[lit-ideas] A book I might have never read
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "james ennis" <james.ennis@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 19:54:04 +0900
The story goes like this. I have begun a project exploring the social
networks that link the winners in one of Japan's largest advertising
contests. I turn for help to Jim Ennis, until recently chair of the
department of sociology and anthropology at Tufts University, a social
network analyst, and briefly, when he was about to graduate and I was
a green-as-a-gourd new professor just hired by Middlebury College. We
go back a long way. While suggesting things that I might want to read,
Jim suggests the work of U. of Chicago sociologist Andrew Abbott. That
is how I find myself reading Abbott's _Time Matters: On Theory and
Method_, a book of whose existence I might well have gone to my grave
without ever knowing—and a book that impresses me greatly.
Why? Because Abbott is a sociologist well-versed in quantitative
methods and mathematical modeling who has also taken on board
postmodern critiques of positivistic epistemology. His grasp of
narrative and interpretive analysis is every bit as good as his grasp
of math and statistics, a rare phenomenon, indeed.
_Time Matters_ includes an autobiographical introduction and a series
of papers written in the 1980s and 1990s. So far I have read one,
"Transcending General Linear Reality," which analyzes the conceptual
weaknesses common in quantitative research that assumes that social
facts can be modeled as systems of linear equations. That assumption
is often made primarily because without it the math involved in
statistical analysis becomes very complicated, indeed. But it only
takes a little thought to realize that life mostly doesn't work that
day. (A thought that among other things--TANGENT WARNING!--directs my
eye to the copy of Checkland and Scholes, _Soft Systems Methodology in
Action_ sitting on the bookshelf next to me).
Now I'm reading chapter two "Seven Types of Ambiguity," and, yes, the
title is a tribute to William Empson's famous work of literary
criticism. But Abbott is not the sort of social scientist to be happy
with noticing ambiguity and throw up his hands in despair, throwing
out the baby of formal analysis with the bath of simplistic models. He
writes,
"In this paper I analyze 'positivistically' a phenomenon normally
assumed to forbid the possibility of positivism: the multiple and
seemingly incommensurable meanins assigned to human events. I discover
in current positivist research a source of untapped information about
those multiple meanings. This discovery does not deny the normal
critique of positivism, but rather suggests that the antipositivist
concept of ambiguity can be used to fold the seeming flatness of
positivism into a complex and subtle terrain.
"For some readers, bothering with the research produced by
sociological positivism and its cousins in political science and
economics may seem a waste of time. For them, its philosophical
presuppositions are ruined. Its correspondence theory of truth is
broken. Its 'causality' has proved mere reification. Yet there are two
problems with accepting the philosophical critique of positivism.
First, even though positivist social science has been shown to be 'in
principle impossible,' the vast majority of social science effort (and
funding) is in fact spent doing it. Such research is often highly
consequential, whether it be the market studies that shape consumeer
demand or the census figures that determine political districts.
"The second problem involves the motivations of those who deny the
efficacy of positivism. Proclamations against positivism often mask an
arbitrary unwillingness to think formally about the social world. One
asserts that the world is constructed of ambiguous networks of
meaning, argues for the complexity of interpretations and
representations, and then simply assumes that formal discussion of the
ensuing complexity is impossible. But this is obviously untrue. Many
people have thought formally about ambiguity, representation, and
interpretation. Nothing in those phenomena militates against thinking
in a rigorous, even disciplined fashion, as we see in the work of
Empson, Barthes, and many others."
In an already overlong posting, allow me one example of what Abbott is
talking about. He has noted that sociological studies often relate
several measures to a single concept, so that, for instance,
religiosity may be measured simultaneously by church attendance, daily
prayer, personal statements of belief, etc. Then, he goes on,
"But consider the reverse situation, the possibility that a given
indicator is attached to more than one concept. In such a case, one
measurable thing 'means' several conceptual things at once. Years in
school, for example, 'means' education, in the sense that we presume
(somewhat against our own experience as teachers) that time spent in
school results in more or less monotonic increase in education. But
years in school also 'means' exposure to popular culture or experience
with bureaucracy. Years in school even 'means' reduced time available
for criminal activity, because those in school are literally off the
street. In fact, in many individual cases years in school is probably
a more accurate indicator of time available for criminal activity than
it is of degree of education. This simple type of multiple meaning is
Empson's first type of ambiguity, a situation where one fact means
several things."
And there are six more to go. I'm hooked. Highly recommended.
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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