New Rules of Sociological Method

A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies

Anthony Giddens

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666525
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a new and revised edition of a book which has already established itself as a basic text in social theory.

The first section of the work provides a concise critical analysis of some leading schools of thought in social philosophy, giving particular attention to phenomenology, ethnomethodology and Wittgensteinian thought. Giddens concentrates primarily upon the implications of these various perspectives for an account of human action and its intelligibility. An `action approach' on its own, however, will not do; in human social life, action and structure presuppose one another. The author therefore moves on to provide a series of concepts relevant to understanding the production and reproduction of society. The book concludes with a succinct statement of some `new rules of sociological method'.

Representing the first, and most trenchant, exposition of the principles of structuration theory, this edition also contains a substantial new Introduction in which Giddens replies to some of the more persistent criticisms made of the original version and also addresses some important issues originally discussed only in a cursory way.

1

Some Schools of Social Theory
and Philosophy

In this chapter I shall discuss what might initially appear a puzzling diversity of schools of thought. However, they all share some common themes and have certain definite interconnections. All are concerned, in some sense or another, with problems of language and meaning in relation to the ‘interpretative understanding’ of human action. I shall not be interested in analysing, in any detail, the intellectual sources which tie together the traditions upon which they draw. One can readily distinguish at least three such traditions. The longest-established is that of the Geisteswissenschaften, or ‘hermeneutic philosophy’, which in Germany dates back to the eighteenth century. It is, of course, rich and complex, held together as a distinctive body of thought by the centrality accorded the notion of Verstehen in the study of human conduct, and by a continuing emphasis upon a radical differentiation between the problems of the social and the natural sciences. Max Weber was deeply influenced by this tradition, although at the same time highly critical of it. It is largely through his writings that the term Verstehen has become familiar coinage among social scientists in the English-speaking world. I shall not evaluate Weber’s version of ‘interpretative sociology’ here because many critical analyses of it are already available in the literature; but also because, as should become clear subsequently, I regard much of Weber’s discussion of the interpretation and explanation of action as obsolete in the light of subsequent developments in the philosophy of method.

The second stream of thought – perhaps too recent to be aptly called a ‘tradition’ – is that deriving from the influence of the later Wittgenstein. Most strongly based in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, this can be broadly grouped together with the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ of Austin, and its subsequent development. Few authors affiliated to the standpoints of either Wittgenstein or Austin have been at all indebted to continental hermeneutics. None the less, it now seems clear that there are important points of overlap, in respect both of the issues that have come to the fore and the modes of approach to them.

Phenomenology, the third of the schools of thought which figures prominently in this chapter, has in some part served as a broker between the other two. The complicated ramification of connections can be briefly traced through as follows. Schutz’s writings draw heavily upon those of Husserl; but Schutz also conjoins Husserl to Weber, and thus is indirectly linked to the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften. The work of Garfinkel in turn takes its point of departure from that of Schutz, and relates the latter to ideas adopted from Wittgenstein and Austin. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is the main stimulus to the writings of Winch: as certain authors mentioned below have indicated, there are evident similarities between Winch’s views and those developed by the leading figure in contemporary hermeneutic philosophy, Gadamer. Gadamer’s work is itself profoundly influenced by one offshoot of the phenomenological tradition, that represented by Heidegger.

Existential phenomenology: Schutz

It would be fair to say that phenomenology has only recently been discovered by English-speaking authors in the social sciences; at least, it is only over the past two decades or so that the writings of phenomenological philosophers have commanded widespread attention. But Husserl’s writings date from about the same period as those of Weber, and Schutz wrote his major work attempting to develop themes from these two thinkers at roughly the same time as Parsons published The Structure of Social Action¹ To speak of ‘phenomenology’ is not to speak of a single, unified body of thought. Husserl has had various important followers, but few of them have pursued the same paths that he did. Although I shall not spell out the differences between the philosophical approaches of such writers as Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty or Sartre, it is as well to remember that the phenomenological tradition is internally a considerably diversified one.

Husserl’s prime aim, at least in his earlier writings, was to establish a philosophical scheme that transcends empirical knowledge. All consciousness is ‘intentional’, in the sense which Brentano gave to that term. This, of course, is not what we ordinarily mean when we speak in English of ‘intended’ action. Brentano had in mind an idea that he traced back to the Scholastics: that consciousness always has an object that constitutes it. Consequently epistemology implies ontology; knowledge implies being; and the ‘objective’ (although not the ‘real’) has no significance except in so far as consciousness is directed upon it. Empiricism, with its central notion of ‘sense-data’, in a way recognizes this, but is unable to show, Husserl claimed, how thought proceeds from the particular to the general, from specific experiences to abstract classification. An abstract concept cannot be identified with any specific object or event, and is not in any way the sum of a definite number of objects or events. There is an absolute difference between an ‘ideal universal’ and its concrete ‘particulars’. Intentionality involves an ‘act of ideation’, which is quite distinct from the object of attention itself, and consequently it is this which is the focus of Husserl’s interest, since if, in the epoché, we ‘bracket’ all empirical particulars, it seems as if we are able to penetrate to the essence of consciousness. In the quest for a transcendental phenomenology, therefore, the ‘lived-in world’ and the ‘natural attitude’ – the ordinary assumptions that we make about the physical world, about other people, and about ourselves, in our day-to-day life – are treated by the early Husserl as just so much bric-à-brac that has to be cleared away in order to reveal subjectivity in its pure form. From this refuge, armed with the means of looking at existence in its most essential aspects, and free from bias, we are then able to re-emerge to conquer the real historical world: we are able to reconstitute it in all its uncouth complexity.

The trouble is that it refuses to be reconstituted. I shall not dwell on this point, because the difficulties which are involved are well known, and indeed stimulated Husserl to revise some of his ideas in his later writings. If we escape from the world into a ‘self-contained realm’ of consciousness, which has no point of contact with that world whatsoever, what means have we got of philosophically validating its existence at all? Perhaps the ‘natural attitude’ is not after all merely a screen which we must brush aside in order to penetrate to the essence of things. Certainly in his later works Husserl began to concentrate his attention upon the ‘lived-in world’, and especially sought to differentiate the ‘natural attitude’ from that adopted in science, both of which he had previously cast to the winds in the transcendental epoché, trying to show that the latter cannot escape from the former in spite of its pretensions to having done so. But it would be wrong to suppose, as some commentators have done, that Husserl radically altered his previous position. His stress upon the ‘lived-in world’ seemed to have brought him closer to historical actuality, but his attempts at the analysis of it remained on the level of transcendental philosophy: mundane existence was to be constituted phenomenologically. The ‘problem’ of intersubjectivity remains intractable; it remains difficult to see how others (indeed, even the concrete self, as opposed to the ‘transcendental ego’) can be regarded as any more than just another intentional project of consciousness.

The view is very deeply embedded in Western philosophy, since it broke away from hierocratic domination, that the quest for certainty – for knowledge free from presuppositions – is both a necessary task and one which can only be fulfilled through the examination of personal consciousness. Yet the claim that the latter has primacy over other kinds of knowledge, of the ‘external’ world or of others, has the consequence that a desperate struggle has to be put up to make it possible to accord others anything but a sort of shadowy, epiphenomenal existence. Thus, for Husserl, intentionality is an internal relation of subject and object, and the whole method of phenomenological reduction, whereby the ego, in a grandiose mental act, is able to shed the empirical world, is dependent upon this beginning-point. Husserl developed the notion of intentionality as a reaction against what he saw as unacceptable premises in previous theories of meaning and experience, and in doing so he was led to abandon the distinction between sense and reference altogether, in favour of the meaning-conferring ‘ideational act’. Many commentators have taken issue with this, and have suggested that Husserl’s formulation of intentionality should be modified. Thus Ryle comments:

As it is, if not self-evident, anyhow plausible to say that what I know to be the case is so whether I know it or not, a phenomenology operating with this modified notion of intentionality would not be obviously bound to terminate in an egocentric metaphysic, or to claim a priority over all other branches of philosophy, such as logic or the philosophy of physics.²

The question arises, however, whether this would still be a phenomenology at all, a question which is of more than passing interest, since most of Husserl’s followers relinquished the aim of producing a transcendental philosophy, and became interested in human experience in the ‘lived-in world’: a movement from essence to existence. In an important way, this punctures the Husserlian system, and returns it to whence it came, the description of self-experience as outlined by Brentano. But Brentano was concerned with the psychology of self, rather than the self-in-the-world which became the preoccupation of Scheler, and more particularly of Heidegger and Sartre. The strong leaning toward irrationalism, the characteristic outcome of merging Husserl’s scheme with an existentialist one, is particularly evident in Sartre’s early philosophy, the philosophy of the individual alone, in which ‘nothingness haunts being’.³ But it is by no means altogether absent even in the latter’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and, massive though it is, Sartre hardly makes much progress towards reconciling the irrationality of human existence with the irrationality of history, or ontological freedom with historical necessity.

Of the leading disciples of Husserl, only Schutz began and ended his career in pursuit of the ambition of applying phenomenological ideas to resolve pre-existing problems of sociology; and only Schutz continued throughout his life to maintain a thoroughly rationalist position, according to which phenomenology could and must provide the basis for a fully fledged science of social conduct. Although Schutz makes his due obeisance to the transcendental ego, his programme is actually completely devoted to a descriptive phenomenology of the life-world. Intersubjectivity appears not as a philosophical problem, but as a sociological one (although, I shall claim later, not one that is satisfactorily resolved). Schutz’s concerns are with the ‘natural attitude’ itself, inverting Husserl’s epoché. The ‘natural attitude’ does not presume a suspension of belief in material and social reality, but the very opposite; the suspension of doubt that it is anything other than how it appears. This is the ‘epoché of the natural attitude’.⁴ In his first and most basic work, Schutz begins from Weber’s account of ‘meaningful action’, seeking to show that while this is in important respects correct, it needs to be complemented and expanded by a study of the natural attitude, or what Schutz also calls variously the ‘common-sense world’ or the ‘everyday world’. Weber’s conception of social action, according to Schutz, ‘by no means defines a primitive’, as he thought it does, but is ‘a mere label for a highly complex and ramified area that calls for much further study’.⁵ It leaves two questions unanswered: first, what is the sense of Weber’s phrase that in action, as contrasted to reflexive ‘behaviour’, the actor ‘attaches a meaning’ to what she or he does? Second, in social action, how does the actor experience others as separate persons, with their own subjective experiences?

As regards the first of these, Weber is mistaken, Schutz says, in holding that we understand by ‘direct observation’ the meaning of what a person is doing when carrying out an act such as cutting wood: for to call the activity ‘cutting wood’ is already to have interpreted it. This is ‘objective meaning’, which refers to placing observed behaviour within a broad context of interpretation. Moreover, Weber’s discussion of meaningful action does not take account of the fact that action is episodic, and from the subjective point of view of the actor has, in Bergson’s sense, a duration: it is a ‘lived-through’ experience. Because Weber fails to give attention to this, he does not see an ambiguity in the notion of action, which can refer either to the subjective experience itself, or to the completed act. It is mistaken to suppose that we ‘attach’ meaning to action that is being lived through, since we are immersed in the action itself. The ‘attaching’ of meaning to experiences, which implies a reflexive look at the act by the actor or by others, is something which can only be applied retrospectively, to elapsed acts. Thus it is even misleading to say that experiences are intrinsically meaningful: ‘only the already experienced is meaningful, not that which is being experienced’.

The reflexive categorization of acts depends upon identifying the purpose or project which the actor was seeking to obtain: a project, once attained, turns the transitory flow of experience into a completed episode. In this respect, Schutz criticizes Weber for not distinguishing the project of an action – its orientation to a future attainment – from its ‘because’ motive. Projects, or ‘in-order-to’ motives, have no explanatory significance in themselves. As Schutz explains this, referring to the action of putting up an umbrella when the weather is wet:

The project of opening the umbrella is not the cause of that action but only a fancied anticipation. Conversely, the action either ‘fulfils’ or ‘fails to fulfil’ the project. In contrast to this situation, the perception of the rain is itself no project of any kind. It does not have any ‘connection’ with the judgement, ‘If I expose myself to the rain, my clothes will get wet; that is not desirable; therefore I must do something to prevent it.’ The connection or linkage is brought into being through an intentional [NB: in the phenomenological sense of the term] act of mine whereby I turn to the total complex of my past experience.⁶

The notion of ‘relevance’ is important in Schutz’s writings. In any ongoing course of action, we may discriminate between ‘theme’ and ‘horizon’; the first term refers to those subjectively appraised elements of a situation or action relevant to a particular project which at that time is the actor’s concern, while the second refers to aspects of the situation which are disregarded as irrelevant to what he or she seeks to achieve.⁷ Life-process, Schutz says, involves constantly shifting systems of relevance according to the interweaving or overlapping of the agent’s hierarchy of projects: the flow of lived-through experiences can be analysed in terms of a series of overlapping themes and horizons. Thus a project of finishing reading a novel may be interrupted because one puts down the book to go out to work; the projected act of concluding the novel hence becomes latent or suspended, but remains ready to be reactivated. ‘We are involved in the one actual and the many marginal topical relevances with layers of our personality on different levels of depth.’⁸

The understanding of the conduct of others, according to Schutz, can be examined phenomenologically as a process of typification, whereby the actor applies learned interpretative schemes to grasp the meanings of what they do. The core social relation is that of the directly experienced other, the ‘We-relationship’, and all other notions of social forms that are applied by actors in their everyday social life are derived from this. In any face-to-face encounter, the actor brings to the relationship a stock of ‘knowledge in hand’, or ‘common-sense understandings’, in terms of which she or he typifies the other and is able to calculate the probable response of the other to her or his actions, and to sustain communication with the other. An actor’s ‘stock of knowledge’ is taken for granted as ‘adequate until further notice’; it is ‘a totality of “self-evidences” changing from situation to situation, being set into relief at any given time by a background of indeterminacy’. Stocks of knowledge are pragmatic in character. In everyday social action, the agent thus possesses numerous recipes for responding to others, but usually could not, if asked by an observer, explain these as consciously formulated ‘theories’.⁹ Besides the realm of ‘consociates’, of We-relationships, however, others also appear in the consciousness of actors as ‘contemporaries’, whom they hear of or know about, but do not meet directly; and as ‘predecessors’, the previous generations who lived before they were born. In most of his writings, Schutz concentrates his attention upon We-relationships, since he proposes that it is by analysing these that the significance of the realms of contemporaries and predecessors can be illuminated. There are, he says, no clearly drawn boundaries between these social realms: they shade off into one another. The stocks of knowledge that are applied to make sense of the conduct of others, according to Schutz, constitute and operate within different ‘finite provinces of meaning’ or ‘multiple realities’. It is part of the normal competence of a social actor to shift between such provinces of meaning: to be able to transfer, for example, from the utilitarian world of labour into the realm of the sacred, or into the play-sphere. Such a transfer of attention and response, however, is normally experienced by the actor as a ‘shock’ – a disjunction between different worlds.

The relevances of lay members of society are geared to the practical tasks of day-to-day social life; those of the sociological observer, on the other hand, are purely ‘cognitive’ or ‘theoretical’.¹⁰ The method of interpretative sociology, according to Schutz, is to establish theoretical constructs of ‘typical modes’ of conduct so as to illuminate the subjective grounds of action. ‘Every social science,’ he says, ‘including interpretative sociology … sets as its primary goal the greatest possible clarification of what is thought about the social world by those living in it.’¹¹ The concepts formulated in the social sciences obey a ‘principle of adequacy’. Such concepts Schutz calls ‘second-order’ constructs, because they necessarily must relate to th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction to the First Edition
• 1 Some Schools of Social Theory and Philosophy
• 2 Agency, Act-identifications and Communicative Intent
• 3 The Production and Reproduction of Social Life
• 4 The Form of Explanatory Accounts
• Conclusion: Some New Rules of Sociological Method
• Notes
• Index