Sensitive and Frigid Methodologies

It is time to return now to the second implication of the epigraph to this chapter. "Facts are like cows" Dorothy Sayers tells us: they generally run away if we look them in the face hard enough. The methodological point here is that we have to look hard, and we have to adopt an approach which gets us close enough to the phenomena to allow us a glimpse of their true character. Let us call such an approach a sensitive methodology. To show how it differs from its more frigid alternatives, let me sketch several distinctive feature of the sensitivity I have in mind:

1. First of all, it requires a methodological engagement rather than detachment; con­tact rather than distance; interest rather than disinterest; methodological inter-subjectivity rather than neutrality. The most prevalent techniques of data collec­tion in sociology and psychology tend to proceed like a motor-car with a disen­gaged clutch—that is, without a necessary point of contact between the measuring instrument and the object of examination. As a result, the engine may operate at high speed, but there is no motion in the vehicle itself.

Complaints about the validity of common social science data have been lodged not only by the critics of their ruling methodologies, but also by their proponents.⁵⁸ By methodologically keeping the clutch in, the observer remains safely out of touch with the subject, no matter how the gears themselves are manipulated. In such a case, the question of sensitivity cannot even arise.

Of course, such disengagement is part of a deliberate strategy of non­interference presumably designed to guarantee the very neutrality we have been talking about. But this neutrality is built upon the questionable assumptions that the meaning of utterances can be taken at face value among speakers of a language, that they do not depend on the pragmatics of concrete situations, that there is no temporality of meaning, and that the observer can reach, preserve and transmit an understanding from a distance as well as from a perspective close at hand. In short, it assumes that intersubjectivity can be safely presupposed and need not be worked at through concrete interaction.

Yet virtually every close inspection of various segments of our social world shows that intersubjectivity is not merely a problem for the anthropologist who goes off to study a foreign culture, but for the everyday interactions of everyday life as well. It is an emergent and continually accomplished property of all com­munication.⁵⁹ As a result, the first requirement of a sensitive sociological approach is the achievement of an intersubjectivity which does not as yet exist. Given the emergent and achieved nature of such intersubjectivity, we cannot save ourselves the trouble of direct, unmediated and prolonged confrontation of the situation under study. If we are interested in the production and reproduction of scientific facts (which, as Whitley has so aptly noted, is still a black box to social studies of science⁶⁰), we may be well advised to seek intersubjectivity by letting out the methodological clutch—that is, by the use of close observation at the site of pro­duction.

2. Can we say, then, that a more sensitive sociology is to be found in a return to the anthropological method of participant observation? The history of anthropology itself involves progressive attempts to establish the intersubjectivity at the core of the ethnographic encounter, beginning with the armchair anthropologists of the

18 The Manufacture of Knowledge

19th century (who relied mainly on travel reports from others), leading to the in­sistence (by Malinowski and others in the early 20th century) on direct ethnographic observation and, most recently, to the criticisms levelled against ethnographic reporting by ethnoscience.

The ethnoscientists argued that ethnographers ought not (as had been their prac­tice, and to some extent, still is) describe a culture (solely) according to their own preconceived categories, but should investigate the ways in which people construe the world of their experience, and then describe it in categories inherent to those structurings. The critique is interesting because it shows that up to this time an­thropology either had not achieved the intersubjectivity it sought to establish through direct participant observation, or had not been able to preserve it through ethnographic reporting, or both.

We can conclude, then, that it has not been enough to place the social scientist in the field of investigation to study it "from within"; that is, to engage in a kind of methodological relativism (as opposed to objectivism) which gives maximum con­trol over the information obtained to the subjects under study rather than to the scientist.⁶¹ Consequently, ethnoscience has tried to "decentre" or translate as many of its categories as it can into those of the actor, developing a series of techni­ques designed to elicit and represent the actors' knowledge.⁶² Sociological ethnomethodology has taken a similar path by decentring its language and in­terests, and even refusing certain common sociological objectivist concepts and concerns. These have been replaced by an interest in everyday practices, expressed in terms invented or modified to match their everyday features.⁶³

The procedures of ethnoscience (and, to a lesser degree, ethnomethodology) give us a clue as to why it is not enough to substitute a qualitative, in-depth procedure for a more macroscopic approach in order to allow the field of study to exert the desired constraints on the information obtained. The problem of a sensitive methodology is not simply to get the observer to better "understand" the field of study, in the sense emphasised by hermeneutics or phenomenology,⁶⁴ but also to control the conceptual constitution given to this understanding in representing or transmitting the constraints.

In other words, the problem to which I have referred by invoking a methodological relativism is not just to understand, but to let speak. The ethnographic reports criticised by ethnoscience were not necessarily marked by a lack of understanding, but by a failure to give voice to that about which a story was told. To make good this failure, ethnoscience has engaged in a form of systematis-ed lexicography,⁶⁵ and ethnomethodology has taken some steps toward developing a subject-relative speech of its own designed to capture the voice of that about which is speaks.

The case-study approach in sociology has virtually ignored these problems. But the difficulty may lie in the fact that it is not interested in lexicography and may re­sent the illocutionary and perlocutionary consequences of subject-centred speech.⁶⁶ A relatively simple move with significant results is the attempt to record the phenomena of investigation with greater precision through the use of optical and acoustic instruments. Clearly, only the sort of pre-summarisation material provided by tape- and video-recorders can be subjected to the level of micro-process-analysis one would want to accompany a sensitive methodology.

The Scientist as a Practical Reasoner 19

However, while this material has the advantage of not being summarised, it is not unconstructed: the techniques of transcription and categorisation of non­verbal behaviour, the partial recording obtained by a camera, or the change in behaviour provoked by the presence of a recorder all point to the selectivity incor­porated in such material. As in the case of scientific products, the results of social science have to be seen as selectively constructed. The point of a sensitive sociology is not to remedy constructivity, but—to borrow the term introduced above—to decentre constructivity such that it becomes an intersubjective endeavour. That we must go to extreme lengths to allow the field of study to actually exert the desired constraints on the information construed is demonstrated by the development of anthropology, which long ago denounced societal ethnocentrism, only to find itself continuously engaged in its own professional ethnocentrism.

3. Methodological engagement was seen as the first prerequisite of the sensitive sociology I have in mind. Methodological relativism decentres that sociology so that it approaches an ethnography similar to the anthropologists' respective enterprise. The third distinctive feature to be specified here is methodological in-teractionism, which guarantees that this ethnography remains interested in the practice, rather than the cognition, of its subjects. It is also distinctively different from the methodological individualism and wholism which has divided sociology up to now.

Methodological individualism has been variously described as a doctrine which holds that social (and individual) phenomena are explicable in terms of human ac­tion, and that an explication of human action must revert to individuals because only they set responsible, intentional action.⁶⁷ In different disguises, such in­dividualism appears in many sociological methods and theories. Its long-standing antagonist has been a wholism which contends that society as a whole is greater than a collection of individuals, and that society both affects and constrains in­dividual behaviour.⁶⁸ Our commitment to a sensitive methodology compels us, at least temporarily, to go beyond aggregate data and summary descriptions of social phenomena. However, it does not commit us to taking the individual as a natural unit of analysis.

In fact, I have argued against the individualism found in the evolutionary model of scientific innovation, and in favour of viewing innovation as the product of con­text and interaction. Microsociological research has pointed to the emergent (tem­poral), actor-bound and setting-bound properties of human action. If the actions of an individual depend on who else is present and on how the dynamics of their in­teraction develop, it is obviously not enough to consider individuals and their in­tentions.

The point stressed earlier was that the dynamics of interaction between in­dividuals contain an element of indeterminacy in the sense that the course of the in­terchange cannot be deduced from knowledge of the individual actors' intentions or interests. The point to be stressed here is that a sensitive methodology cannot ig­nore the existence of such dynamics, or of the temporal, actor-bound and setting-bound character of human action. It is clear that our units of observation and ex­plication must allow the temporal, contextual and interactional features of action to emerge. Thus, the focus can no more be upon individuals than upon society at large. Methodological interactionism considers interaction to be a more adequate

20 The Manufacture of Knowledge

form of explication, and the one from which the contextual and temporal features of action arise.⁶⁹

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