Another quick blog addressed to sociologists. It raises a couple of issues, hypotheses of sorts. The first suggests that for all many of us are committed to the view that society is an ‘open system’ – that is, a system within which beneath-the-surface structures and causal mechanisms generate on-the-surface events without necessarily leading to neat constant conjunctions or predictable outcomes – it may nevertheless be expedient and productive to look for ‘experimental-type closures’. This is manifestly not to sign up to empiricist/positivistic notions of experimentation (to predict is to have explained). Rather, it acknowledges that experimental-type closures in the form of ‘models’ offer a way of channelling and refining the sociological project and the omnipresent ongoing dialectic between theory and research. Models, understood this way, always posited as both plausible and fallible, can act to enhance the reach and explanatory capacity of the discipline. Thus understood, the pursuit of quasi-experimental closures or models are means to an end and not ends in themselves.
I edged towards this hypothesis or stance via my reading of philosophy. It seemed to me that those we might classify as open system philosophers, subtle and cautious (not to say finicky if closeted in postwar Oxford) were often less likely to contribute to or serve as catalysts for the advancement of our grasp of phenomena or events than those bolder and more imaginative practitioners who attempted to ‘wrap things up’. Proponents of closed systems in philosophy like Hegel have in fact opened up far more productive avenues of enquiry than their more conservative colleagues. Going for it may be both unwise and rewarding and helpful.
As an addendum I might mention a prior blog on what I called the ‘pendulum paradox’. When sociologists – or others – come up with models, one typical response is ‘it’s more complex than that’. The result over time is the positing of another ‘better’ model, to which over time is subject to the same criticism: it’s more complicated than that. In my mind was that sociologists – and others – tend to generate models, while historians – and others – tend to respond with protestations that things are more complex than the model allows for. The pendulum swings to and fro.
Models are a useful device, as stopping points and an opportunity to take refreshment and refuel.
My second hypothesis, if that is the apt term, is that sociologists’ backgrounds and accumulated experiences are likely to play a significant role in their interests, aptitudes and practices. My father, a postwar trained schoolmaster with a varied prewar background, often complained that his fellow teachers in the staffroom had limited experience and little to talk about since they had gone straight from school via teacher training back to school. My personal experience is not so different: I went from school to university and after graduating and doing a Ph.D became part of the university system. My hypothesis in its broadest terms is that sociologists with a mixed and varied set of background experiences are better placed to delve into others’ lives on route to building models. Examples might be that those who have actually experienced classism, sexism, racism, ableism and institutions like poverty, dependency, stigmatisation and imprisonment have a natural route into the lives of others with equivalent experiences. I was once charged in my 20s to conduct a general-practice- based community study of menstruation in East London. I interviewed a pilot sample of women and was quite pleased with the results. Then Annette Scambler took over to conduct the main study and, predictably, I discovered the women I talked to hadn’t really opened up to me at all. Of course they hadn’t! I’ve argued elsewhere (in another blog) that insight and intuition, often born of personal position, background and experience, matter hugely in social research, most evidently in ethnographic or qualitative studies.
There’s are riders to be attached here. Of course there are exceptions: people with a narrow band of experience can and do conduct excellent research across all fields. And sociologists with varied backgrounds are almost certainly more likely to have careers characterised by insecurity and uncertainty in 21st century academia. We might say that people with a mix of experiences of the kind I’ve mentioned here are facing a growing discriminatory ‘bias’.
This has more bite now than it did when I, as a postwar baby boomer, fashioned my own career. While my career allowed me time and space, these are now at a premium: higher education as a whole is in deficit and crude institutional and individual metrics have displaced more relaxed and informal modes of appraisal. So while I could be said to lack experiential variety in my background I did nevertheless have more freedom both to choose phenomena to research and to publish. Swings and roundabouts as well as pendulums!