The Practice of Social Research
Nicholas Gane
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The purpose of this session is to think about
the status of theory and method within your
own doctoral research
Regardless of all disciplinary backgrounds, all
PhDs contain elements of theory and method
to greater or lesser degree
How are theory and method connected to
your research questions? How can they be
integrated?
We will read C.W. Mills as a way into some of
these questions
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No work is purely empirical. It is always
related to questions of epistemology – how
we can know the world; the status or type of
knowledge that we want to produce; the
choice of models or methods that we want to
use for a research, and so on
There is no single model of PhD – some are
densely theoretical, others are more empirical
and deal more with different types of data
Question: what makes for good theoretical
work?
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From 1995 to 1998 the journal Philosophy and
Literature ran a bad writing contest
Readers nominated passages from different
scholarly texts
Many of the good and the great were nominated
and were awarded this prize, including figures
such as Judith Butler and Fredric Jameson
The 1996 ‘winner’ was Roy Bhaskar for a passage
from his Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy
and Their Resolution (Verso, 1994)
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‘Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect
of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of
Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the CartesianLockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in
practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in
practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other
ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and
old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy,
ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy
with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato,
which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent
analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical
connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he
inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean
eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism
through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a
Baudrillard’.
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1). A tendency to name drop (Aristotle, 2013;
Baudrillard 1993; Hayek, 1948; Ignatieff,
2005; Marx, 1968; Mises, 1933; Plato, 1993)
What work do these references do? How do
they embellish your position or argument?
2). A tendency to be too devoted to a single
thinker – as if the truth always lies with their
work.
References to other figures are of course
important but don’t be afraid to find you own
theoretical voice.
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3). A tendency to hide behind theory. What is it
you want theory to do in your research?
Coupled with this is a tendency to use an overly
complex theoretical style in order to make work
look intellectually sophisticated
The biggest challenge is to write about
challenging things in a way that is clear and
accessible while at the same time intellectual and
scholarly
Beyond the PhD, this is especially important if
you want to your research to reach an audience
beyond the academy. Who are you writing for?
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Many of these problems are addressed by C.
Wright Mills in his famous work The Sociological
Imagination (1959)
He parodies the ‘grand theory’ of his fierce rival
Talcott Parsons by ‘translating’ some passages
from his book The Social System ‘into English’
His verdict: ‘Grand theory is drunk on syntax,
blind to semantics’ (p.42)
A way of thinking that fetishises concepts and
works at such a high level of generality that it is
always far removed from any empirical context
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Mills’ aim is ‘to help grand theorists get down
from their useless heights’ (p.42) – a
provocation to think about the uses of high
theory
His answer: ‘every self-conscious thinker
must at all times be aware of – and hence be
able to control – the level of abstraction on
which he is working. The capacity to shuttle
between levels of abstraction, with ease and
clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative
and systematic thinker’ (p.43).
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Mills is critical of social science that is made
up of a network of general concepts that have
little if any connection to the empirical world
He warns against the use of concepts as
‘sponge-words’: concepts as abstract forms
or catch-alls that lack clear definition
Be clear about what you mean when you use
concepts, in particular big ones such as
economy, society, gender, race, power and so
on
And remember that concepts are contested…
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By the end of the third chapter of this work, Mills
reveals what is really at stake in social science
research: ‘problems’
He says that the ‘withdrawal into systematic work
on conceptions should be only a formal moment
with the work of social science’ (p.58)
Again, a provocation: to think carefully about the
problems and questions that guide our research
and to think about the theoretical resources most
suited for dealing with these
In other words: theory should fit the problem,
not vice versa
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Some common problems encountered in
doctoral social science research:
A tendency to make the methodological
techniques define the problem in hand
An unwavering dedication to certain
methodological approaches (be these either
quantitative or qualitative)
A tendency to over-complicate matters by
introducing too many research techniques
Uncertainty about the scale of the research
project
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Mills offers a number of provocations on the
question of method (and these are even
fiercer than his statements on theory)
He talks about a ‘methodological inhibition’
that runs parallel to grand theory: what he
calls ‘abstracted empiricism’
This is a form of methodological work that
fetishes techniques over the formulation of
methods in response to particular problems
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Mills is critical of the tendency for
‘Methodology…to determine the problems’
(p.67).
He questions the common strategy of starting
with ready-made methods that then
determine the types of research we can do
Again, as with grand theory, he argues that
such an approach is back-to-front: methods
should be developed in response to the
problems we want to address, not vice versa
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Mills encourages us to think creatively about
the question of method
He says: ‘no method, as such, should be used
to delimit the problems we take up, if for no
other reason than that the most interesting
and difficult issues of method usually begin
where established techniques do not apply’
(p.83).
This raises further questions about the
originality of your work – something we will
look at further next week
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Be careful not to fetishize theory and method
for their own sake
The danger of ‘grand theory’ is that it leads
to ‘formal and cloudy obscurantism’
And of ‘abstracted empiricism’ that it is little
more than ‘formal and empty ingenuity’
(p.86)
We can use theory and methods in highly
technical ways, but how do they cast light on
empirical problems – or, in the context of the
PhD, our research questions?
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Mills offers us a provocation to think about
the status of theory and method in our work
He urges us to think creatively about these
theory and methods
Theory and method should fit our research
questions, not the other way around
Don’t lose yourself in a world of conceptual
jargon or methodological abstraction
The integration of theory and method should
be born out of a drive to address problems
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The craft of social science lies in the ability to
master theory and method rather than be
‘mastered’ by them
Mills: ‘To have mastered “method” and “theory” is
to have become a self-conscious thinker, a man
at work and aware of the assumptions and the
implications of what he is about. To be mastered
by “method” or “theory” is simply to be kept from
working, from trying, that is, to find out about
something that is going on in the world’ (p.135).