Ideology and objectivity

KAZAKH ABLAI KHAN UNIVERSITY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND WORLD LANGUAGES

FACULTY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Chair of International Relations

Specialty 050202 - International Relations

Discipline – Sociology

Lecture №6

Theme «Methods of research in Sociology»

ALMATY 2008-2009

Lecture №6

Theme «Methods of research in Sociology»

Professional practice. Ideology and objectivity

Freedom for values

Professionalism

Lifelong learning

Professional practice

Ideology and objectivity

By now we can appreciate what a stir it made when British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said that society did not exist. This actually made a lot of people think hard about society, so sociologists should be grateful to her. Thinking often leads to study, and she gave sociology quite a boost, which certainly was contrary to her intention.

Challenging society’s existence makes us think, not just about society but also about ‘existence’. After all people think about and study a lot of other things which don’t ‘exist’ in the way material things like, say, our bodies exist. For instance, love, values, or God are not material. But not many of us would make sense of our lives without one, two or, many would say, all three of them.

They are not material objects. But then neither are most of the things which interest us about human beings. Consider a speech, meeting or anniversary. They exist in and through what we do. If no one turns up to a meeting which was advertised it doesn’t take place. But we don’t normally question the possibility of the existence of meetings as a result.

Raising the question of existence brings into the open the fact that different things exist in different ways. Not everything exists on the same plane. Society (meetings included) has its own peculiar mode of being. Mrs Thatcher went on to declare that men and women and their families did exist.

Well we can accept men and women perhaps, though we can find problems there too, but what about ‘families’? What makes them more real than society? Do they exist as well as the people who belong to them? Then we are into an argument which is about whether individuals are more basic or real than the social units to which they belong. Mrs Thatcher could have quoted many authorities, including Max Weber, the most famous German sociologist, who have said society has no existence outside individuals.

But Weber was active in setting up the German Sociological Association and devoted his career to studying social relations. So his preference for basing sociology on the study of individual social action was really more a statement about the methods of studying social relations than about society’s existence.

What he deplored was academics making ‘society’ equal ‘the nation’ and then using this as a stick to beat individuals. He wanted to rid the subject of nationalistic ranting, a real problem for the academic world just before the First World War. This illustrates that society is a highly charged political topic. This greatly complicates its study because we can neither avoid nor solve the issues of objectivity and bias which arise. There is no formula which can guarantee that the study of society will be politically neutral. Sociologists simply seek to be as objective as possible by the standards of the academic world, but they can never satisfy themselves fully, let alone the outside world.

For some this poses such a huge problem that they reject the possibility of a discipline devoted to the study of society. But it is not alone among academic subjects in having such difficulties. After all it can’t be worse for sociology than it is for the study of politics itself. There are other sciences too which have equally complex, unavoidable problems. The medical doctor regularly confronts issues of life and death which raise moral dilemmas about allowing, not allowing, or helping people to die. We would all be in a sorry state if no one studied medicine because they were unwilling to face the prospect of these inevitable ethical problems in medical practice.

Assertions about human nature or the relations of individual and society provide classic examples of contrasting expressions of different views of the world which each claim universal validity. For instance: ‘Man was formed for society’—Sir William Blackstone (1723-80); ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members’—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). Blackstone was an English lawyer, Emerson an American freethinker. This immediately suggests a sociological interpretation. We see them representing contrasting cultures, the stifling conformity of the eighteenth-century English establishment was precisely what the macho energy of the American farmer had rejected. We interpret what is said in terms of the position of the speaker in the wider society. At the same time we adopt an observer’s position distant from both. We are relying on a theory which says that a person’s view of society as a whole is conditioned by the special place each has in it. This insight is the basis of the long-established sociological theory of ideology.

For sociologists an ideology is a set of beliefs which claims to have universal validity but in fact reflects the social position of its adherents. Views about society as a whole are common components of ideologies. Sociology’s view of society as a complex set of social relations, in which people have different positions, allows for changes in those relations and leaves its nature always open to research. The nature of sociology as a science rather than ideology depends not on its achievement of objectivity but on its search for it.

The concept of ideology was the critical response in the nineteenth century to the belief that there were laws governing the working of society which like those of the natural sciences were true for all times and places. To those who objected that society, unlike nature, was founded on individual free will came the reply that moral choice had to observe ethical principles which like natural laws applied universally. Whether society was seen as a set of external forces or as the outcome of human decisions, either way the search was for universal statements.

Not too many universal statements of this kind have been found. ‘Who says organization, says oligarchy’; or ‘the higher the social status the more choice people have’ (‘beggars can’t be choosers’) are examples. But these are not very impressive in terms of precision and, while broadly true, exceptions to them abound. Some organisations are democratic and the hobo has choices money can’t buy.

Other social sciences appear more impressive in this respect. Economics, for instance, seems to find laws of comparative advantage or marginal utility which can be expressed in precise mathematical terms. But then economists have a different intellectual strategy. The laws they identify hold under certain initial conditions which are never fully realised in the real world. These are abstract models rather than accounts of what actually happens. When commentators (usually not professional economists) declare that the real world always works according to these abstract models events eventually prove them wrong.

But the point about economics today is that the models are tested against data. There is a reality test and economists only ever seek a good approximation between model and reality. It is when they fail to acknowledge the gap between model and reality that ideology critique begins and questions are asked such as: Who employs them? What view of the world promotes their professional interest? In other words their place in society comes into question.

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