Any description of the natural, life or social worlds we inhabit, independently of its putative level of sophistication, presumes an element of theory. This is because none of us starts with a blank slate, but rather draws on a symbolic framework handed down and absorbed as if by osmosis from previous generations, lay or expert. We inherit through socialisation an admix of lifeworld-to-expert language games/forms of life. Society precedes us, for all that it neither exists independently of human activity (the error of reification), nor is the product of it (the error of voluntarism). We are where we start from. But where we start from, as lay persons, physicists, biologists or sociologists, is replete with theories that we ‘have to’ take on board, with varying degrees of reflexivity, about how things are and why they are as they are.
Given this starting point, it would be strange if we did not – all of us – acquire a commitment to refine or improve the lay or expert theories we imbibed via the artefact of inheritance; in the case of the latter it would seem of the very essence of the scientific project, at least as initially fashioned by the Enlightenment project. An important qualification is of course necessary at this point. As many feminist and post-colonial sociologists have rightly averred, the ‘Enlightenment project’ was the progeny a corrupt, white, masculine, European and imperial order. So, as Habermas recognised and addressed, only a reconstructed Enlightenment project will suffice.
So we are stuck with amendable theories, though it sometimes seems as if with superglue. To complicate matters further, and this is a pointed missive for many empiricists and positivists, ‘data’ do not speak for themselves: they have no articulacy of their own. In facing up to this it is important to note some general principles and parameters for effective theorising. I will comment briefly on the following: absence, explanatory focus, scope, beyond ‘is’ versus ‘ought’, philosophical grounding, fallibilism and permeable boundaries.
Absence is the first of this septet and briefly anticipates Bhaskar’s dialectical realism. Being, Bhaskar insists, is but a ripple on the surface of the ocean of non-being. He means by this that what presently is comprises but one possibility among others too numerable and varied to mention or even envisage. These possibilities cover what might have been as well as what might yet be. The importance of this irregular but judicious statement for social and sociological theory rests in its ramifications. It is only too easy to focus exclusively on a sociology of the present, or perhaps an historical sociology of how the present came to pass. To do so is entirely legitimate, but it distracts attention from a sociology of what might have been and might yet be. I have argued in fact that this is one facet of a ‘taming’ of the discipline.
Complementing Burawoy’s four types of sociology – professional, policy, critical and public – I have commended the inclusion of foresight and action sociologies. The former invites attention on ‘alternative futures’, or how might we do things differently or better; and the latter exhorts engaging with the public sphere in pursuit of evidence-based change. With regard to action sociology we might go on to posit an ‘inverse opposition law’, stating that the importance of engaging with the public sphere is inversely related to the receptivity of any mooted change. In their different ways both these sociologies address issues around absence.
More prosaically, there are absences in theory and data. These manifest themselves theoretically in unasked questions and empirically in the unavailability of data.
Explanatory focus encapsulates the second point. After Weber, I see sociology as deploying mixed methods towards a science of society committed to causal explanation. This is necessarily a non- or post-positivist project. The cardinal sin of positivist orientations is to treat prediction and explanation as two sides of the same coin: to be able to predict is to have explained. Predicting may be important in its own right of course, but as Blumer long ago insisted, reducing social reality to expedient chunks called ‘variables’ is every bit as concerning as twinning prediction and explanation. Positivist research, in short, is flawed in its conception, for all that the findings it delivers remain grist to the sociological mill. Not all quantitative research in sociology is positivist of course.
It is sufficient at this stage merely to commend Bhaskar’s argument that we inhabit an ‘open society’. In other words, sociology cannot aspire to wrap things up. As much after all is entailed in the notion of absence. Whilst the exposure and elucidation of the ‘relatively enduring’ structural, cultural and agential mechanisms causally responsible for phenomena of interest are what sociology aspires to, it is a project limited by: (i) the likes of contingency or happenstance, and (ii) biological and psychological mechanisms travelling ‘upstream’ to insinuate themselves into and inform the social. So if sociology is, or should be, a scientific project oriented to causal explanation, this in no way entails a capacity to exhaust causal powers.
By scope I mean sociology’s reach from the micro- through meso- to the macro-study of social phenomena. This applies, pace Weber once more, a commitment to plural methodologies. An example should press home the import of this principle/parameter. Consider the stellar achievements of Mo Farah, Greg Rutherford or Jessica Ennis. To fully appreciate and account for the sociological salience of winning an individual Olympic Gold Medal it is necessary not only to focus on the training, preparations and skills of the athlete. Performance is a function of socially and culturally structured, local-to-national opportunity as well as innate talent. Class, gender, race/ethnicity and the variable circumstances of time and place obstinately retain their causal inputs: they contextualise and shape performance. Furthermore, the modern Olympic Games themselves, much evolved between 1896 and the present, together with the enduring prestige that attaches to them as singular and stand-out ‘mega-events’, cannot be accounted for in the absence of considerations of capital accumulation and the political power of the state and other agencies.
Third, we must venture beyond ‘is’ versus ‘ought’. The Humean insistence that what ought to be the case cannot justifiably, logically, be inferred from what is the case is a largely un-interrogated premise of positivist research on, to take an example, material and social inequality. There is a special irony here since, as Therborn has observed, we are typically ‘against’ inequality (the philosopher Ryle called equality a ‘hurrah word’, inequality a ‘boo word’). Inequality is almost invariably documented and explanations for it sought with a view to its effective reduction. But the argument can be taken further.
Bhaskar considers the issue of ‘false consciousness’, sociological accounts of which will often, and necessarily, be evaluative. These evaluations are likely to be in terms of the ideological use of cultural resources by dominant vested interest groups to retain and spread their power and privileges. If a theory becomes available which explains why false consciousness is necessary, then (i) a negative evaluation of the social relations that made that consciousness necessary can be immediately reached, and (ii) a positive evaluation of rationally planned attempts to remove the causes of false consciousness demand approval.
But it is not just a matter of exposing false consciousness. Consider the wage-form in capitalism. This cannot be explicated – that is, truthfully accounted for – in the absence of a critique of capitalism as a system of class exploitation: a scientific analysis is at one and the same time a political-ethical critique if the wage-form is a mechanism of alienation and exploitation. Creaven writes: ‘and, if this is so, specifying the nature of ‘what is’ (capitalism as a system of class exploitation) logically entails a specification of ‘what ought’ (an alternative social system in which class exploitation is abolished). This is simply unavoidable, since capitalism is not beyond rational criticism or the powers of human agency to ameliorate or abolish’. So certain propositions in sociology, if true, deliver moral obligations ‘by force of logical necessity’ .
Philosophical grounding provides my fourth point. While it is entirely appropriate not to mourn the passing of ‘foundationalism’ – that is, the philosophical attempt to deliver absolute or ’irrefutable’ epistemological premises capable of supporting the edifaces of scientific knowledge – this does not remove the need to ground our theories. To adapt an analogy from Popper, while it is not necessary, indeed mistaken, to attempt to sink piles to support an oil rig to some final endpoint of rock, it remains essential that they are driven deep enough to do the job. Critical realism, I contend, can provide a credible philosophical grounding for the sociological project.
Point five is summed up in the word fallibilism. It is surely indisputable that any theory we construct, whether about the natural or the social world, could turn out to be only partially true – as was affirmed of Newtonian theory when Einstein’s theory of relativity saw the light of day – or just plain false. This is one of the lessons of the past: inductive inference might not give us the surety of deduction but it serves its purposes here. The implication is twofold: it reminds us never to rest content with Kuhnian normal science, or the theoretical status quo; and it encourages a framework, and a frame of mind, that affords full acknowledgement of the provisional nature of the explanatory theories that sociologists adduce.
Fallibilism represents a kind of bottom line of uncertainty, if not precarity. It is not just that sociology cannot wrap up explanations of social phenomena because of free will, contingency and the causal inputs and insinuations of the likes of biological and psychological mechanisms, but that no ‘scientific’ sociological theory can presume to be the final word.
Finally, mention must be made of what I call permeable boundaries. The salience for sporting activity of the ‘upstream’ contributions of biological and psychological mechanisms testifies to sociology’s permeable boundaries. Sociology and the ‘real’ generative or explanatory mechanisms it exposes are not reducible to biological and/or psychological mechanisms. ‘Wimbledon’, another mega-event, is a social phenomenon and as such cannot be understood or accounted for in terms of either cellular structures or locus of control. Yet it is clear that biological and psychological mechanisms fuel tennis performance. This amounts to an invitation to interdisciplinarity. With regard to sport, it takes us beyond merely satisfying the ‘scope’ of sociological study and theory. Social divisions of class, gender and race/ethnicity, as well as cultural norms and practices, might well – indeed do – inform and help explain sporting accomplishment; but it is clear too that genetic inheritance and learned behavioural dispositions can be vital causal intermediaries between socially structured opportunty and effective performance. Sociology, is short, must remain open even beyond reconciliation to Bhaskar’s ‘open society’.