After Method

Mess in Social Science Research

John Law

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134294312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

John Law argues that methods don't just describe social realities but are also involved in creating them. The implications of this argument are highly significant. If this is the case, methods are always political, and it raises the question of what kinds of social realities we want to create. Most current methods look for clarity and precision. It is usually said that only poor research produces messy findings, and the idea that things in the world might be fluid, elusive, or multiple is unthinkable. Law's startling argument is that this is wrong and it is time for a new approach. Many realities, he says, are vague and ephemeral. If methods want to know and help to shape the world, then they need to reinvent themselves and their politics to deal with mess. That is the challenge. Nothing less will do.

1 After method:an introduction

If this is an awful mess . . . then would something less messy make a mess of describing it?

‘There is no use in trying,’ said Alice; ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)

How might method deal with mess?

Look at the picture above, and at the question posed by the caption. This book is about that caption, and about what happens when social science tries to describe things that are complex, diffuse and messy. The answer, I will argue, is that it tends to make a mess of it. This is because simple clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent. The very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess. So the book is an attempt to imagine what it might be to remake social science in ways better equipped to deal with mess, confusion and relative disorder.

No doubt some things in the world can indeed be made clear and definite. Income distributions, global CO₂ emissions, the boundaries of nation states, and terms of trade, these are the kinds of provisionally stable realities that social and natural science deal with more or less effectively. But alongside such phenomena the world is also textured in quite different ways. My argument is that academic methods of inquiry don’t really catch these. So what are the textures they are missing out on?

If we start to make a list then it quickly becomes clear that it is potentially endless. Pains and pleasures, hopes and horrors, intuitions and apprehensions, losses and redemptions, mundanities and visions, angels and demons, things that slip and slide, or appear and disappear, change shape or don’t have much form at all, unpredictabilities, these are just a few of the phenomena that are hardly caught by social science methods. It may be, of course, that they don’t belong to social science at all. But perhaps they do, or partly do, or should do. That, at any rate, is what I want to suggest. Parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are then this is because they have been distorted into clarity. This is the problem I try to tackle. If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all, then where does this leave social science? How might we catch some of the realities we are currently missing? Can we know them well? Should we know them? Is ‘knowing’ the metaphor that we need? And if it isn’t, then how might we relate to them? These are the issues that I open up in this book.

I don’t have a single response to these questions. The book is intended as an opening rather than a closing. In any case, if much of reality is ephemeral and elusive, then we cannot expect single answers. If the world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we’re going to have to give up on simplicities. But one thing is sure: if we want to think about the messes of reality at all then we’re going to have to teach ourselves to think, to practise, to relate, and to know in new ways. We will need to teach ourselves to know some of the realities of the world using methods unusual to or unknown in social science.

For example? Here are some possibilities. Perhaps we will need to know them through the hungers, tastes, discomforts, or pains of our bodies. These would be forms of knowing as embodiment. Perhaps we will need to know them through ‘private’ emotions that open us to worlds of sensibilities, passions, intuitions, fears and betrayals. These would be forms of knowing as emotionality or apprehension. Perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigour, and find ways of knowing the indistinct and the slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight. Here knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision. Perhaps we will need to rethink how far whatever it is that we know travels and whether it still makes sense in other locations, and if so how. This would be knowing as situated inquiry. Almost certainly we will need to think hard about our relations with whatever it is we know, and ask how far the process of knowing it also brings it into being. And as a theme that runs through everything, we should certainly be asking ourselves whether ‘knowing’ is the metaphor that we need. Whether, or when. Perhaps the academy needs to think of other metaphors for its activities – or imagine other activities.

Such talk is new but at the same time it is not so new. There are many straws in the social science wind which suggest that it is starting to blow in directions such as these. Over the last two decades methods for the analysis of visual materials, performance approaches, and an understanding of methods as poetics or interventionary narrative have all become important. Students of anthropology, cultural studies and sociology have grappled with ways of thinking about and describing decentred subjectivities and the geographical complexities that arise when intimacy no longer necessarily implies proximity. There is also a developing sense that global flows are uncertain, unpredictable indeed chaotic in the mathematical sense. Many now think that ethnography needs to work differently if it is to understand a networked or fluid world. The sense that knowledge is contexted and limited has become widespread, and feminists have talked of situated knowledges while anthropologists have explored writing and receiving culture.¹ Market research, often more imaginative than academic social science, has developed methods such as tasting panels for understanding the non-cognitive and the ephemeral. And never to be outdone, management consultancy has adopted ‘soft methods’ for intervening in organisations by turning to dramatisations, enactments and performances.

So the world is on the move and social science more or less reluctantly follows. Agency is imagined as emotive and embodied, rather than as cognitive: the nature of the person is shifting in social theory and practice. Structures are imagined to be more broken or unpredictable in their fluidity. But at the same time, within social science, talk of ‘method’ still tends to summon up a relatively limited repertoire of responses. The collection and manipulation of certain kinds of quantitative data is emblematic for research methods in many parts of social science including much of sociology, economics, psychology, and human geography. The collection and manipulation of certain kinds of qualitative materials is iconographic in anthropology, cultural studies, science studies, and other parts of sociology and human geography. The quantitative/qualitative iconography – and its division – is built into many courses on research methods. In the English-speaking world it is unusual, perhaps impossible, to qualify as a degree-level social scientist without following such courses and learning the appropriate suites of methods. Indeed, national recognition of social science courses in the United Kingdom now demands that these include both quantitative and qualitative methods, though many students and teachers dislike such courses and find their content to be at best marginally relevant to the research process.

This book makes a sustained argument for a way of thinking about method that is broader, looser, more generous, and in certain respects quite different to that of many of the conventional understandings. It is therefore, in part, an attack on the limits set by such understandings. But there are various reasons why any such attack needs to be cautious. One is that ‘social science method’ is an encouragingly multi-headed beast. It is already variegated and heterogeneous in its claims, but even more so in its practices. Since I am arguing for greater methodological variety, existing variety is surely welcome wherever it is to be found – which is everywhere. This suggests, then, that the problem is not so much lack of variety in the practice of method, as the hegemonic and dominatory pretensions of certain versions or accounts of method. I will return to this question, that of the normativity of method, shortly.

Another reason for caution is that standard research methods are often important, not to say necessary. To take one notorious example, it was quantitative epidemiological research that established a plausible link between smoking and lung cancer.² Another example with a more social science flavour would be the many studies, again often quantitative, that have revealed strong relations between poor health and a range of social inequalities including poverty.³ Or between vulnerability to disaster, and age, social isolation and poverty.⁴ There are, to be sure, always complexities and ambivalences.⁵ Nevertheless studies such as these have been the basis for major health education campaigns. And endless other success stories for standard methods, quantitative and qualitative, could be cited.

It cannot be the case, then, that standard research methods are straightforwardly wrong. They are significant, and they will properly remain so. This is why I say that I am after a broader or more generous sense of method, as well as one that is different. But to talk of difference is indeed to edge towards criticism. As I have suggested above, I want to argue that while standard methods are often extremely good at what they do, they are badly adapted to the study of the ephemeral, the indefinite and the irregular. As I have just suggested, this implies that the problem is not so much the standard research methods themselves, but the normativities that are attached to them in discourses about method. If ‘research methods’ are allowed to claim methodological hegemony or (even worse) monopoly, and I think that there are locations where they try to do this, then when we are put into relation with such methods we are being placed, however rebelliously, in a set of constraining normative blinkers. We are being told how we must see and what we must do when we investigate. And the rules imposed on us carry, we need to note, a set of contingent and historically specific Euro-American assumptions.⁶

Here the problem is not that our research methods (and claims about proper method) have been constructed in a specific historical context. Everything is constructed in a specific historical context and there can be no escape from history. Rather it is that they, or at least their advocates, tend to make excessively general claims about their status. The form of argument is often like this (think, for instance, about rules for statistical sampling, or avoiding leading questions in interviews). ‘If you want to understand reality properly then you need to follow the methodological rules. Reality imposes those rules on us. If we fail to follow them then we will end up with substandard knowledge, knowledge that is distorted or does not represent what it purportedly describes.’ There are two things I want to say in response to such suggestions about the importance of methodological rule-following. The first is counterintuitive. It is that methods, their rules, and even more methods’ practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand. I will carefully explore the reasons for making this suggestion in due course. However, for the moment let me simply note that there is a fair amount of heavyweight work on the history of science and social science that makes precisely this argument. Perhaps again counter-intuitively, I will also say that if methods tend to produce the reality they describe, then this may be, but is not necessarily, obnoxious. Again I will return to this argument at some length in due course. But what is important now is to note that if these two claims are right then they have profound implications for our understanding of the nature of research.

There is a further and more straightforward point to be made. This is that claims about the general importance of methodological rules also tend to get naturalised in social science debate. Particular sets of rules and procedures may be questioned and debated, but the overall need for proper rules and procedures is not. It is taken for granted that these are necessary. And behind the assumption that we need such rules and procedures lies a further range of assumptions that are also naturalised and more or less hidden. These have to do with what is most important in the world, the kinds of facts we need to gather, and the appropriate techniques for gathering and theorising data. All of these, too, are naturalised in the common sense of research. Yes, things are on the move. Nevertheless, the ‘research methods’ passed down to us after a century of social science tend to work on the assumption that the world is properly to be understood as a set of fairly specific, determinate, and more or less identifiable processes.

Within social science conventions, which are the best methods (and theories) for exploring those somewhat specific processes? This is a matter for endless debate. Neo-Marxists discover world systems, or uneven developments, or they theorise regulation. Foucauldians discover systems of governmentality. Communitarians discover communities and the need for informal association and responsibility. Feminists discover glass ceilings, cultural sexisms, or gendering assumptions built into scientific and social science method. As a part of this, social science common sense also assumes that society changes. Indeed this is one of the rationales for social science: that it can participate in and guide that change. (Witness the health-inequalities finding mentioned above, but also the larger political inheritance of Euro-American social theory.) But, overall, the social is taken to be fairly definite. Such is the framing assumption: that there are definite processes out there that are waiting to be discovered. Arguments and debates about the character of social reality take place within this arena. And this is what social science is meant to do: to discover the most important of those definite processes. But this is precisely the problem: this is not necessarily right. Accordingly, it indexes the broadening shift that I want to make. The task is to imagine methods when they no longer seek the definite, the repeatable, the more or less stable. When they no longer assume that this is what they are after.

So what are those elusive realities? This is for discussion. I have my own sense of what it is that might be important and this informs my argument. However, I do not want to legislate a particular suite of research methods. To do so would be to recommend an alternative set of blinkers. Instead I argue that the kaleidoscope of impressions and textures I mention above reflects and refracts a world that in important ways cannot be fully understood as a specific set of determinate processes. This is the crucial point: what is important in the world including its structures is not simply technically complex. That is, events and processes are not simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp (though this is certainly often the case). Rather, they are also complex because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them. No doubt local structures can be identified, but, or so I want to argue, the world in general defies any attempt at overall orderly accounting. The world is not to be understood in general by adopting a methodological version of auditing.⁷ Regularities and standardisations are incredibly powerful tools but they set limits. Indeed, that is a part of their (double-edged) power. And they set even firmer limits when they try to orchestrate themselves hegemonically into purported coherence.

The need, then, is for heterogeneity and variation. It is about following Lewis Carroll’s queen and cultivating and playing with the capacity to think six impossible things before breakfast. And, as a part of this, it is about creating metaphors and images for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable. Slippery, indistinct, elusive, complex, diffuse, messy, textured, vague, unspecific, confused, disordered, emotional, painful, pleasurable, hopeful, horrific, lost, redeemed, visionary, angelic, demonic, mundane, intuitive, sliding and unpredictable, these are some of the metaphors I have used above. Each is a way of trying to open space for the indefinite. Each is a way of apprehending or appreciating displacement. Each is a possible image of the world, of our experience of the world, and indeed of ourselves. But so too is their combination. What this might mean in practice will be explored below. But together they are a way of pointing to and articulating a sense of the world as an unformed but generative flux of forces and relations that work to produce particular realities.

The world as a ‘generative flux’ that produces realities? What does this mean? I can only tackle this question bit by bit, and any answer will be incomplete. Nevertheless, in this way of thinking the world is not a structure, something we can map with our social science charts. We might think of it, instead, as a maelstrom or a tide-rip. Imagine that it is filled with currents, eddies, flows, vortices, unpredictable changes, storms, and with moments of lull and calm. Sometimes and in some locations we can indeed make a chart of what is happening round about us. Sometimes our charting helps to produce momentary stability. Certainly there are moments when a chart is useful, when it works, when it helps to make something worthwhile: statistics on health inequalities. But a great deal of the time this is close to impossible, at least if we stick to the conventions of social science mapping. Such is the task of the book: to begin to imagine what research methods might be if they were adapted to a world that included and knew itself as tide, flux, and general unpredictability.

This will take us, and uncertainly, far from a conventional discussion of method, but also from our common-sense assumptions about the character of the world and how we come to know it. And this in turn means that it is also important to avoid some possible misunderstandings:

• First, as I have tried to insist above, I am not saying that there is no room for conventional research methods. Such is not at all the point of my argument.
• Second, and more generally, I am not saying that there is no point in studying the world. I am not recommending defeatism. On the contrary...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: After method: an introduction
• 2: Scientific practices
• 3: Multiple worlds
• 4: Fluid results
• 5: Elusive objects
• 6: Non-conventional forms
• 7: Imagination and narrative
• 8: Conclusion: ontological politics and after
• Glossary
• Notes
• References