Methods and methodology of social research 3

Author:
Dr. Sc.soc., Vladislav Volkov
• Main paradigms in social research
methodology
 Main paradigms in social research methodology

• Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged primarily out

of enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a
positivist science of society.

• Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction

to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, ratio-
nalization, secularization, colonization, imperialism.

• Late 19th century sociology demonstrated a particularly strong

interest in the emergence of the modern nation state; its
constituent institutions, its units of socialization, and its means
of surveillance.
Auguste Comte (1798–1857)
 Positivist sociology

• Comte used this term to describe a new way of looking at

society. Comte had earlier used the term "social physics“. Comte
endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through
the scientific understanding of the social realm.

• Writing shortly after the malaise of the French Revolution, he

proposed that social ills could be remedied through
sociological positivism, an epistemological approach.

• Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era, after

conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, in the progression
of human understanding.
 Social task of the positivivism

• To establish mutual understanding between social classes

(industrial classes - businessmen and workers) is possible through
solidarity. social solidarity normative, it must obey the people in their
individual actions
Karl Marx (1818–1883)
 Ideas, 1

• Karl Marx set out to develop scientifically justified systems in the

wake of European industrialization and secularization, informed by
various key movements in the philosophies of history and science.

• Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to develop

a science of society nevertheless came to be recognized as a
founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning.

• Human societies progress through class struggle: a conflict

between an ownership class that controls production and a
dispossessed labouring class that provides the labour for
production.
 Ideas, 2

• Marx believed, were run on behalf of the ruling class and in their
interest while representing it as the common interest of all;

• and he predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems,

capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-
destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism.

• He argued that class antagonisms under capitalism between the

bourgeoisie and proletariat would eventuate in the working class'
conquest of political power and eventually establish a classless
society, communism, a society governed by a free association of
producers.
Herbert Spencer (1820 –1903)
 Ideas

• Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the

progressive development of the physical world, biological
organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies.

• A notable biologist, Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest".

While Marxian ideas defined one strand of sociology, Spencer was
a critic of socialism as well as strong advocate for a laissez-
faire style of government. His ideas were highly observed by
conservative political circles, especially in the Unite States
and England.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)
 Ideas

• The institutionalization of sociology was further facilitated by

Durkheim, who developed positivism as a foundation to
practical social research. It also marked a major contribution to the
theoretical concept of structural functionalism.

• He developed the notion of objective sui generis "social facts" to

delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to
study.

• Social facts are elements of collective consciousness (collective will)

that dominate in individual behavour.
Max Weber (1864–1920)
 Ideas

• A rejection of positivism in favour of critical analysis, seeking to

supplement the empirical acquisition of "facts" with the elimination of
illusions.

• Early hermeneuticians pioneered the distinction between natural

and social science.

• Various neo-Kantian philosophers  further theorised how the

analysis of the social world differs to that of the natural world due to
the irreducibly complex aspects of human society, culture,
and being.

• Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a

science as it is able to identify causal relationships of human "social
action“- especially among "ideal types", or hypothetical
simplifications of complex social phenomena. 
Georg Simmel (1858 –1918)
 Ideas

• Simmel pioneered the "Verstehen" (or 'interpretative') method in

social science; a systematic process by which an outside observer
attempts to relate to a particular cultural group, or indigenous
people, on their own terms and from their own point of view.

• His neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological

antipositivism, asking 'What is society?', presenting pioneering
analyses of social individuality and fragmentation.

• Culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency

of external forms which have been objectified in the course of
history".

• Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of

"forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship; form becoming
content, and vice versa, dependent on the context. 
 Post-modernist theories of society in 20-21 centuries
Jean-François Lyotard
(1924-1998)
• His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as knowledge and
communication, the human body, modernist and postmodern art,
literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space,
the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation
between aesthetics and politics.

• He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the

late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on
the human condition.
 The Postmodern Condition

• His work is characterised by a persistent opposition to

universals, meta-narratives, and generality.

• He is fiercely critical of many of the 'universalist' claims of the

Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the
fundamental principles that generate these broad claims.

• Lyotard argues that we have outgrown our needs for grand

narratives due to the advancement of techniques and technologies
since WWII.

• Little narratives have now become the appropriate way for

explaining social transformations and political problems.
 Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)

• His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge,

and how they are used as a form of social control through societal
institutions.

• Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault

rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history
of modernity.

• His thought has been highly influential both for academic and for activist
groups, such as within post-anarchism.

• He argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from
one period's episteme to another. 
• Epistemes:
• 1. labour;
• 2. life;
• 3. language
 Pierre Bourdieu
(1930-2002)

• His work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in

society, and especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power
is transferred and social order maintained within and across
generations.

• His research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and

methods, and introduced such influential concepts
as cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital (as opposed to
traditional economic forms of capital), the cultural reproduction,
the habitus, the field or location, and symbolic violence.

• Ultimately, each relatively autonomous field of modern life, such as

economy, politics, arts, journalism, bureaucracy, science or
education engenders a specific complex of social relations where
the agents will engage their everyday practice.
 Jean Baudrillard
(1929-2007)

• In contrast to poststructuralists such as Foucault, for whom the

formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of
power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive,
fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of
delusion.

• He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete

understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when
people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn
toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his
neologisms, a state of "hyperreality".

• This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the
faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality
together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure
and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality,
in this sense, "dies out".