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Basic Stuff – Meta-theory for the Social Sciences
An old dog returns to its vomit
I surprise myself, writing a book about meta-theory and feel I should explain why I am returning to this topic after so many years. The occasion is definitely my reading of Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter (2001), itself a book on meta-theory. In advance I apologize the reader for flogging Flyvbjerg like a dead horse; I have allowed him to stand in for a number of other writers with similar viewpoints. I was lent a copy by my friend Lena who got it from our mutual friend Margot. Both recommended it very highly and Margot was particularly enthusiastic about the way it allowed for a social science that was practical and political. I read it like a novel, every night before going to bed, and never found it boring, something that I hope to imitate here, but we’ll see. Despite this, I kept being annoyed by aspects of the book. I started to write notes in pencil in the margin, even though it was Margot’s book, thinking I could use these as points to discuss his theories with her. A lot of what annoyed me were very common viewpoints in the social sciences that I usually ignore, while I know that my own perspective is quite radically different.
Is there a crisis in social science?
Flyvbjerg is right that the social sciences always come in for a battering from the right wing in the “culture wars” and his book is intended to rescue us from that attack. As well, people like me who teach in universities must be aware that the “pure” discipline of sociology is hardly the flavour of the month with students who think it cannot help them get a job. The kind of radical students who used to populate Sociology departments at universities are more likely to do Communications or Environmental Sciences or Development Studies. The Communications students are hoping to get exciting and creative jobs in the last days of affluence and the other radical students are hoping to do something about the disasters that plague us – with something a lot more practical than sociology.
This may be a career problem for sociology academics but whether it is really a problem for social science it is hard to say. After all, geographers and cultural studies academics, as well as anthropologists, all use the same set of theoretical resources that us sociologists use – Foucault, the neo Marxists, feminism and so on. Qualitative social research and surveys are used in social work, nursing and even architecture and town planning. It is almost embarrassing the way some of these people look to us as the parent discipline. You can feel like the emperor has no clothes.
Sometimes sociologists express their current disquiet like this. Sociology is facing a crisis. We need a new paradigm. Obviously there are a few contenders for this status already in the field, yet there is no general agreement. On the other hand, social research goes on and journals and books go ahead with fascinating research on every aspect of society. Is there really a problem?
Really a crisis of the left
It may be more accurate to say that the left is facing a crisis. I would put it like this. Social scientists, along with the left in general, see many failings in capitalism, patriarchy and racism, and we are getting on with trying to change things. Yet we do not really agree on any overall direction. If capitalism, patriarchy and racism are all of them problematic, what do we want in their place and how are we going to move in that direction? One solution is to say this is not a problem. The idea that there could be a unifying grand narrative of the left and a unifying utopian vision, is itself problematic. This postmodernist critique of the grand narrative is what is derided by the right as “anything goes” and “cultural relativism”.
My problems with abandonment of grand narrative are many. Quite a few of us on the left are not really convinced, so the postmodernist solution has not resolved the problems of disunity and the absence of a convincing alternative program. Worse, the abandonment of grand narratives and grand alternatives is very disingenuous. Our critiques of society today all come from somewhere – and necessarily point to an alternative, even if it is less scary to define it negatively as not this, not that. The issue is to round up these nots and see what they add up to. And then to talk about how we might get there.
It may be that the practical implications of the postmodernist critique are that we long for a radically multi-culturalist utopia and want to implement a range of piecemeal struggles as the means to get there. But that is no less a utopian position for being defined in this postmodernist way. Foucault notwithstanding, key authors in the social sciences almost always end up tackling these questions in one way or another. Beck believes that we are heading towards “world risk society” and will solve our problems by democratically controlling science and industry. Castells wants a global linking up of social movements ranged against oppressive networked capitalism. Judith Butler wants a ludic and polymorphous gender play to replace the tired straight jackets of heteronormativity. Giddens wants the third way. Hardt and Negri want the masses to realize their mission and an end to border controls and nationalist citizenship rules. The fact is that these are all attempts to define a utopia. According to Flyvbjerg, Foucault wants us to struggle against “power” wherever it appears, and to understand how we are constrained by it – so that we can free up alternatives. Flyvbjerg presents this as the preferable option to utopian grand narratives. The formlessness of this is certainly appealing, but where it points to is probably as radical than any of the suggestions listed above.
The problem is that none of these attempts wins assent or seems likely to convince anyone at large, or even convince a good many of us at any one time.
Finally, we are faced by the fact that the solutions of the left in the past seem passé. Social democracy is certainly better than a dictatorship and usually better than a right wing party in government – but we all know it cannot deliver what we would ideally like. It has failed to deal with very many of the real problems and we know that this is not just a failure of nerve on the part of social democratic parties, but relates to very real constraints on national action in the conditions of globalisation and continuing capitalist domination of the economy. Hardly anyone wants to go back to a model of state ownership, however democratic. There are of course a range of other utopias of the future being imagined. Most of these are coming out of the environmentalist movement or are being put together by sections of the Marxist left as it revamps itself for today’s world. Or by forces coming out of the developing countries – radical Islam; the new socialism of Latin America. But none of these options has broad appeal in the countries of the rich.
If there is a crisis in the social sciences it is squarely tied to this. As a critical discipline we cannot agree about where our criticism points. And what is worse, we do not even like to talk about this at our conferences, where it is much more pleasant to engage in critique and get on together as fellow members of the broad left – without getting stuck into each other on behalf of models of utopia that we are not sure about anyway.
So how do I relate this to meta-theory? I do have some suggestions about how to resolve this crisis of the left but whether they are any more likely to gain agreement is a moot point. I would like to present these in another text. Yet it strikes me that to even get that argument started I need to set some meta-theoretical position. I cannot see how a lot of the meta-theory we have come to take for granted in the social sciences would even allow us to clearly formulate a way forward for the left at present.
Why working social scientists hate meta-theory
As I have been writing this book and thinking about meta-theory I have started to get a sense of a more general problem with meta-theory and a partial explanation of why many “working social scientists” ignore it. A large part of meta-theory seems to be about telling us in the social sciences that what we normally think about what we are doing is a mistake and that the concepts that have informed our practice in the past are wrong and have to be avoided.
This is not always helpful in that those who make these claims usually replace the original conceptual map with something that is a great deal more complicated and – most usually – very hard to apply to actual social research. The self appointed agents of beloved meta-theorists then go about the world reviewing articles and books and castigating the authors for simplistic and outdated meta-theory – which really means that their own unique take on their favourite meta-theorist should be embodied in every piece of social research.
This goes way back. Here is a short list of popular negations coming from meta-theory to trap the unwary working sociologist.
- There is no such thing as human nature and if there is, it is not relevant to sociology.
- Sociologists do not talk about individuals but only about social objects, or alternatively, people are merely the nodal points through which discourses operate.
- Gender and sex cannot be distinguished.
- There is no such thing as social reality, there are just perspectives on it.
- Social sciences cannot establish causal connections and do not need to talk about causes.
- Social scientists must leave values out of their work - or instead, they must always include values and stop pretending to be objective.
- It makes no sense to talk about a class interest or indeed any social interest at all.
- Ideas do not operate in history.
I mean to argue in this book that most of these demolitions of common sense social science conceptual maps are unnecessary. These concepts still make sense and have been used for ages with good reason. In most cases, more recent insights can be readily mapped over older conceptual frameworks – without doing much injustice to the new meta-theoretical devices which frame them. So this is a book on meta-theory that is meant to banish meta-theory. It is an “Off Our Backs” for meta-theory.
Bad meta-theory is always recommending the impossible and telling you they have done it
A second key insight of this book is that one of the attractions of bad meta-theory lies in self contradiction. This self contradiction is of course masked in endlessly complicated and difficult prose. But it is nevertheless available to the reader’s unconscious as a sense of magic, of the mysterious depth of the universe below mere surface appearance.
Meta-theoretical attempts to banish common concepts are always contradicted. This can take place in the meta-theoretical discussion itself, which always sounds very grand and is usually difficult to follow. Yet when you boil it down, it seems to contradict itself from one paragraph to the next. Or the contradiction may occur between the grand statements of meta-theory and the later empirical work that is framed up to fit it. There is a ghostly shadow created by this strategy. It is like the original “rainbow serpent” – an Australian rock python. Looked at in the full sun, the viewer sees the scales of the snake as grey, dull and prosaic. But hovering just above them is a rainbow replica, a shimmer of luminescence that is attractive and magical in its impact. Bad meta-theory is like that; its complicated verbiage and self contradiction creates a shimmer. Good meta-theory can never match this attraction and will always seem lacking and prosaic. What is magical is the world that good meta-theory can help us to describe.
Intended topics of the book
I aim to cover all the usual meta-theoretical topics. I will begin by looking at whether social sciences can get knowledge of the world and what that might mean. I will consider the kinds of explanations that we set up in the social sciences and how these differ from those of the natural sciences. What are the kinds of theoretical objects that social sciences make use of – human nature; classes; interest groups; individuals; discourses; subjectivity; biology? How do we relate these to empirical research and to each other? Is Flyvbjerg right when he says that these items feature in different theoretical schemas, which get replaced like a new year’s fashion, leaving old research floundering in its dated conceptual frameworks?
I will look at the relationship between the social sciences and ethics and values and try to come up with an alternative to relativism that fits what social scientists actually do.
Finally, I will tackle the question of inequality and social power. What do sociologists mean when they talk about “power”? Is there such a thing as inequality and can we define this in a way that does not mean something different in every circumstance? Does it make any sense to imagine that social scientists can describe structures of inequality across a range of cultures and periods and mean the same thing when they talk about these very different social contexts? Why is there so much confusion arising from Foucault’s critique of Marxist analyses of power? Do we need to stick to one of these perspectives and avoid the other or can they overlap?
Where does this philosophy come from?
The main problem with writing meta-theory is that it can get very boring. Many of the following chapters were first typed in the early seventies and re-reading them I am struck by the tedium of the prose style. I am going to try and change all that. Nevertheless, I have found that these ideas have served me very well in 30 years of teaching, research and activism. While I have taken on board a lot of ideas from the poststructuralist and postmodernist turn, I have tended to graft these onto this original framework.
The point of view taken here owes a lot to the kind of philosophy being taught by George Molnar and David Armstrong at Sydney University in the mid sixties. The reader is encouraged to go back to their writings for a more thorough philosopher’s version of some of these ideas. In turn, these academics owed much to an earlier philosopher at Sydney University, John Anderson, whose articles I read through adolescence.
Connell’s critique of metropolitan theory
The kind of project of “general theory” which is here attempted has been criticized and explored recently by Raewyn Connell and before launching into this, I should discuss some points. Connell’s basic understanding is that the supposedly universal theories of social science actually reflect and also disguise their location in the metropole. They systematically ignore the colonized countries and the social theories coming out of them. At least some of that analysis fits this work and I want to begin by considering these aspects. I will have to admit that Connell’s work could be considered a recipe for doing general theory as well as a critique!
In a way this book is not “general theory” as Connell describes. It is an attempt to talk about the methodology of the social sciences rather than come up with some generalizable analysis of “the nature of society”. On the other hand, these two projects are a bit hard to distinguish in practice. In a second book, I certainly intend to go on to talk about societies at large, historically and cross culturally. Nevertheless I do not think the “nature of society” can be assessed in the abstract through a set of typologies of society that can be applied across time and space. I do not think that “human society” as such “evolves” through stages and that these stages and types are internally generated out of the logic of social action. Instead human society is always the product of a specific history. As Connell points out, this can include radical discontinuities and disruptions. Human history is full of inventions and accidents and societies have to be considered as the historical outcome of these events.
Nevertheless there are some respects in which this meta-theory is a kind of “universal” theory as Connell puts it. She writes of “Northern” theory:
It is assumed that all societies are knowable, and that they are knowable in the same way and from the same point of view. (Connell 2007: 44)
This is a central tenet of a book such as this on meta-theory. It is assumed that social science develops certain understandings about how societies are to be analysed and that the meta-theorist undertakes to make these clear to the reader and defends some meta-theoretical ideas while discarding others. The point of view is always that of the writer and the aim of writing is to persuade others that this point of view is useful. To that extent, it is inevitable that different societies will be described from the “same” point of view. A meta-theory like this creates and makes use of concepts which are seen as useful to describe a variety of social contexts – in this book, concepts such as human nature, discourse, inequality are all argued to be useful in this way.
Despite this defence of general theory, I would certainly agree with one aspect of the substance of Connell’s critique. The perspective that animates this book is written from the metropole or at least from the Australian version of that – certainly by a paid up member of a colonizing society. I was brought up to “salute my flag, honour my god and serve my queen” as we used to chant in primary school. I acknowledge that what I write about meta-theory could be quite different from that written by someone on the receiving end of the colonial imperium. I do not and cannot claim to have a “universal” perspective in the sense that it does not come from a particular social location.
Connell continues this critique by pointing out that the claim of universality is often made through a method in which the writings of other social scientists are re-written into “one’s own conceptual language” (Connell 2007: 45). As she says, this is not just a translation but a “subsumption” in which “the universal relevance of the preferred theory” is claimed (Connell 2007: 45). This is certainly true here and readers may gasp at the way I subsume a very diverse set of social science writings within my own meta-theoretical framework. While this may appear somewhat imperialist I do not argue that this is the only sensible way to view things – as I point out, there are a number of ways of presenting the findings of social science, which may make sense. I will argue this indeterminacy is an inevitable consequence of the imaginative freedom of human action. I prefer to think of this procedure as a kind of mapping – seeing how different kinds of meta-theory can be mapped onto each other to look at the same social context. I argue that there is a lot more mapping possible than the sectarians of some metatheories generally credit.
Connell points out that “Northern” theory rarely makes use of the theoretical tools developed by the colonized. Her own book addresses this issue by presenting some of this theory. The meta-theoretical writings I consider here are almost exclusively from the metropole. This is certainly a limitation. On the other hand, I will not commit some of the other mistakes that Connell notes. My concept of inequality will be worked out in relation to current global inequality as well as to the kinds of inequality within the metropole typically studied by social scientists. Like all “universal” theory there is an attempt to comprehend a range of social situations and hopefully this can be judged on its merits.
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