From the Question Why to the Question How

Methodological reorientations are usually accompanied by problem shifts and displacements of the goals of investigation. Having turned their back on the more frigid tools of social investigation in order to move toward a sensitive sociology, some microsociological approaches have also eschewed various established questions of the social sciences. On the most general level, they seem less interested in the question of "why", than in the less conspicuous notion of "how". For example, cognitive sociology is less interested in why social order exists than in how the members of a group acquire the sense that it exists. The symbolic interactionist cares less about why the members of a group invoke certain meaning-frames than about how they negotiate and monitor a definition of the situation. The ethnomethodologist seeks not to explain, but to learn how we proceed when we convince ourselves to have something explained in everyday life.⁷⁰

We may argue that explanation is needed to understand a social phenomenon and ar­rive at practically relevant conclusions, but some of the above approaches are not in­terested in practical conclusions. Others might contend that answers to the how are often a prerequisite for sensible answers to the why. If we know, for example, how the child acquires a sense of social order, we may already have learned something about why a social order "exists".⁷¹

Furthermore, the thesis which proclaims a symmetry between explanation and prediction (in the sense that practical conclusions depend on preceding explanations) is more uncertain than ever among those who investigate such questions.⁷² Practical ex­perience has demonstrated that the gap between predictions derived from social ex­planations and actual courses of action is as yet unbridged.⁷³ On the other hand, how people do social things is of immediate practical interest: by exploring customary lines of action, it proves crucial to social learning, and by opening up new lines of action, it proves crucial to social change.

To ask "how" often requires that we take the radically naive stance promoted by Lofland and turn the obvious into the problematic.⁷⁴ In fact, it is exactly this stance which Dorothy Sayers has challenged us to take. The question of how scientists pro­duce and reproduce their knowledge in the laboratory is the major interest of this book, and has already been extensively introduced under the guise of my remarks on the constructivity and contextuality of the scientific enterprise. "How" is the first question that an ethnography of knowledge as advocated here will have to face.

The methods I have outlined in Section 9 represent a first step toward the sensitivity necessary to answer the question, and the present study is one of the first to make this attempt with regard to the production of knowledge.⁷⁵ The reader should be forewarned that it will manifest all the insufficiencies inherent in the partisan character of such studies.

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