How Max Weber got it
mostly right about the role
of values in social research
Martyn Hammersley
The Open University, UK
Helsinki-Copenhagen Colloquium on Evidence in Social
Inquiry Workshop #1: The Role of Values in Social
Enquiry, University of Copenhagen, December 2013
Max Weber in 1917
An issue characterised by three C’s
• Caricature – of some of the positions proposed.
• Complexity – a range of difficult issues,
concerning: the legitimate products of social
research; the role of various sorts of value in its
pursuit; the institutional requirements for such
research; evaluation of its consequences; and
so on (see Proctor 1991; Kincaid et al 2007).
• Confusion – a variety of terms are employed to
mark out different positions, but these do not
have clear or unambiguous meanings: ‘value
neutrality’, ‘value freedom’, ‘objectivity’,
‘subjectivity’, ‘partisanship’, ‘perfectionism’, etc.
Caricature
• Critics, and even some supporters, formulate
the idea that social inquiry can be ‘valueneutral’, ‘value-free’, or even ‘objective’ in
ways that misrepresent its original form.
• Weber’s work is frequently ignored or
misinterpreted.
There is some slight excuse for both these
tendencies: ‘value-free’, ‘value-neutral’, and
‘objective’ are problematic terms; and Weber
does not clearly express his position in a way
that is immediately intelligible. (But see Bruun
2007.)
Weber was no positivist
• Weber was a post-enlightenment thinker,
influenced by neo-Kantianism and
Nietzsche. He did not believe, like Comte
and Durkheim, that science can diagnose
social pathology. Nor did he believe, like
Hegel and Marx, that there is a set of
values, built into human nature, whose
realisation is the End of History.
• If we try to understand his views as if they
were a form of positivism or historicism we
will be led astray.
Assumptions that the value-neutral
principle does NOT imply/require
• That research involves no reliance upon
values.
• That making value judgments is quite
independent of facts about the world.
• That there is a metaphysical dichotomy
between facts and values (Putnam 2002).
• That value judgments are necessarily irrational
leaps of subjective faith.
• That because discussion of values cannot be
scientific it cannot be rational.
Complexity: Is social inquiry valueneutral/value-free/objective? Can it
be? Should it be?
Besides these 3 questions, there are at
least 3 others that need to be addressed,
with a view to reducing confusion:
1.How are we defining ‘social inquiry’?
2.What do we mean by ‘value’?
3.What do we mean by
‘neutral’/‘free’/‘objective’?
Types of social inquiry
• Academic research: aimed at building up
disciplinary knowledge. This was Weber’s
primary focus.
• Practical research: aimed at supplying
information needed by practical actors –
governments, citizens, consumers, etc.
• Inquiry-subordinated-to-another-activity, for
example police inquiries, legal research, civil
service research, and much ‘action research’.
All three can be of great value, but they are
different in character (Hammersley 2002:ch6).
What does ‘value’ mean?
Two meanings in Weber:
• A principle that specifies a good/bad contrast.
Very often there are multiple versions of the
same principle, for example justice/injustice can
take retributive or distributive forms. Moreover,
all value principles must be interpreted in order
to be applied to particular cases.
• A value-judgment = an evaluation of some
person, situation, object, course of action, etc in
terms of a set of value principles (and, also, on
the basis of various factual assumptions).
Weber’s treatment of values
• Weber argues that we are faced with plural
value principles, and that for this and other
reasons there are usually conflicting but
equally reasonable (as well as unreasonable)
value judgments about any object. [Correct!]
• He believed that how we choose among or
assign priority to value principles cannot be
decided by reason. [Wrong but salutary!]
• However, he thought that value judgments
were open to rational scrutiny as regards their
derivation from principles, and also in terms of
their ‘realism’. [Correct!]
Weber on vocations
1. We choose particular vocations, and this will
lead us to prioritise some values over others.
Western society involves institutional
specialisation, and a rationalisation process
requiring us to pursue vocations objectively.
2. Whatever our vocation, we will often find it
uncomfortable because of conflict among
values.
3. Those following different vocations, like those
brought up in different cultures, may struggle
to reach agreement and sometimes even to
understand one another.
Epistemic and non-epistemic values
Social scientists are, by the nature of their task,
committed to epistemic values: their sole
operational goal is to produce knowledge. So,
in many contexts, they prioritise truth over
other values.
At the same time, the practical, that is nonepistemic, values to which they are committed
as people can serve as a value-relevance
framework for their research. (There will also
be practical values that operate as ethical
constraints on how the research is carried out,
see Hammersley and Traianou 2012).
What is value ‘freedom’/‘neutrality’?
• Value freedom/neutrality requires that only
factual research questions are investigated;
and that in seeking to find answers to those
questions the researcher tries to be neutral as
regards non-epistemic values.
• The implication is not that publication of the
findings of a study will be politically neutral in
its effects, in the sense of being equally
favourable or unfavourable to all political or
practical commitments. However, it will not be
systematically favourable or unfavourable to
particular positions in its consequences.
Assumptions underpinning value
neutrality
• Factual conclusions are distinct from value
conclusions; even though value judgments
involve factual assumptions, and factual
conclusions must usually be value-relevant.
• Social science can only validate factual claims,
not value conclusions. It can legitimately claim
expertise, though not infallibility, about factual
matters. It cannot claim legitimate expertise as
regards value-judgments. To do so would
amount to scientism, and would thus
undermine democracy.
What is objectivity?
At least three meanings, the first applying to
knowledge claims, the others to research
strategies. ‘Objective’ as:
1.‘Corresponding to objects in the world’ = ‘true’
2.‘Following procedural rules rather than making
idiosyncratic decisions’
3.‘Taking proper account of what is relevant, and
only of what is relevant’. (There is, of course,
room for uncertainty and dispute about what is
relevant.) This third sense was the one that
Weber used, it is a component of a
commitment to value neutrality.
Bias: the conceptual complement
to this third sense of ‘objectivity’
Bias = distortion of the pursuit of some goal as
a result of the influence of values or interests
that are not relevant to it. For example, bias
in job selection or in legal trials. In the case of
research, of course, ‘bias’ refers to deviation
from the most effective path to finding true
answers to factual questions (see
Hammersley 2000:ch6).
What constitutes bias in pursuing an activity
depends upon its goal(s).
Value relevance
Unlike natural science, social research focuses
on explaining individual phenomena, rather
than aiming at universal laws, and these
phenomena must be selected for
investigation on the basis of practical values,
and studied from within a particular valuerelevance framework.
A value-relevance framework defines what is at
issue, but is not partisan in the sense of
favouring only one view about that issue, and
does not provide a basis for drawing value
conclusions as part of the research.
Illustrating value relevance
Levels of poverty or social mobility, and reasons
for changes in these, are factual issues that
are value-relevant from a variety of political
perspectives (though not from all). Contrasting
views can be taken about them, and the
research findings are likely to be relevant to
many different political views.
How we define ‘poverty’ or ‘social mobility’ can
vary, partly depending upon value
assumptions, but value-neutrality requires us
to explore the consequences of different
definitions for our findings.
Has social science ever practised
the principle of value neutrality?
Not very systematically, for at least two reasons:
1.There are continual demands on social science
for value conclusions, not just from outside but
also from social scientists themselves.
2.While, in the mid-twentieth century, there was
widespread appeal to value-neutrality, in
practice researchers nevertheless often
assumed that value conclusions follow directly
from the facts, for example on analogy with the
(misleading) case of medicine.
The current situation
Today, across many fields of social science, and
especially where qualitative approaches have
made inroads, any commitment to ‘value
neutrality’, ‘value-freedom’, and even
‘objectivity’ is generally rejected, usually as
‘positivist’ (but see Letherby et al 2012).
Value conclusions are frequently presented as
well-established by evidence, and as
warranting acceptance as valid by anyone. Yet
it is rarely made clear why these valuejudgments should be treated as authoritative,
and they are often open to reasonable doubt.
The lost ground
• The means previously used to infer value
conclusions from factual premisses – religion,
natural law theory, nationalist ideology, organic
social theories, or historicism of a Hegelian or
Marxist kind – have been largely abandoned by
social scientists today.
• We need not, and should not, adopt an
irrationalist position, but we must recognise that
it is much harder for rational discussion about
values to produce consensus than is the case
with factual matters. This is because there is
rarely a single, true answer to a value question.
Proposed alternative approaches
a) Researchers as organic intellectuals explicitly
committed to some set of practical values or
to some interest group (whether marginalised
or involved in government). MacIntyre (1990),
Root (1993), Burawoy (2005), and Turner
(2007) all seem to propose versions of this.
b) The contractual model: researchers offer their
services on the market, doing research that
supports clients’ value positions, on the
model of lawyers as advocates. This may be
disguised via appeal to some notion of the
common good.
Problems with these alternatives
1. Social inquiry loses all internal coherence and
comes to lack clear boundaries, merging into
the activity of pressure groups of various
kinds.
2. Bias as regards factual conclusions will be
encouraged, along with misuse of the authority
of science.
3. Public funding is hard to justify since research
is serving partial interests. Given this, what
research focuses on, and the conclusions it
reaches, will be determined even more directly
by funding source than currently.
Two corollaries of the valueneutrality principle
• The primary duty of researchers is to pursue
inquiry in such a way as to try to ensure that
their findings are true.
• A secondary responsibility is to try to ensure
that the discussion of research findings, and of
other factual information, in the public sphere
pays attention to the distinction between facts
and values and the ways they are interrelated.
At present, the social science community does
not always match up well to these obligations.
Summary and Conclusion
• Current situation: the principles of value
neutrality and objectivity are widely rejected;
social scientists routinely present value
conclusions as validated by research.
• There is little clarity about the basis for these
value conclusions, and why they are legitimate.
• Rejection of value neutrality is largely based on
misinterpretation and caricature.
• The alternatives proposed – the organic
intellectual or the hired advocate – are
undesirable: they increase bias, encourage
scientism, and thereby threaten democracy.
An advert!
The Limits of Social Science: Causal Explanation
and Values, London, Sage, 2014.
Martyn Hammersley
Chapters include:
On the role of values in social research
From facts to value judgments? A critique of critical
realism
Can social science tell us whether a society is
meritocratic? A Weberian critique
We didn’t predict a riot! On the public contribution of
social science
References
Bruun, H. (2007), Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s
Methodology (Second edition), Aldershot, Ashgate.
Burawoy, M. (2005) ‘For Public Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology,
56, 2 pp259–94.
Derman, J. (2012) Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Hammersley, M. (2000) Taking Sides in Social Research, London,
Routledge.
Hammersley, M. (2002) Educational Research, Policymaking and
Practice, London, Paul Chapman/Sage.
Hammersley, M. (2014) The Limits of Social Science: Causal
explanation and values, London, Sage.
Hammersley, M. and Traianou, A. (2012) Ethics in Qualitative Research:
London, Sage.
Hutchison, T. (1964) Positive Economics and Policy Objectives, London,
Allen and Unwin.
References contd
Kincaid, H., Dupré, J., and Wylie, A. (eds) (2007) Value-Free
Science: Ideals and illusions, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Letherby, G, Scott, J and Williams M (2012 ) Objectivity and
Subjectivity in Social Research. London: Sage.MacIntyre, A.
(1990) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, London,
Duckworth, pp23-4 and passim.
Proctor, R. N. (1991) Value-Free Science: Purity and power in
modern knowledge, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press.
Putnam H. (2002) The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and
other essays, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press.
Putnam, H. and Walsh, V. (eds) (2011) The End of Value-free
Economics, London, Routledge.
Root, M. (1993) Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford, Blackwell.
Turner, S. (2007) ‘Public sociology and democratic theory’,
Sociology, 41, 5, pp785–798.