Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
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...This is what Harding (1993) calls “strong objectivity,” which means taking positionality into account so that the relationship of knowledge to power can be understood. She argues that the standard, methodological positivist assumption that scholarly position can be ignored produces “weak objectivity” in which power, such as class or gender power, still operates but without accountability. 5. For example, explaining why he excluded social constructivist approaches to policy from his influential Theories of the Policy Process, Paul Sabatier writes: “Although it is clear that much of social ‘reality’ is ‘socially constructed,’ these [social constructionist] frameworks: (a) leave ideas unconnected to socioeconomic conditions or institutions and (b) conceive of ideas as free-floating, that is, unconnected to specific individuals and thus largely nonfalsifiable” (1999, 11). Our understanding of interpretive research (including social constructionist work), described and illustrated throughout the book, is that, on the contrary, it is thoroughly grounded in specific persons, times, places, conditions, and institutions. 6. We thank Tim Pachirat for initially drawing our attention to this phenomenon of contending methodological camps’ using the same terms but meaning different things by them. 7. In her study of the graduate curriculum of fifty-seven political science programs, Schwartz-Shea (2003) found that over half of the programs did not require even minimal exposure to the philosophy of social science. 8. For a history of qualitative methods in sociology and anthropology, see Vidich and Lyman (2003). 9. One of the central, although not always articulated, procedural principles underlying interpretive methods of accessing and generating data (such as observing, with whatever degree of participation) is the extent to which researchers form provisional interpretations based on their own personal responses to the situation(s) under study. The U.S. phenomenologist (albeit better known for his work in developing humanistic psychotherapy) Carl Rogers described this process as first forming inner hypotheses, in a subjective mode of knowing within oneself, about what is going on in the event, “making patterned sense out of [one’s] experiencing” from within one’s “own internal frame of reference” (1964, 112, 110). This interpretation is then checked in further observation of others’ acts and responses and/or in conversation with those others about their experiences and responses, and corroborated or refuted. 10. King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) seem to understand this point. They state: “Although case-study research rarely uses more than a handful of cases, the total number of observations is generally immense. It is therefore essential to distinguish between the number of cases and the number of observations” (52). Yet they go on in chapter 6 to offer advice for increasing the number of observations in small ‘n’ research. To make sense of this apparent inconsistency requires acceptance of a methodologically positivist framework in which “observation” means, as they state, “measures of one or more variables” (53; emphasis added). In other words, “observations” do not “count” unless they are in the form of “variables.” Moreover, “social inquiry” is restricted to causal inference of a methodologically positivist sort. 11. See the preceding note. Brady and Collier (2004) address many of the limitations of the King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) conceptualization of qualitative methods, although this point about observations is not one they engage. 12. These interpretive schools and methods have family resemblances, in Wittgenstein’s sense—as Dosse (1999, xv) noted with respect to contemporary French philosophical schools—but they also have specific differences. Schwandt (2003) makes a similar point about there not being a direct ideational link between phenomenology and methods; rather, he argues, one sees similarities of presuppositions, but with different applications and terminologies in different fields (e....
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...It is the struggle to produce satisfyingly robust data, for instance, under the requirements of positivist science that leads King, Keohane, and Verba (1994), for example, to call for increasing the number of observations in order to improve small ‘n’ studies (see also chapter 5). However, it is a fallacy that small ‘n’ studies entail a small number of observations: They may entail a small number of research sites—one is not uncommon outside of explicitly comparative work—but field studies of communities or organizations or polities entail large ‘n’ data points in their sustained observation (with whatever degree of participation) over extended periods of time, often in and of various locations within the research site, extended and repeated conversational interviews, and/or multiplicity of agency, policy, or other documents read and analyzed.(10) One might imagine counting, for example, the large number of hours of engaged observation, the number of conversations held, the number of interactions, and the ensuing number of segments of observation and/or conversation and/or interaction analyzed over the course of the research project—any one of which would yield a large ‘n,’ indeed. In her study of a single organization—a single ‘n’ study, by traditional reckoning—sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter spent over 120 “personal onsite contact days,” during which she conducted over 120 “more than momentary conversations” in which she asked her interlocutors to describe other people (uncounted) and their situations (also not tabulated) (Kanter 1993, 337). This accounting omits the countless hours of observing and “momentary” conversations. In some sense, each one of these constitutes an “observation,” although not necessarily as that term is used in quantitative analyses.(11) The pressure to adopt a more “quantitative” methodology is leading to the growing delimitation of the term “qualitative” to connote methods other than what it initially designated—the sorts of field studies generated by Chicago School-style anthropologists, sociologists, and others and case study developers across the social sciences (e.g., H. Becker et al. 1977 [19610; Blau 1963 [1953]; Crozier 1964; Dahl 1961; Dalton 1959; R....
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...This is what Harding (1993) calls “strong objectivity,” which means taking positionality into account so that the relationship of knowledge to power can be understood. She argues that the standard, methodological positivist assumption that scholarly position can be ignored produces “weak objectivity” in which power, such as class or gender power, still operates but without accountability. 5. For example, explaining why he excluded social constructivist approaches to policy from his influential Theories of the Policy Process, Paul Sabatier writes: “Although it is clear that much of social ‘reality’ is ‘socially constructed,’ these [social constructionist] frameworks: (a) leave ideas unconnected to socioeconomic conditions or institutions and (b) conceive of ideas as free-floating, that is, unconnected to specific individuals and thus largely nonfalsifiable” (1999, 11). Our understanding of interpretive research (including social constructionist work), described and illustrated throughout the book, is that, on the contrary, it is thoroughly grounded in specific persons, times, places, conditions, and institutions. 6. We thank Tim Pachirat for initially drawing our attention to this phenomenon of contending methodological camps’ using the same terms but meaning different things by them. 7. In her study of the graduate curriculum of fifty-seven political science programs, Schwartz-Shea (2003) found that over half of the programs did not require even minimal exposure to the philosophy of social science. 8. For a history of qualitative methods in sociology and anthropology, see Vidich and Lyman (2003). 9. One of the central, although not always articulated, procedural principles underlying interpretive methods of accessing and generating data (such as observing, with whatever degree of participation) is the extent to which researchers form provisional interpretations based on their own personal responses to the situation(s) under study. The U.S. phenomenologist (albeit better known for his work in developing humanistic psychotherapy) Carl Rogers described this process as first forming inner hypotheses, in a subjective mode of knowing within oneself, about what is going on in the event, “making patterned sense out of [one’s] experiencing” from within one’s “own internal frame of reference” (1964, 112, 110). This interpretation is then checked in further observation of others’ acts and responses and/or in conversation with those others about their experiences and responses, and corroborated or refuted. 10. King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) seem to understand this point. They state: “Although case-study research rarely uses more than a handful of cases, the total number of observations is generally immense. It is therefore essential to distinguish between the number of cases and the number of observations” (52). Yet they go on in chapter 6 to offer advice for increasing the number of observations in small ‘n’ research. To make sense of this apparent inconsistency requires acceptance of a methodologically positivist framework in which “observation” means, as they state, “measures of one or more variables” (53; emphasis added). In other words, “observations” do not “count” unless they are in the form of “variables.” Moreover, “social inquiry” is restricted to causal inference of a methodologically positivist sort. 11. See the preceding note. Brady and Collier (2004) address many of the limitations of the King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) conceptualization of qualitative methods, although this point about observations is not one they engage....
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...This is what Harding (1993) calls “strong objectivity,” which means taking positionality into account so that the relationship of knowledge to power can be understood. She argues that the standard, methodological positivist assumption that scholarly position can be ignored produces “weak objectivity” in which power, such as class or gender power, still operates but without accountability. 5. For example, explaining why he excluded social constructivist approaches to policy from his influential Theories of the Policy Process, Paul Sabatier writes: “Although it is clear that much of social ‘reality’ is ‘socially constructed,’ these [social constructionist] frameworks: (a) leave ideas unconnected to socioeconomic conditions or institutions and (b) conceive of ideas as free-floating, that is, unconnected to specific individuals and thus largely nonfalsifiable” (1999, 11). Our understanding of interpretive research (including social constructionist work), described and illustrated throughout the book, is that, on the contrary, it is thoroughly grounded in specific persons, times, places, conditions, and institutions. 6. We thank Tim Pachirat for initially drawing our attention to this phenomenon of contending methodological camps’ using the same terms but meaning different things by them. 7. In her study of the graduate curriculum of fifty-seven political science programs, Schwartz-Shea (2003) found that over half of the programs did not require even minimal exposure to the philosophy of social science....
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...Gergen (1999, 236–37), for instance, distinguishes between the use of constructivism in developmental psychology to mean individuals’ mental constructs, inside their respective heads, of their experienced world and constructionists’ emphasis on social processes of reality construction. We will not attempt to sort out these definitional and conceptual knots, which are apparently afflicting other fields as well: Hacking identifies a book on the social construction of literacy that concerns “innovative ways of teaching children to read”—it offers, that is, a “‘social perspective’ on how children learn to read, or don’t,” rather than treating the idea of literacy as a social construct (1999, 35). We note, then, that our approach is in the same spirit as Patrick Jackson’s, who writes: “I utilize this term [social constructionism] rather than the more familiar [in international relations] ‘constructivism’ in order to signal the fact that my inspiration is the sociological and social theoretical literatures . . . rather than what might be called ‘mainstream IR constructivism,’” reflecting the former’s concern with “intersubjective negotiations of meaning and processes of social transaction” as distinct from the latter’s “causal impact of roles and norms” and debates over “logics of consequences” versus “logics of appropriateness” as “better accounts of social behavior” (2002c, 258, n. 12). See also Hacking (1999) for a detailed parsing of the various meanings of the phrase “social construction....
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