is, in turn, shaped by
social control devices which are effective enough to produce a well-defined structure
which one might recognize as a marriage, a funeral, a family system, or perhaps as the
feudal system as well as the various structures of racism, sexism, age, grade, and
religion. These control devices shape who we may talk to, the topics about which we may
speak, the tone and kind of language we may use, as well as the degree to which we must be
taken seriously. The symbolic systems used include voice, clothing, body and various
behavioral patterns. All four systems work together to constitute an incredibly rich
information field--if, indeed social conditions permit their use. Obstacles to information
generation and flow at once destroy knowledge and the social relationship to which the
knowledge is oriented.
If we were to examine more closely one of these relations in order to clarify the general
form of folk method for knowledge constitution we would find both symbolic interactive and
social control activity giving rise to shared understanding about what really exists. We
may use the husband-wife relationship as an instance of folk methodology with which to
make visible the general method. If two persons live together, share use of possessions,
engage in the various forms of sexual intimacy, help with household tasks and rear
children such behavior is not conceived as a marriage nor do the persons concerned view
themselves as married without resort to the folk method by which sure and certain
knowledge is constituted. Two persons, say my daughter and your son, live together under
all these circumstances neither you nor I know them to be married until a fairly simple
social rite involving law, religion and morality notions have been embodied. Two other
persons, say your female cousin and my female student, living in such circumstances cannot
be said to be a marriage in that we withhold the knowledge constitutive methods from them
should they have the audacity to embark on such a venture. Steeped in the culture, these
later two persons know full well that the folk methods for constituting a marriage are not
available to them.
Were these two persons, cousin and student, to proceed to live together in the conditions
above, social controls would be deployed as part of the method by which human behavior is
given public (social) meaning. That most of these controls are themselves constituted as
such is seldom given much thought. Constructed as they are of such flimsy material as
belief and trust, still they produce shame and establish guilt. Flaunting social
conventions produce curses and invite condemnatory rituals. A theory of corruption must
begin with the failure of persons to observe those knowledge constitutive methods found in
legal, religious or other ritual.
Perhaps the most difficult and subtle knowledge constitutive processes are found in the
activity by which sons and daughters are defined as such. Ordinarily we take for granted
these knowledge constitutive processes and do not reflect upon them except in rare and
unusual circumstances. When a woman produces a female child, most of the time, we take for
granted that the infant is a daughter. But sometimes other processes are invoked and that
infant is constituted as another woman's daughter. If that woman is conceived as a wife,
ordinarily the infant is known and understood to be the daughter of the husband and indeed
the husband is known as the father. Even where the adult male is the biological father and
where a "marriage" to the biological mother has been constituted, still some
societies have disengagement routines by which the putative parents can deny the infant as
"their daughter." All of this is strange and unusual but reveal the fact that
these social relationships are not given in the world of nature but are--must
be--constituted in and as part of a social world. These relations are constituted as known
and knowable by means of ethnomethods--folk methods.
Scientific methods for constituting knowledge are objective in that these methods
take the subjective activity of human beings for granted just as folk methods take the
objective structures produced by their highly sophisticated subjective activity for
granted. Scientific methods (except for hermeneutical sciences) count marriage, citizens,
crimes, divorces, children, votes, friendships, workers, mental patients and such without
reflecting upon the highly variable and greatly assorted ways in which these social facts
are constituted as knowable. Scientific methods in "modern" sociology take
mathematical models of human behavior as the first stage in perfecting the knowledge
process. Actually, mathematical models are simple-minded representations of the very, very
complicated process of constituting social reality. The primitive character of
mathematical models can be seen by noting the rug-weaving patterns of the Navajo of North
America or the basketweaving of the Baganda in East Africa. The mathematics of these two
"primitive" art forms is more complex than the most sophisticated algebraic
model of marriage, mobility, or crime found in "advanced" sociology today. That
a sixteen year old Navajo woman can create in one medium a mathematical system more
complex than a professional sociologist can in the medium of mathematics is not a matter
of any great shame for the sociologist. What is of interest to note is that sociologists
attempt to enforce a fairly primitive system of constituting knowledge over and set above
very, very complex folk methods of knowledge constitution. One may well wonder why. We'll
return to that question in the next section.
In order to constitute a given statement as a scientific fact, sociology relies upon the
authority of mathematical measures of concentration, dispersion as well as probability
statements about variations from chance distributions. In this approach to knowledge
constitution, interaction of the objects of study (not subjects) is unnecessary. And, even
more interestingly, social control is not necessary. A fact is constituted outside the
structure of social relations. Interaction and social control are not involved. It is a
matter of some curiosity that sociology strips methodology of its social matrix--at least
it appears so. If one wants to know how much crime is produced or divorce, or productive
work teams or how party allegiance is increased, one need not be a criminal, a worker, a
plaintiff, or a Republican--one has only to count, measure, and calculate.
The degree to which scientific methods replace folk methods in the constitution of human
knowledge has not been the topic research nor do we know the harm done to the social
process by such displacement. We do have some indirect measures which may have no
relationship to such substitution. Measures of alienation in the workplace may be related
to the adoption of scientific methods of work control as may be the case for the decline
or demise of family relations as scientific method of childrearing and formal relations in
the school impair the social process. We really don't know. A third important kind of
knowledge we should generate has to do with the particular mix of folk and scientific
methods which is optimal. In the final sections of this paper, I will argue that
scientific methods should be subordinated to folk methods. I shall also argue that the
realm of the cultural (practical reason) should always preempt the realm of the technical
(technical reason). Again, there is no certainty to this position--merely the insight from
extensive reflection and reading.
Why is such knowledge once, twice and thrice removed from its source? What advantage
accrues to the user to such remoteness from the everyday activity of interacting persons?
Why has scientific method replaced, in part, social/folk methods for determination of the
facticity of given relationships? The answers to these questions require that we call into
question the taken-for-granted aspects of scientific scholarship. Only by doing so may one
contribute to the authentic self-knowledge of sociology and thus, returning to Marx and
Mannheim, locate knowledge processes in the social matrix which produces them. The task is
to restore its sociology to sociology. We can make a small contribution to the vast
literature on the social character of scientific social research by considering the
possibility that contemporary (not advanced) sociological methods stand in subtle but
hostile opposition and conflict to folk methods.
Scientific Method as Conflict. At some point in the course of social
evolution, the various folk methods for establishing knowledge were supplemented and, to
some small extent, replaced by scientific methods. The history of this particular
transition is precisely the history of sociology itself as a professional discipline--of
the history of its allied disciplines; law, economics, geography, political science,
psychology and other knowledge institutions. Newspapers, news programs, literary
criticism, news magazines and social historians as well as anthropologists all
industriously pursue the methods by which facts are constituted (not accumulated) by
selection, interpretation, and legitimation. It is a growth industry and has been since,
especially, the time of Cromwell. What I would like to propose here is that scientific
methods in sociology as well as other disciplines become of interest and are allocated
resources in those who control resources, when the ordinary folk methods of knowledge
constitution are an obstacle to the purpose of those who control the resources. Scientific
methods replace folk methods when conflict relations obstruct naive, trusting, open
interaction. Scientific methods do serve the purposes of their sponsors and all too often
those purposes are hostile to the purpose to which ordinary folk put their
knowledge-constitutive capacities.
The first systematic "objective" study of a society which I am able to locate is
one commissioned by Cromwell after the slaughter of Irish defenders of Dragheda and
Wexford--"a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches" to put it
in Cromwell's words. In order to repair the harm done to the knowledge process by ethnic,
linguistic, religious and economic cleavages between the Irish and the English which
interfered with the subjective folk methods of constituting friend, law, justice, loyalty,
commercial exchange and political allegiance, Cromwell turned to objective methods and
commissioned a study of Ireland. One can hypothesize that objective knowledge processes
replace subjective processes to the extent conflict relations grow between social
entities. Conflict gives rise to professional sociology when violence fails to generate
behavior of the sort desired and defined by the powerful outsider/enemy. Objective
knowledge is a poor and frail substitute for the richness of subjective knowledge
occasioned by the breach in social relations accruing from economic exploitation,
religious oppression, political animus or sexist advantage. There exists the distinct
possibility that espionage, remote sensing, secret codes, signs and countersigns, private
languages as well as social research arise under conditions of overt, sustained conflict
in which one party has neither the interactive capacity or legitimate right to shame the
consciousness of another party. Social research as a knowledge constitutive process is but
one of a whole set of indirect technologies by which to give form and shape to knowledge
when intimate, direct, and trusting modes are not possible. Part of the anguish found in
the current interest in the ethics of the profession may arise from a dim awareness of the
partisan character of sociological research. Why have a set of ethics for a neutral
science--one might well ask.
The major thesis of this section of the paper then is that sociology--as well as law and
other knowledge constitutive processes--are political devices by which one set of persons
in conflict with another set of persons preempt the knowledge constitutive processes in
order to supplement and circumvent social cleavages.
It is necessary to study Irish, women, workers,Blacks, consumers, voters,
"criminals," and such when the relationship between the sponsors of the research
and the objects of research is so bad that interaction and social controls as knowledge
constitutive activities are rejected or resisted by the object group.
When Cromwell could not get the Irish to comply to the British mode of constituting social
(especially exchange) relations by force of arms, he turned to "objective'' science.
The same pattern is true for the first studies by Taylor of the work process. The persons
who purchased the labor power of workers could not establish by interaction and by . wage
incentive the facticity of a more accelerated (and more profitable) work process, they
turned to Taylor and his students in order to study and learn how, unilaterally, to get
more production. The process by which workers (and others) are excluded from the knowledge
process is called objectification in marxist analysis. It is a process which subverts
praxis and, perhaps, the human enterprise itself. These are not nice things to say about
sociology and research methods.
Scientific Method and Social Control. People are more easily managed if the
knowledge constitutive process is removed from their direct participation and vested in
the person of a ''scientific" consultant. There are several subtle changes which
enable scientific methods to replace social/ folk methods. In the first instance, the
object of research does not know the things that the sponsor of research knows and this is
at a disadvantage in selecting work, consumer goods, services, candidates and even, these
days, universities. The research done enables the purchasers of knowledge to
quietly/secretly use the unshared knowledge to private advantage. Social research, the
more valid it is, better helps reproduce the social relations which are oppressive,
exploitative, and unjust-relations which cannot stand open and undistorted processes of
direct discourse. By discourse, I mean a special form of interaction in which the rules of
social interaction are themselves taken as the topic of reflexive judgment.
Scientific methods also validate given social paradigms as natural, really existing, and
"true." Ordinarily, in folk methods, the validity and truth value of a given
relationship is asseverated (and thus constituted) by traditional authority--priests,
parents, courts, as well as by esteemed elders. Sociology in particular and social science
in general offers itself as a substitute validator of the truth value of given social
paradigms (and the theories which describe them), and debunks as myth and magic the
capacity of priests and secular authority to legitimate a social paradigm. The artful
manipulation of secret rituals (Regression Analysis, path analysis, Chi Square and
Kendall's Tau) awe and astonish the lay person. However, these magical manipulators do not
readily enter into the society as truth-sayers but first require a wide variety of
political tools. Neither workers nor racists acceded gracefully to the superior merits of
scientific ''findings"--both resisted fiercely. In the first instance, owners used
physical and economic power to substitute Taylor's truth for the truth as set by workers.
In the second instance, the Supreme Court and the State (reluctantly mobilized by
Eisenhower) enforced the new social relations set forth by sociology as opposed to the
truth of separate but "equal'' education. The informal social controls of shame and
guilt which establish as true (in the normative sense) a given social relation are
replaced by the formal controls of law, fine and prison in the course of substituting a
foreign truth as normal.
Scientific Method as Antipraxis. Scientific knowledge turns back against
workers, voters, students, natives, women and minority groups in ever more serious and
harmful fashion as the division of labor between knowledge producers and knowledge users
on the one hand unilaterally enforce their objective truth upon unwilling workers,
natives, and students. Project Camelot is the most notorious instance of sociology,
anthropology and other professional disciplines constituting the knowledge of a society.
This knowledge is unavailable within the structure of non-exploitative, non-hostile social
relations wherein trust, belief, faith and relatedness all combine to provide a full-blown
knowledge of social life. The whole purpose of Project Camelot was to help maintain a wide
range of conservative governments in South America by the U.S. State Department, the
C.I.A., and other agents of the U.S. during the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford administrations
in opposition to the folk methods for creating the facticity of "the official
government" of Brazil, Columbia, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador
and Mexico. The sad tale of that venture must be seen in terms of the political and
economic advantages of objectivized social research.
A lesser known instance is that research commissioned to study the Yanomamo. These people
are studied not so much as to contribute steadily to a finite fund of knowledge but rather
to constitute new, useful knowledge on how to deal with them in the effort to get access
to the rich uranium deposits upon which they sit. The A.E.C. would prefer not to use the
genocidical tactics used against native peoples in other places and in other years.
However, if sociology fails, there is always the C.I.A. to act on these interests.
Scientific Method as Class Conflict. In these times, the proliferation of a
separate, professional group which responds to the funding possibilities in a class based,
racially organized, sexist society promises further inroads upon folk methods of
constructing social reality. Without raising any ethical questions in the A.S.A., a joint
committee was organized in 1975 in order to "help educate the public on the uses and
values of survey research and to help monitor reported abuses of the survey method''
(Footnotes,May, 1979:11). The committee, composed of the Association for Consumer
Research, the American Marketing Association, the American Association for Public Opinion
Research, the American Sociological Association, the American Psychological Association as
well as other research-oriented groups, were concerned about the decline of public (state)
support as well as public (mass) resistance to questionnaires, came out with a pamphlet
entitled "Surveys and You.'' The possibility that such public resistance was well
founded was not at issue-the point was to overcome that resistance; not evaluate it and,
perhaps, dismantle the research machines behind the various committees listed.
The hostile intent of research activity engaged in by members of the Association for
Consumer Research and by the American Marketing Association needs little development by
most of the readers of this paper. The knowledge generated by this knowledge industry is
clearly oriented to the constitution of needs, motives, wants, impulses, attitudes and
behavior leading to the unreflective compulsion to purchase high profit; cheaply produced
goods even when dangerous to personal health, family, budget and social needs. Where
undistorted interactive processes used to constitute these needs, motives, behaviors then
personal health, family requirements, and social needs might take precedence over profit
realization needs of those who use those research agencies. That this is a form of class
conflict is not readily appreciated. Most of the time, the irritating things which workers
do to improve working conditions, get higher wages, oppose speed-ups and stretch-outs are
readily conceived to be class struggle. The things that corporate officers do to extract
more profits from workers or from consumers, to evade labor laws, pollution laws, or
consumer protection laws are not seen as class struggle but rather the ordinary and
natural activity of professionals ... including the work of social researchers they hire.
Scientific Methods as Technical Reason. The hostile relationship between
folk methods and scientific methods for constituting public opinion is not clear. In
another place, I have tried to explore this hostility in some small detail (Young, 1980b),
but the gist of it is that the mass opinion of isolated individuals is quietly substituted
for the public opinion of interacting persons. This requires the development of the
concept of public opinion and distinguishing it from mass opinion as well as from social
opinion in the effort to make visible the fraud involved in ''public opinion"
surveys.
Marcuse (1964), Habermas (1975), Horkheimer (1972) and many others have warned against the
substitution of technical reason for practical reason (praxical reason). The crux of the
matter is that decisions are made which affect the quality of life of a society. These
decisions are not mediated by either self or public-structures of reflexive discourse.
Rather they are mediated by the interests and imperatives of economic or administrative
organization--both of which thrive nicely upon technical reason; neither of which are
helped by the practical reason of a collective.
Technical reason encompasses the formal, inflexible logics of logical positivism, interval
and rational numbering systems, equations and blueprints. In technical reason, the point
is to approximate as closely as possible the parameters and pathways of mathematics.
Practical Reason, on the other hand, has no necessary relation to a predetermined and
fixed set of relationships. Practical reason encompasses the non-logical, non-linear world
of language, value and purpose. The world of technical reason is causal while the world of
practical reason has a dialectic between means and ends which is remarkably variable. Much
as one could write this paper in a number of ways beyond counting, practical reason a
human creation requiring judgment, insight and wisdom. Technical reason, as useful as it
is, requires no thought or judgment once the equation is set: all that is required of
technical reason is the mechanical discipline of a more-or-less complex machine. One can
readily understand the desirability of technical reason from the point of view of
administrators, architects, and engineers--it makes things simple, predictable and
controllable in ways practical reason does not. Technical reason and the world which
answers to it makes gods of its practitioners; practical reason makes servants of
managers, administrators and public officials. One can see the preference for scientific
methods applied to people over that for folk methods in constructing health and medical,
educational, military or economic systems.
The hostile relation between folk methods of constituting public opinion and the
scientific methods of constituting mass opinion is clearly seen in the use of survey polls
and sample during election campaigns--especially this year's as advertising agencies are
used by candidates to construct a favorable, sellable image of that person as a good
president, senator, council person or whatever apart from a critical, undistorted analysis
of the political record of the candidate. Any number of books and articles report the
growing use of scientific methods with which to constitute the dramaturgical image of
authentic public agency on the part of this or that candidate. Of these, Maginiss' The
Selling of the President and Halberstam's The Powers That Be stand out for their explicit
and informed narration of how it's done.
The Point of all this is that the professional societies such as the A.S.A. do not reflect
deeply upon the continued growth of objective methods--nor do they see as unethical the
activity of pollsters. samplers and surveyors such as Gallup. Harris. N.O.R.C. and 1.8.S.
There is considerable unreflexive outrage by sociologists when Congress cut 14 million
from its N.S.F. research budget or when Senator Proxmire denigrates the value of social
science activity. However, a better, more adequate response is to study the whole research
industry and try to evaluate its product in terms of criteria specified openly and
critically. In the sections which follow, I present: 1) some normative characteristics as
a point of departure, 2) a procedure for critical research adopted from Comstock (1980),
and 3) some practical elements of dialectical methodology adapted from Freiberg (1980).
The point of these sections is to relocate scientific methods within the framework of folk
methods of constituting practical knowledge. The purpose of such relocation is to
transform American sociology from a scientific specialty to a practical (praxical)
collective endeavor.
Methodology for a Critical Sociology. At present, social research, for the
most part, is seen in terms of its private value. It serves the special interests of those
who fund it. The official canons of social research specified by Merton (1964) are
explicated in such a way as to strip social methods of their value context while making
the findings available to those who have private values to advance (Wunderlich and
Minichino, 1980). Social research could be reintegrated into the social process rather
than alien to it if certain explicit controls upon its use were enforced by the A.S.A.,
the A.P.A. and other professional organizations which claim (sincerely enough) to have the
public interest at heart. Below I suggest some norms which might be useful as a place to
start to make social research methods an integral support for the social process rather
than destructive and oppositional to it.
American sociology, in the peculiar context of American capitalism and corporate
liberalism, has taken Merton as its mentor together with some lesser luminaries as
Lundberg, Davis/Moore, and now, Blalock. In the next seventy-five years, it must
delegitimate Merton, Weber, Lundberg and others as the very model of sociological
enterprise and install them as minor scholars who contribute something of value at the
edges of human knowledge. One must resist the temptation to replace them with other stars
and heroes. Still more pressing is the need to reverse the growing monopoly over social
knowledge claimed by the A.S.A. membership and relocate that process in the public sphere
rather than in the private sphere of market research, the state sphere of social problem
research, or the professional sphere of academic research. This division of labor between
those who study and know and those who are studied and vulnerable is a moral calamity.
Of the four ''canons" of science elaborated by Merton (1964), only the canon of
"Communism" is relevant to a critical sociology--and then only if one revises
Merton's meaning of communism. In that meaning, communism is merely freedom of
information--a bourgeois notion which places information in the marketplace of ideas to be
chosen (purchased) by private individuals for private purpose (profit). This is, of
course, a travesty on the notion of communism. In the marxist usage, and the one adopted
here, the canon of communism holds that knowledge is collectively produced--not privately
used.
The other three canons of social research are directly, specifically, pointedly, hostile
to folk methods. Folk methods are not skeptical--they require
faith, belief, innocence and naivete in order to constitute social reality/knowledge. And,
as Wunderlich (1980) points out, so does "normal'' science. A little skepticism is
necessary in a cooperative society. It is in a society of knaves, rascals, frauds,
charlatans, public relations, and advertising executives where a full-blown skepticism is
necessary. Conflict relations destroy faith, belief, and innocence; they make skeptics and
cynics of us all.
Universalism creates a mechanical world in which all decisions, judgment,
creativity and rebellion are subjugated to the uniform application of impersonal rules.
Universalism is in direct opposition to praxis in its moments of creativity and autonomy.
Universalism creates the well-ordered world so necessary to sustain exploitative relations
by asserting particularism as an antiquated folk method. It is this very particularism
which brings history into human affairs. Each person, each group, each society in order to
function in its own socio-ecological niche must be slightly/significantly different from
all other such groups unless each entity lives exactly in the same environment and if the
environment stayed exactly the same throughout eternity (Young, 1978). Universalism is the
dream of a clock-maker.
Disinterestness is the most dangerous advice Merton has given to American
sociology. It makes moral cretins of us all. It puts us and our work in the service of
whomever has the price to use social science methodology for whatever private interest
comes to hand. Merton is properly concerned that one's interests does not lead one to
slant one's research design or to falsify one's data in order to advance one's pet theory.
The problem here is that one cannot be disinterested. The very act of conceptualizing
problems, variables and hypotheses is loaded with human history. If Pasteur, Salk, or Koch
were disinterested, they could have as easily worked on germ warfare as preventative
medicine. In order to relocate sociology in a prosocial context, the norms adumbrated
below are in opposition to those of Merton.
1. All social research should be in dialectical relationship with
folk methods of constructing social reality. By this I mean that scientific
methodology should be oriented in such a way as to facilitate democratic interaction and
collective control of social facts. More particularly, research methodology should take as
its proper domain the activities and vulnerabilities of the structures of domination:
class, racist, sexist, and power rather than study the objects of oppression. This canon
asserts that research findings be available to the public (Merton's canon of communism),
but more than that, subservient to collective methods of constituting social relations.
This means research must be used collectively to help dismantle these oppressive
structures and not used to reproduce them or to substitute ''real" science for
collective judgment and creativity. There are ways of living as yet uninvented and
therefore outside normal science as it is constituted by Merton's norms.
2. Social science methodology in its quantitative mode should
recognize the primitive character of its operations and not insinuate these as
superior to folk methods. One should realize that quantification is a process by which the
richness of everyday life is made progressively more barren as it proceeds. One discards
information (variety) as human behavior is organized into word sets. Still more
information is discarded as one transfers data from word sets into number sets--a number
set simply is not as informative as a word set since word sets are not limited by the
constraints on number sets--ordinality, intervality, and ratio-nality. One loses still
more information as one converts descriptive parameters into summary statistics.
Quantification, then, is a process by which information is systematically discarded. One
must not assume that, since valuable information is obtained by such distillation, this
knowledge surpasses that produced by symbolic interaction using words or by behavioral
interaction.
3. Social Science methodology should not be used to trump the
legitimation processes of ordinary people. One should not accept as definitive the
authority of social research in affirming the desirability of this system of work or that
system of education. This strips human activity of its historical character; of its moral
character; of its subjective (intentionality/praxical) character and establishes as
oppressive structure of domination which benefits those who control the means of
production of knowledge.
A value-full sociology recognizes that there are many ways to pursue work and education,
family life and spiritual (aesthetic/moral) life. While there may be no history in the
physical world, i.e., eternally changeless relationships between mass, energy, force
fields and velocity; human life has history and, given the proper organization of its
knowledge-suites, can come under democratic self-control.
Where scientific methods replace folk methods, judgment, wisdom and moral responsibility
are lost. A people cannot be responsible for its actions if it becomes objects brought
into rational (mechanical) relationship. The marxian point that one creates oneself in
concert with others through a special form of labor called praxis warns us away from a
world organized to fit the simple and rigidly constrained modes of mathematical reasoning.
4. Sociological methodology should not take the development of
formal theory as its goal but rather critique. Formal theory has some ugly
characteristics. It must be complete, coherent and universal. These characteristics define
spontaneity, creativity, historicity, and reversibility out of the system. A coherent
system requires that one part of the theory be logically derivative from another part. It
is this feature which makes prediction (hence control) possible. While regularity in human
affairs certainly exists, one should pause before one assumes it must exist and pause
again before one insists that this particular relationship endures for all time and
place. One must admit into one's theoretical model the possibility of
revolutionary/radical change between elements of the system. For example, being Black need
not predict upon I.Q. except in 20th century America.
Were one to accept this very uncommon view of the goal of social research methodology;
critique rather than formal theory, one must then proceed to analyze the forms of
critique. There are two general forms of critique: immanent and transcendent. An immanent
critique requires one evaluate the behavior of a social formation in terms of what it
promises to do. If a corporation promises to produce safe, necessary, economical goods in
an efficient and safe way, one can critique it in those terms. If a society claims to be
democratic, oriented to human rights, equal standing before the law, and personal privacy
all well and good but the immanent question is to what degree does its performance match
its prophecy.
A transcendent critique requires one go outside the system and evaluate it upon standards
which may be different from those the system employs itself. Rather than critiquing a
social formation on its own terms, one may critique on terms specified carefully. If one
uses transcendent standards, one must be prepared to defend one's choices. Justification
of critique must be a collective and uncoerced process if the critique itself does not
become itself an instrument of alienation. While I won't take the space here, elsewhere I
have argued that community, praxis, and ecological integrity are universally valid points
of transcendent critique. Others use caloric intake, income inequality, infant mortality
rates together with other indices to compare and contrast differing social formations.
5. Sociological methodology should recognize a wide diversity of
methodologies by human knowledge is constituted, enriched, made more reflexive and
more democratically based. Reporting of the sort done by David Halberstam should have
equal footing to that done by G. William Domhoff. Literary criticism of the New York
Review of Books should be seen as equally important to the Robust Estimation of Hoaglin.
The qualitative analysis offered in Qualitative Sociology should receive as much honor as
the quantitative analysis of A.S.R.--maybe more. The work of Telos is vastly underrated
when compared to the A.J.S. Theory and Society, the Insurgent Sociologist, NACLA and MERIP
are more oriented to the human project than are most of the mainline journals sponsored by
the A.S.A.
6. Finally I would argue that the stilted, depersonalized,
depoliticized linguistic style of the A.S.A. journals is itself hostile to the
human condition--of those who write it if not those whose behavior is affected by the
application of the findings. If the quality of human life is intimately connected to the
quality of its symbolic systems (as indeed they are). then passion, anger, joy, disgust,
hope and rage should not be excluded from the pages of authentically human endeavor. The
languages of business, mathematics, computers and science are too poor a vehicle upon
which to place the fate of human society. They are too meagre, too remote, and too barren
a soil in which to plant ideas. I find the student polemics of some left publication
overblown and paranoiac--as bad as they are they are better oriented to human, social,
activity than the deadly, dull and lifeless prose of American sociology.
One cannot speak of the range and scope of human endeavor with the narrow and dusty
language of social science as now conceived--it is necessary to restore human forms of
speech--folk methods of conceptualizing--to American sociology; that may be the most
important task for the next seventy five years.
Procedures for Critical Research. Comstock (1980) has identified seven
steps in critical research to stand against the procedures currently offered as
"the'' scientific method in American sociology. The procedures currently set as
comprising the scientific method are oriented to developing nomological (general laws)
theory. The steps set forth in Comstock's alternative are oriented to collective praxis.
One method serves the interest in prediction, control and stability while the other is
oriented to praxis and change.
In Table 1, below, we can note that the procedures for a Critical sociology expose the
researcher/advisor to the political wrath of privileged classes and congeries. The current
procedures are politically safe. The critical methodology is a collective enterprise
offering to reduce alienation in social relations while current methodology has its roots
in the assumption that alienation is a psychological, private matter entailing separation
of the individual from perfect knowledge of eternal truth. There are many fine and subtle
differences between the two approaches to doing sociology but, in the final analysis, the
critical procedure is an open statement of political purpose while current procedures
permit the oppressive and private use of knowledge to be alienated from its producer, the
sociologist.
(Table I here)
Practical Elements of Dialectical Methodology. Freiberg (1980)is in discontent with the imperfect and unperfected state of dialectical methodology. In order to repair this disaffection, he has laid out some practical elements of dialectically oriented social research.
Table 2 |
|
A PRELIMINARY LISTING OF
PRACTICAL DIALECTICAL-COUPLES FOR MATERIALIST SOCIAL RESEARCH (After Freiberg) |
|
NATURAL CATEGORIES-- | --ANALYTICAL CATEGORIES |
INVESTIGATION RESEARCH OF ANSWERS- | -RESEARCH OF QUESTIONS |
INHERENT CONTRADICTIONS-- | --OVERT CONTRARIETY |
ANALYTICAL PRESENTATION-- | --SYNTHETIC PRESENTATION |
CONCRETE RESEARCH FINDINGS-- | --THEORETICAL EXPOSITION |
CLASS STRUGGLES-- | --CLASS HEGEMONY |
STRUCTURAL DETERMINATIONS-- | --AUTONOMOUS DECISIONS |
While this table has many interesting features explained in detail in the
Freiberg paper, it is the dialectics of content which ties this approach to a critical
sociology. These elements--research oriented to class struggle and to structural (over)
determination which gives that research its critical, emancipatory character. I would add
several dimensions not mentioned by Freiberg. I would add as elements of
dialectical-elements those oriented to the structures of sexist domination, sexual
repression, racist oppression, national chauvinism, religious bigotry (but not
spiritual/aesthetic activity). and age-grade alienation. The myopic focus of traditional
class domination underestimates the capacity of humans to oppress each other. There is a
need to be sensitive to the scope of human oppression as well. I have come to view the
structure of international capitalism as the most dangerous beast feasting off the wealth
of the world. However, the private, face to face cruelty captured so easily by Jules
Feifer are also important. It is easy to push small gauge problems aside and to prefer to
deal with the most extensive forms of exploitation but emancipatory science requires many
fronts and many areas.
The central feature of interest in the Freiberg formulation is its concern with structural
transformations rather than, as in the case of contemporary sociology, structural
regularity and permanence. Freiberg's elements define a genuinely revolutionary sociology
rather than a static one. It is this revolutionary science I urge over sociology as it is
currently oriented.
Conclusion. In this analysis of American
sociology, I have tried to play off the attributes of folk methods against those of
current social science methods in constituting human knowledge. In doing so, I have
exaggerated the faults of sociological methodology and ignored the flaws in folk methods
in order to make the hostile contrast more visible ... in order to surmount the blindness
we all have to the things we've learned to take for granted. A more kindly, more balanced,
more richly detailed analysis is appropriate when the negativity of American sociology has
registered more fully on the consciousness of its practitioners.
I have, rather self-consciously, adopted the cartoon style of a Conrad or a Herblock in
setting forth this negatively. Just as Herblock tried to make visible the Nixon behind the
P.R. image put together by Halderman, Ailes, Klein, and Erlichman ... the fake piety, the
ability to serve one master while proclaiming the public good; the darker face behind the
clean-shaven, sanitized image as Halberstam put it. By this caricature, I do not mean to
argue that American sociologists are cynical, self-serving scoundrels. It is important to
understand that good and decent people can be part of an ugly and oppressive structure. I
have great esteem and respect for the Blalocks, Cosers, Goodes, and Blaus of the
profession. I do not deny their many personal virtues. And I can see the flaws of those in
the radical camp--the Gouldners, Syzmanskis, Leggetts and Piccones are not without the
ordinary human frailties. It is American sociology as a system I wish to caricature, not
the good and fine people who are part of it.
One may well argue that the cartoon format has no place in a scholarly critique of the
A.S.A. Why not? If it contributes to the authentic self knowledge of American sociology,
why reject it? If it hurts too much in this form, I regret it. However, I want it to hurt
as I see it hurting the human project by its division of the knowledge process and
abrogation of it from the general public. At some point we must recognize and accept that
negativity of our work if we are to transcend it.
We must not assume that what we have learned as good is good because we have learned it
well. We must not assume that which we practice is good since we practice it excellently
well. We must not confound between the excellence of evil practice and evil itself. To do
evil excellently may well be more immoral than to do good in ugly and ungenerous ways. We
should be very careful not to take our personal prosperity and our present forms of
sociology as an adequate test of the moral worth of our pursuits. There are any number of
instances in history where genius has been linked to oppression and has been well rewarded
by the oppressors. We must seek to know our own ugliness and evil.
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