The relevance of histories of methods expertise for studying socio-cultural

change

Mike Savage

CRESC & Sociology

University of Manchester

www.cresc.ac.uk

Reading methods as part of the story…

• Issues of theory and method

• The emergence of the interview

• The strange history of the sample survey

• Some contemporary provocations

1: Issues of theory and method

Methods and Socio-Cultural Change

• The rise of the post-war social sciences is one of the most important, yet un-researched, aspect of post-war change. – Social scientists are 3% of UK academics 1948 > c. 45% 2001– Social scientists play pioneering role in elaborating new

‘technologies of the social’ in post-war years• National sample survey (from 1930s)• The ‘user questionnaire’ (from 1960s)• The qualitative interview (from 1950s)

– Social scientists generate ‘epoch descriptions’ which come to embed change into the social itself

• ‘Affluence’ (1960s)• Post-industrialism (1970s)• Globalisation (1990s)

• Conceptions of change themselves are dependent on the methods which social scientists champion

Yet, social scientists largely remain blind to their own ‘footprints’

• We still rely on teleological/ institutional histories (e.g. Abrams, Halsey, Platt) produce– Disciplinary self-understanding couched in terms of

‘theoretical currents’ (e.g. functionalism > structuralism > post-structuralism, etc) rather than in terms of their ‘modes of ordering’.

– Mobilise current orthodoxies as a means of interpreting past events

– Focus on ‘insider’ disputes, rather than about the deployment of disciplines within wider networks

• Critical histories mostly study either the natural sciences (STS), or the colonial social sciences (Mitchell, Dirks)

My argument…. Two major UK social science research

repertoires - the national sample survey and the in-depth interview - gained (sudden) precedence in the 1950s, and come to play vital, though still largely un-researched, roles in shaping socio-cultural change.

• The interview formalises the elicitation of ‘personal accounts’

• The sample survey generates concerns with emergent individuals, governmental change

2: The emergence of the ‘interview’

1945-1955: The power of ‘gentlemanly social science’

• Academic social sciences are not conceived as ‘empirical’ disciplines.

• The hold of evolutionary syntheses. • The dominance of ‘observation’ as the privileged method• ‘Social problems’ define the questions asked• The dominance of (gentlemanly) economics• Fuses the medical, moral, and social

This gentlemanly social science actually advances in immediate post-war years under influence of:-

LSE synthetic sociology (Hobhouse). early impetus associated with British Sociological

Association (1951+)New opportunities for research associated with

post- war welfare state

1947+: the methods challenge from ‘psy-science’

• Focused on the Tavistock Institute and Human Relations• Dominated by issues of ‘war’ not ‘welfare’ (morale,

mobilisation, leadership, etc)• Introduces new technologies

– Organisational ethnography (Jacques et al)– The ‘interview’ (Robb, Bott)

• Introduces new concerns with ‘relationality’– Lewin and ‘field analysis’– Trist and the ‘role’– The concept of ‘network’ (Moreno, Bott)

• Scientistic, yet not interested in the sample survey, but strongly vested in the ‘case study’.

The genealogy of the ‘interview’• Is initiated out of a particular debate about norms and ‘reference

groups’, yet remains inscribed long after that debate recedes.• The interview was not readily accepted as an effective research

method. – Titmuss’s preface to Family and Social Networks: ‘ultimately they

resolved, to put it simply, to favour readability… this has meant that some chapters now have an impressionistic flavour’

• Emerges out of contestation between social workers and academic sociologists, in which the social problem problematic is necessarily displaced in order for sociologists to command jurisdiction

• Involves a way of abstracting individual narratives from a ‘social landscape’. Key exemplars include– Willmott and Young, Family and Kinship in East London, 1956– Stacey Tradition and Change, 1960

• Involves the ‘masculinisation’ of the research process (pioneers included Dennis Marsden, Brian Jackson, Ray Pahl, John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood) and a mode of research which forces ‘discursive justification’ on behalf of the respondent.

The new politics of ‘interviewing’

1962: A young male sociologist knocks on suburban doors in the name of social scientific knowledge. Extract from interview with a ‘young housewife’ reads as follows…

What things do you really look forward to?I don’t honestly know? I tend to live from day to day. I’m not looking forward to

the baby getting older… but I do look forward to the complete family. (four) is a reasonable number. Not too many. And they’d be reasonable companions for each other. It’s as many as we could possibly afford

Do you prefer the company of males?Yes, perhaps I identify myself more with males than females (confusion) what

sort of Freudian thing are you going to make of that. I don’t know what I mean’

What about your husband? ‘I suppose he uses the home mainly as a resting place and an eating place. He

enjoys his home life but….. what am I trying to say? I think I’ll go and make a cup of tea, I’m thinking. I’ve done more talking than I’ve done for ages.

What does your husband see?‘I hope he sees a place he can come home to and discuss his work and find

peace and rest. A place that stimulates him outside his work. I suppose I’m the hub of his home… I hope a companion as well as a wife.

3: The strange history of the sample survey

Issues The national sample survey is seen by many quantitative social scientists as the key research technology. We need to recognise, however, it broke from received scientific notions of social research, e.g.those associated with the census

1. It constructs ‘public opinion’ from the 1930s (Osborne and Rose), though there is considerable early resistance and scepticism.

2. It becomes a key government technology from Second World War (1942)

3. It provides an inscription device for ‘individual’ development (Cohort studies).

4. It allows the isolation of ‘social groups’ as definite bounded entities (notably in 1960s ‘white heat’).‘

5. The survey co-produces the social scientific habitus itself (through enlisting educated’ researchers),

1: Surveys and public opinion

• Rose and Osborne (2000) argue that polling creates a new conception of ‘public opinion’

• This jostles with, and comes to displace, notions of ‘national character’ (c.f. Mandler) which had predominated beforehand.

• However, until the 1960s, there was considerable suspicion of, and resistance towards polls (e.g. no one believed their prediction that Labour would win the 1945 election).

• (Partial) respectability only comes during the 1950s. As late as 1964 it was noted that educational research was – ‘something of a bandwagon (to which) individuals and bodies with

scanty experience and minimal competence are now turning their attention to… some of these are commercial interests who skilfully conceal their origins or convince a reputable educational organisation that they will finance research without strings. Others are self appointed pressure groups with innocent and high sounding titles… questionnaires are a favourite instrument of such groups, since they appear simple to construct and interesting to fill’

• Consider also Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s critique of ‘tick-box’ research which initiated the ‘Affluent Worker’ project, as well as Bourdieu’s concerns with survey research.

2. As governmental technology • The first national survey, under government aegis, in 1942. The

OPCS becomes the main body to conduct national surveys till the 1960s.

• Key devices of post-war government begin to deploy survey measures, for example the ‘retail price index’, linked to the Family Expenditure Survey (1957>). Surveys construct notions of the nation as ‘modern imagined community’.

• The survey becomes the key device for establishing ‘government departmental’ expertise in the ‘white heat’ of the 1960s Labour government, defining the client groups of departments (e.g. the ‘poor’, the ‘ill’)

• supplementing the ‘gentlemanly’ Royal Commissions. – Fulton Commission (Civil Service reform)– Plowden Report (educational reform) – Radcliffe-Maud Report (local government reform)

• Surveys were not seen as ‘re-usable’, but as ‘one-off’ inquiries • Academic social scientists still work at some remove from surveys

Up until the 1950s many teachers, most educationalists, and nearly all politicians envisaged educational research as a mildly interesting and marginal activity… the periodic reports of the Central Advisory Council… formulated their recommendations by the time honoured means of canvassing opinion and seeking a consensus. Recent reports, however have illustrated a revolutionary change. Crowther, Robins and Plowden were not content with mainly canvassing opinion… they proceeded to seek out facts.

(National Foundation of Economic Research, 1967-68)

3. As device for eliciting the ‘individual’• Until 1970s public surveys rarely focus on national

random samples, but focus on specific ‘problem’ groups, notably children.

• Cohort Study (1946) and National Child Development Study (1958) pioneer studies of the ‘developmental individual’ using innovative panel study design

• During the 1960s, extensive surveys of children and young people were common.– Youth Survey 1961, 1962, 1963– Child Chest Survey, 1966– Buckinghamshire child survey, 1961– Politics and the English child, 1969

• Educational reform and ‘comprehensivisation’ depends on survey research (e.g. consider the National Foundation for Educational Research)

4: As elaborating on ‘social groups’

• In contrast to field analysis, surveys permit the sampling of pre-specified social constituencies, often remarkably fine-grained, e.g.– Interviews with the ‘poor’ (numerous)– interviews with ‘handicapped’ (1968) (N = 12738)– Attitudes on International Affairs among African Students in

Britain (1963) (N= 291), – Survey of aircraft noise near Heathrow (1961, 1969, N = 4699)– Surveys of phone users.

• The national random sample survey only has marginal position and the impetus comes from political science (British Election Survey 1964>; Butler and Stokes; Runciman; Nuffield Mobility Study)

5. As eliciting the social scientific habitus itself

• Numerous surveys are about students themselves, including surveys at Cambridge, Essex, Edinburgh, Manchester, Nottingham, UCL, Exeter

• National Survey of 1960 University graduates, surveys of trainees, of the ‘impact of schemes’

• Remarkable enthusiasm for surveys of University teachers (1964 Halsey; 1969, Ministry of Labour)

• MENSA plays a role in pioneering user surveys (e.g. 1969 survey to see if MENSA members are ‘upwardly mobile’)

• New Society pioneers the ‘user questionnaire’.

The social scientific habitus is elicited around concerns with change, development and technological modernity.

4: Some contemporary provocations

The challenge to the ‘methods settlement’

• The ‘methods settlement’ was set between 1950 and 1970 and has proved highly obdurate.

• This agenda institutionalised key divides– Qualitative Quantitative– Interview National sample survey– Interpretative Positivist/ scientific– Narrative Numbers

• The idea of ‘sampling’ is the point of contact between traditions• Observation, previously dominant, stands outside this ‘methods

settlement’• These oppositions do not do useful work

– They obscure more innovative deployments of numbers and narratives– They obscure the challenge of digital knowledge in an era of ‘knowing

capitalism’ • We are seeing a return to the politics of ‘whole populations’

The challenge to ‘depth’ models In defining their identities and activities, sociologists invoke

‘depth models’, implicit in positivist, realist, and hermeneutic approaches.

• Both the interview and the sample survey are ‘inscription devices’ for delving into, and revealing, ‘hidden’ social processes.

• Both allow ‘inference’, ‘abstraction’ and the search for regularities, a ‘causal’ social science in which particularities are subsumed to ‘underlying’ forces

• Digital transactional data – works through surfaces using data on whole (sub-)populations. – is concerned not with ‘exposing the hidden’, but with arraying

surface data in visible and accessible form.– It generalises through particularising methods. – Is implicated in an audit and commercial ‘neo-liberal’ culture. – Can be seen as part of ‘descriptive turn’….

….the ‘descriptive turn’

Recent thinking re-instates the discredited role of the ‘descriptive’ in a way that is amenable to the use of transactional data.

• Historian of science John Pickstone identifies four distinct ‘ways of knowing’ (i) classificatory, (ii) analytical (iii) experimental and (iv) hermeneutic, and argues that (ii) should not be seen as definitive.

• US sociologist Andrew Abbott attacks conventional ‘multi-variate’ analysis with its problematic assumptions of ‘general linear reality’ in favour of descriptive methods.

• Social theorist Bruno Latour criticises the delineation of the ‘deep’ social.

• Deleuze and Guattari on the ‘immanence’ of the social, with links to chaos theory, etc (cf Delanda).

The role of networks • We have seen that the rise of the sample survey in the

mid 20th century depended on discrediting the ‘field analysis’ approach, in which it was deemed essential to study whole populations (e.g. Tavistock Institute).

• Despite the early prominence of British network research in the 1950s (Barnes, Bott, Mitchell) this tradition faded, as it is not easily amenable to study using either sample surveys or in-depth interviews. SNA now increasingly championed by physicists (Barbarasi, Watts, etc).

• Transactional data allows the deployment of network methods, where understanding the links between transactions, and not the attributes of the individual ‘transactor’ becomes a central research issue.

• E.g. Amazon; Tesco loyalty cards; marketing research, etc

The power of visualisations

• The survey and the interview has historically involved abstracting from the visual either through prioritising numbers or narratives. Some theorists (Martin Jay) talk about the ‘denigration of vision’ in the academic endeavour. However, – The reporting of transactional data routinely deploys hybrid

mixes of text, number, and the visual in ways which mutually inter-relate.

– The visual, textual and numerical play off each other, and rely on a hermeneutic of accessibility and engagement

– Examples include network sociograms, web pages, maps, etc

• The following examples are networks of mobile phone connections….

Conclusions• The ‘methods settlement’ allowed social scientists to get caught up

in their own internal disputes (between quant and qual, etc) and they have not been attentive to the deployment of new methods that deploy radically different forms of the ‘whole social’.

• We should not dismiss this new work as ‘un-scientific’: it is highly ‘scientific’ (note its affiliation with the natural sciences), and it actually speaks to recent theoretical currents.

• Social scientists need to critically engage with transactional research on its own terrain, e.g. by questioning its classifications, assumptions, procedures, etc

• We need to reflect on ‘the politics of method’ in which academic social scientists do not enjoy a legislative position but are – at best – intermediaries between numerous agents.

A focus on ‘description’ could be a way of staging a debate between academic social scientists and work using ‘transactional data’.