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Interestingly, though the issues raised by a focus on methodology were shown to be complex and, in Derrida's term, undecidable, the organisers in their programme notes, displayed a confidence that the method of discussion is the way to engage the intellectual issues and is also the procedure which would break down social isolation. The intentions were not to attempt to resolve in an univocal and reductive way the problems of methodology but, rather, to engage them and through such an engagement, practically address the problem of community. Therefore, the conference had a theoretic interest, to address the inner-relation of broad methodological issues with the selection of methods of research, and a practical concern, to overcome researcher isolation. The solutions implied were dialogue and community. It is interesting to now read these presentations in light of such practical and theoretical conference concerns.
I was delighted to be asked to chair the event. I had met many of the organisers during and after a Trinity seminar presentation I had given earlier in January (coincidentally enough, on the issue of methodology as it impinged on my own research). The energy and enthusiasm for debate and discussion they had displayed on that occasion showed me that they had the capacity and the ability to carry it off. And carry it off they did. The conference was attended by over 60 participants. The presentations were lively and the questions challenging. Though all the presenters were postgraduates attached to universities in Ireland, the range of accents (American, German, Dutch, Israeli as well as Irish and British) and dialects was rich. This is telling with regard if not to what has been coined the 'global village', then more with regard to the Europeanisation of Irish society (Boucher). Afterwards, I had the general sense that the great success of the event was limited by the, as always, curtailed discussion time. Its success also invited the question in the more informal discussions, "What next?"
'What Next' is now before you. Through their discussions, the organisers considered ways that they could build on this initiative. They decided that this publication would continue to develop the initial impulses which inspired the first event. Included below are 5 of the 6 papers presented at the conference. All of the papers were submitted for review and comment (by Dr. Brian Torode, Dean of Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Science TCD and Mr. Ben Tonra, Lecturer in Political Integration, TCD) and the authors undertook revisions. The finished products appear below. Because of the narrow timeline involved in meeting a relatively immediate publication deadline, this introduction had to be based on the earlier conference versions of their papers.
While the prefix 'post' has appeared in front of many nouns (modernity, structuralism, industrial society, feminism, not to mention the more quotidian graduate) and is inscribed in media representations of the contemporary age, this is the first time I saw this now ubiquitous prefix as a preface to the term methodology. This suggests that the dissolution of the 'grand narratives' (Lyotard) which postmodernity announces has penetrated the very identity of social research. Regardless of theories of society, regardless of the implosion of the social, regardless of the rise of surveillance, the centrality and solidity of the methodological division in the social sciences seemed to remain. After all, methodology is the way the social sciences not merely claim but demonstrate their 'scientific' credentials.
Yet, as the papers below show, the narrative or 'consensus' on the methodological division no longer exists. What now seems to be more in focus is the differences within the interpretive tradition. Post-methodology, therefore, seems to refer to the diversity of positions that can be, and are, taken within the interpretive tradition, rather than between the 'positivist' and interpretive tradition. Whether in the case of the failure of political science to predict the fall of the Berlin wall (Herrberg), the inability of the research to take into account the unavoidable influence of the person who does the research (Boucher), the need for research to be flexible at every stage of the research process (Cox), the need to make a place for reflexivity given the political and ontological significance of feminism (Lentin), or in the importance of developing a discourse appropriate to the phenomenon being studied (Riper), methodological uniformity has been, and continues to be, disrupted. Political, social, ontological and personal concerns have now invaded what before was thought to be technical arena. Perhaps this is what most distinguishes the 'post' of post-methodology.
Yet it is not entirely true to say that methodology has not previously been a contentious area in the social sciences. Peter Berger (1963: 13) in his Invitation to Sociology said (way back then) that "some sociologists ... have become so preoccupied with methodological questions that they have ceased to be interested in society at all". In this case he was addressing the attempt by sociologists to establish the scientific legitimacy of their vocation which at that time led to a self-absorbed concern with technique. In his satirical if perhaps sexist terminology he comments that "in science as in love a concentration on technique is quite likely to lead to impotence". To the non-sociologist, arguments about methodology often appear to be so absurdly preoccupied with how to go somewhere with one's research, that the journey itself has become irrelevant - not unlike the protagonists in Waiting for Godot (2).
On the other hand, if the papers below are in any way representative of contemporary post-graduate interest in Ireland, the preoccupation with technique is marginal. With the possible exception of the paper by Cox, the preoccupation with methodological questions is seen to be interwoven with societal questions. Rather than ceasing to be interested in society at all, the papers show that one cannot address methodology without simultaneously addressing society. This is most clearly brought out in the papers by Lentin and Riper.
Because feminist research is not only a substantive concern (it is also a political, epistemological and ontological concern), arguments about methodology are simultaneously social, political and ontological arguments. "Feminist sociologists who reject the binaries of theory and practice, objective and subjective, and researcher and researched, do so because they believe that knowing is a political process, and that these binaries encourage an elitist sociology which cannot produce ways of knowing which avoid subordination" (Lentin). "Reflexivity," says Lentin, is a "feminist issue" because "we feminist social scientists are also the women whom we study". Though Lentin passionately calls for reflexivity, she acknowledges that her presentation is more argumentative than reflexive ("So why am I being so argumentative?") because of the "need to continually challenge ... patriarchal formulation of knowledge" and so proclaim that the personal is political, but it is also theoretical (Lentin). As we shall see, both the concern with embodying (as well as calling for) reflexivity and the concern with the place of the 'theoretical' in this methodology come up again in Boucher's paper.
Riper, artfully drawing on the insights of Foucault, shows how our way of relating to death is intricately interwoven with the discourse we use to understand and 'know' death and dying. The attempt to develop scientific terminology and procedures to understand death and dying, despite the great achievements of medical science, simultaneously has led "to the exclusion, denial, invisibility, and silence of the dying (institutionalisation, professionalisation, and secularisation)". Through her research, she identifies "three distinctive discourses on death and dying", where each discourse, in dialectical fashion, develops on the grounds of the interest in supporting "more humane ways of dying". While, in this presentation, the ground/interest (i.e., developing a discourse "where above all the dying persons can speak and act for themselves") itself remains to be theorised and critically examined, her analysis of this discourse shows, by implication, that the traditional scientific distinction between theory and practice is artificial and abstract, and symptomatic of an early one-dimensional discourse itself in need of development. From these two presentations alone, we come to recognise that a focus on methodology, far from representing a lack of interest in society, points to specific ways that society is organised.
As already mentioned, Herrberg addresses the limitations of various approaches in political science (behaviourism, systems theory, transactionalism, functionalism and neo-functionalism) to understanding international relations in general and European integration in particular. Herrberg is struck by the disjunction of what the approaches attempt to explain and what they fail to explain; their failure, she says, lies in their 'one-dimensionality'. Though the paper seems to be as much a focus on theory as methodology, the point she makes is that theory and methodology have to be measured against the complexities of contemporary political reality. That is, methodology cannot just aim to be scientifically objective if that, in turn, prevents the one who studies politics from being able to take the unpredictable (which as Hannah Arendt [1958] argued is the essence of political action) into account. "The science of international politics", Herrberg says, "did not foresee the end of its [cold war] era". The reality of contemporary international relations, it seems, forces political scientists to reflect on the limitations of scientific methodology. Whether it also forces inquirers to reflect on the limitations of science itself, in the way it does, for instance, in the work of Arendt, is another question.
What collects all the papers and differentiates them from more conventional reflections on methodology, is the recognition of the intrusion of social and political reality into what was previously seen to be an exclusively technical and epistemological matter. In the presentations by Cox and Boucher, this intrusion takes a different, if less radical, vis a vis Lentin and Riper, direction (in terms of the classic methodological division referred to above). Both papers argue for a separation of the theoretical and philosophical from the 'empirical', thus, implicitly at least, diverging from the claims made by Lentin and Riper. Yet both seek to integrate a kind of 'reflexivity' into the research process itself. The concern for Boucher is how the research process can take into account, as integral to the very research itself, the "simple observation that the people [he] trained with, or studied under, appeared to choose their research areas for personal reasons". That is, personal biography and theoretical interest intersect in practice. Another case of the 'personal is theoretical' although, for Boucher, this question is an "empirical problem and not a theoretical or methodological one". Boucher then goes on to argue for, and show a procedure for dealing with this question. (Does this not demonstrate a concern for both theory and method?) To this extent, Boucher and Cox agree and to the same extent both share the parameters of empiricism. Like the everyday member who decisively stops speculating about the gender of the baby after the birth, both argue that the broad theoretical and philosophical issues (of subject and object, materialism and idealism, rational and non-rational modes of thought) are "ultimately irresolvable ones". Unless we transform our notion of social theory as distinctively different from philosophy, one would have to agree with their conclusion. But this is precisely what the ethnomethodology of Garfinkel, the critical theory of Habermas and the feminism of Stanley (see Lentin), and to me, above all, the hermeneutics of Gadamer show must be done (i.e., transform our understanding of and relation to theory/theorising).
Cox's paper fulfills the very useful task of making the work of Gerhard Kleining accessible to an English speaking audience and shows the connections between Kleining's work and the position of E.P. Thompson. From the overview provided, there is a very striking similarity between Kleining's approach and the symbolic interactionism of the American sociologist, Herbert Blumer (1969). Kleining's four rules for "scientific and qualitative" research relate closely to Blumer's famous three premises (1969: 2-3). Both theorists emphasize that everyday members are not passively and mechanically complying with prescribed cultural norms (à la Parsons), but are actively involved in the process of "making meaning" (Blumer) or "discovering the world, not simply interpreting it from an immobile standpoint" (Kleining, as cited by Cox). Thus, unlike their more quantitative colleagues, both Blumer and Kleining argue that the sociologist must build, systematise and elaborate on the ways we, as everyday members, are already involved in understanding reality. "The everyday methods are the reservoir for all the social scientific methods. They are developed from them by exclusion, by separation from their everyday context, [and] by abstraction" (Kleining as cited by Cox). The everyday social way of gaining an understanding of reality is not eschewed by the scientific perspective, but rather is to be used and developed by the researcher as s/he goes about understanding social phenomena. In this case the social is not so much an intrusion as an adjunct and a resource for scientific research. It seems to me (Bonner 1994), on the basis of what Cox provides, that, as symbolic interactionism has to deal with the ethnomethodological (Douglas 1971) critique (i.e., the everyday methods of understanding which symbolic interactionism treats as a mere resource, have to be addressed and examined as a topic in their own right), so too would one who subscribes to Kleining's qualitative methodology.
Boucher's lively paper seeks to provide a practical solution to the problem that the topic of research is empirically related to the biography of the researcher. Thus, he would argue that it is not an accident that Ronit, the Israeli woman, is interested in feminism as it enables an understanding of daughters of Holocaust survivors, or that Heleen, the Dutch sociologist, wants to develop a discourse "where above all the dying persons themselves speak and act" or that Antje, the German woman on an exchange programme in Boston, would develop an interest in International Relations, or that Laurence, whose life is an experience of being subject to "complex and contradictory social contexts", would develop an interest in a methodology which developed this practical and sense-making ability or, for that matter, that Gerry, the Irish-American, would find a pragmatic and social-psychological solution to a theoretic problem. In this case, the invasion of the social into the methodological is personal and particular, implying along with Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Gadamer's hermeneutics, that the reality of the social lies in its particularity.
Boucher, in his presentation, argues (the persuasive words solution?) that the "practical solution to the problem [of researcher influence] entails ... applying to oneself the theories and concepts one has developed to explain others. Likewise, one must apply one's research methods to oneself". But he not only argues for this solution, he seeks to exemplify it by applying it to his own research, thus perhaps lending unknowing weight to Arendt's (1977) claim (regarding the influence of Socrates on social and political thought) that practicing what one preaches is the most persuasive of all methods. Boucher shows that once one makes reflexivity an issue for methodology one, therefore, has to do or apply it in one's own writing and not just polemically demand it.
To summarise, what all the above papers in their different ways show is the diversity of the interpretive tradition, and they show this diversity in a way which demonstrates an unwillingness to divorce the social (the personal, the political, the everyday) from the methodological. If one were to formulate the interest which moves these post-methodological discussions, it lies in the recognition that the beginning and the end of social theorizing is a social enterprise through and through. The 'post-' of post-methodology is organised by the principle, most directly stated by Lentin, that the process of creating knowledge and the product of that knowledge need to be integrated and that this integration needs to be shown.
An implication of this principle is that the commodification of knowledge, as this has taken shape in the more positivistic expressions of social science, needs to be resisted. Knowledge packaged as a result, without reference to the way the procedures and theorising produced that result, is an alienated relation to knowledge. The papers below are instances of the way a self-conscious social and political analysis is oriented by the need to resist the commodification of knowledge.
This interest and principle (i.e., integrating the process and the product in knowledge creation) coheres with wider developments in methodological understanding during the second half of this century. As the editors (3) of the very recent The Polity Reader in Social Theory state, the "division between 'naturalistic' and 'interpretive' social science has become regarded by many with increasing scepticism". This is due in part to the recognition of the role that communication (Habermas), meaning (Barthes) and language (Gadamer) play in all research, whether social or natural (Dallmayr and McCarthy 1977: 1-15). These developments have been organised around the inter-related themes that 'everything known requires a knower' (phenomenology) and that all conceptualised knowledge, whether natural or interpretive, makes use of a linguistic structure (the linguistic turn). The turn "toward language and linguistic analysis, signified first of all a realisation that empirical reality could not be directly grasped without an adequate conceptual and linguistic framework" (7). "The natural sciences, in other words, develop frames of meaning that make the physical world intelligible to us in specific ways. It is not just the social sciences which concern themselves with issuers of meaning" (Giddens et al, 1994:3).
Also, and more significantly, for social inquiry, the tradition of 'dialectical hermeneutics' represented by Gadamer shows the inextricable interconnection between understanding and language. "Experience is not so much something that comes prior to language, but rather experience itself occurs in, and through, language" (Palmer 1969: 207). Because "language is the medium in which consciousness and the world are joined" (Gadamer 1986: 3), and is "not a property of the individual, but of the social collectively" the "contrast between the 'subjective' character of the human sciences and the 'objective' form of natural science is thus to some degree transcended" (Giddens et al. 1994: 3). As Palmer (1969: 136) states: "(t)he very definition of what is presumed to be self-evident rests on a body of unnoticed presuppositions, which are present in every interpretive construction by the 'objective' and 'presuppositionless' [inquiry]". This pre-structured character of understanding is given to us publicly in language.
These developments, which are cryptically and elliptically outlined in the last paragraph, raise many issues concerning methodology. These issues involve addressing the notion of methodology itself as a concern with showing community, the notion that science is itself a way of being, the tensions between methodology and thinking, the difference between experience and empiricism, between ideology and the learning/teaching relation, and so on. That is to say that a whole new area of inquiry is opened up by the transcendence of the subject-object distinction through life-world and language. All of these issues can now, in the words of Blum and McHugh (1984: 123-151), be made subject to discourse.
This brings us back to the aims of the organisers addressed at the beginning of this introduction. As already stated, they sought to create a forum where methodological issues and student isolation could be addressed through formal and informal discussion. Dialogue, discussion, debate were envisaged as the ways that intellectual and practical concerns could be resolved. Interestingly, the live dialogical encounter is, according to Gadamer, the way the interpreter is to overcome the "alienation in which a text finds itself". In this sense, the event itself, and its offspring (e.g., this publication) point to what is most significant about post-methodology, i.e. the importance of developing experiential knowing through dialogue. The organisers are, therefore, to be congratulated on their achievement and I hope that this birth will receive the nurturance and encouragement that every good birth deserves.
(Note 2) When describing this conference to a cousin of mine, I received the comment "Sure I suppose you have to argue about something". To the everyday member, arguments about methodology seem to be arguments about arguments. [Back]