Non- positivist methodologies[1]

Since sociology was founded as a discipline in the 19 th century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, the study of society has developed in several different ways. The early rise of sociology was deeply rooted in positivist philosophy favoured by Comte, which relied on scientific methods and techniques to study society. Nn Postivist approaches developed as an alternative to positivism.

As early as the 19th century, positivist and naturalist approaches to studying social life were questioned by scientists like Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, who argued that the natural world differs from the social world because of unique aspects of human society such as meanings, symbols, rules, norms, and values. This view was further developed by Max Weber, who introduced Non-positivism (in the form of interpretative sociology ). According to this view, sociological research must concentrate on humans' cultural values. These approaches claim either that ‘scientific’ approaches are inadequate on their own for collecting, analyzing and explaining data, or that they are totally inappropriate in a subject that deals with human behaviour. 

Thus some sociologists who advocate the use of interpretive and qualitative approaches suggest that they should be used to supplement positivist methodology; others that they should replace positivist’ approaches.

There are several approaches in social sciences that are opposing the positivistic view, commonly referred to as Non-positivist or anti-positivist views. They are:

Interpretive sociology

This idea has been developed by Max Weber. It is connected to hermeneutics and deals with understanding human social behaviour and its influence on social context. Weber defined sociology as the study of social action. Action is social when it takes account of other members of society. Weber believed that an explanation of social action necessitated an understanding of the meanings and motives that underline human behaviour.

• Interpretive sociology focuses on the meanings people attach to their social world. It shows that reality is constructed by people themselves in their daily lives.
• Interpretive Sociology can be defined as the study of society that focuses on discovering the meanings that people attach to their social world.
• This can also be loosely defined as ‘understanding’, rooted in the concept Verstehen (German term which means ‘empathic understanding of human behaviour’).
• It is an approach that centres the importance of meaning and action when studying social behaviour and interactions.
• This approach diverges from positivistic sociology by recognizing that the subjective experiences, beliefs, and behaviour of people are intrinsic aspects of what we observe or in other words there is no such thing as a purely objective phenomenon.
• In simple words, this approach tells us that in order to study and understand society and social phenomena, we must ‘enter or step into the shoes of the other’ and nothing can be understood from the outside.

Sociologists who take an interpretive approach are usually the strongest advocate of qualitative data. They argue that the whole basis of sociology is the interpretation of social action. Social action can only be understood by interpreting the meanings and motives on which it is based. Many interpretive sociologists argue that there is little chance of discovering these meanings and motives from quantitative data.

In sociology, the study of interpretive sociology, occupies central importance.

Difference between Positivist and Interpretive sociology

Interpretive sociology has various limitations. The major ones are:

1. It is possible that observation may be influenced by personal bias.
2. Direct observation also requires prior knowledge of the culture being studied.
3. It assumes that people in society consider their actions to be rational, which may not always be the case.
4. It also has been regarded as an inadequate account of action since it remains  excessively individualistic.

Symbolic interactionist

Symbolic interactionists do not reject the attempt to establish causal relationship within sociology. However, they tend to believe that statistical data does not provide any great insight into human behaviour. Interactionists see human behaviour is largely governed by the internal process by which people interpret the world around them and give meaning to their own lives. Symbolic Interactionism advocates that meanings emerge through the process of interaction. It views social life as a process in which the individual interprets his environment and acts on the basis of this interpretation. There are two important concepts in this theory, the definition of the situation and the social self.

The definition of the situation means that the idea that people’s actions are shaped more by the subjective meaning given to their situation than by the purely objective aspects of the situation. individuals construct the meaning of the situation on the basis of their experiences, needs and wishes and also on the basis of the customs and beliefs of the social group.

Interactionists believe that individuals posses a ‘self concept’, or image of themselves, that is built up, reinforced or modified in the process of interaction with other members of society. The responses of others to an individual may make it impossible for him or her to sustain a particular self concept; the self concept will change, and in turn the behaviour of the individual will alter accordingly.

This view has its origin in G. H. Mead’s work “Mind , self and society”. The implications of these views for sociological methodology have been developed by the American interactionist Herbert Blumer (1962). Blumer rejects what he regards as the simplistic attempts to establish causal relationships which characterize positivist methodology. Blumer argues that sociologists must immerse themselves in the area of life that they seek to investigate. Rather than attempting to fit data into predefined categories, they must attempt to grasp the actor’s view of social reality. This involves ‘feeling one’s way inside the experience of the actor’. Since action is directed by actors’ meanings, the sociologist must ‘catch the process of interpretation through which they construct their action’. This means that the researcher ‘must take the role of the acting units whose behaviour he is studying.

This perspective has four key focus points

1. It focus on the ways in which human beings are distinctly ‘symbol manipulating animals.’ It is through symbols men are capable of producing’culture and transmitting history.’
2. For the symbolic interactionist the social world is a dynamic and dialectical web, situations are always encountered with unstable outcomes and lives and their biographies are always in the process of shifting and becoming, never fixed and permanent.
3. Social world is always interactive i.e. humans are always connected to one another.
4. Symbolic interactionism looks beyond symbols, processes and interaction in order to determine underlying patterns or forms of social life.

The other intellectual underpinnings are versthen[2], naturalism[3] and ethnogenics[4].

Herbert Blumer

Herbert Blumer (1969) suggests that symbolic interactionsim is based on three main premises.

First of all, it is based on the premise that human beings act towards things on the basis of meanings that those things or objects have for them. Such things may include physical objects such as trees or chairs; or human beings such as friends or enemies; or even institutions such as school or a government building.

The second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows.

The third premise is that these meanings are modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters.

Hence, symbolic interactionism views meaning as having a different source than those held by the two dominant views just considered. Instead, it sees meaning as arising in the process of interaction between people.

Thus people define situations in different ways depending on their life experiences and perspectives. This means that for symbolic interactionists, interpretation becomes the key.

Hence, Blumer contends that we are indebted to George Herbert Mead for the most penetrating analysis of social interaction. While Mead identifies two forms or levels of social interaction in human society which he refers to as ‘the conversation of gestures’ and ‘the use of significant symbols’; Blumer understands these terms as ‘non-symbolic interaction’ and ‘symbolic interaction’. Blumer further says that ‘non-symbolic interaction’ takes place when one responds directly to the action of another without interpreting that action; whereas, ‘symbolic interaction’ involves interpretation of the action.

Dramaturgical approach

Apart from Blumer’s popularising of the symbolic interactionist approach, another major contributor to this perspective was Erving Goffman. He made a distinctive contribution by popularising a particular type of interactionist method known as the dramaturgical approach. The dramaturgical approach also derives from the interpretive approach and it compares the everyday life to the setting of a drama – a theatre or a stage. M Francis Abraham attests that, “The dramaturgical approach is the study of social interaction as though participants are actors in a play in a theatre....hence; social behaviour becomes analogous to theatrical drama.

This approach, popularised by Goffman is based on the following premises. Just as actors act in front of us and present to us certain visuals or images, we individuals also like to present certain qualities of our personalities in front of the outside world; while we like to hide some of them.

Goffman’s primary focus has been to understand the process of impression management. Hence, individuals not only present themselves to each other in a presentable manner, but also attempt to manage the image they present. This aspect gives an important dimension to dramaturgy. That is, it assumes that ‘all the world is a stage’ and that people manage their acts in face to face interactions. In a way, it also gives a complex dimension to the action perspective. If we are to understand the meanings of actions as Weber postulated, it would be necessary to deeply and subjectively involve ourselves during interactions, in order to gauge whether an individual is engaging in the act of impression management.

Phenomenology

Phenomenological sociology has largely developed out of the works of Alfred Schutz, who is best known for The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967).

Schutz suggests that in the course of our action, we employ assumptions about society and how it works and we use verstehen in a crude way to predict the action of others. As a result, our acts are ‘meaningful’ not because we have a particular intention or motive, but because other actors interpret our action as having symbolic significance.

This perspective further says that our reality consists just of meanings; therefore the job of the sociologist is to discover the meanings of actions and behaviour and nothing else. In popularizing this approach, Schutz uses the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in order to critique Max Weber’s methodology. He does this in order to construct a radical account of the nature of social action. In Schutz’s view, Weber failed to give any real account of the way in which actions can only be constructed by drawing upon a shared set of social concepts, symbols and meanings.

Schutz developed this perspective in order to basically suggest that, we individuals act successfully only when all share the same set of meanings. Thus, in many ways we can understand this approach as a departure from the conventional model of interpretive sociology

Phenomenology represents the most radical departure from the ‘scientific’ quantitative methodology. Phenomenologists go further than interactionists in that they reject the possibility of producing causal explanations of human behaviour. They do not believe that it is possible objectively to measure and classify the world. To Phenomenologists, human being make sense of the world by imposing meanings and classifications make up social reality. There is no objective reality beyond these subjective meanings.

Phenomenologists believe that the problem of classification is universal, and not unique to particular types of data. All people, all of the time, make decisions about how to classify things, and these decisions are the product of social processes. For example, on a simple level, what one person might classify as a ‘chair’ might be classified by another person as a ‘wooden object.

Phenomenologists believe that sociologists should limit themselves to understanding the meanings and classification which people use to give order make sense of the world. Phenomenologists concentrate almost entirely on the subjective aspects of social life which are internal to the individual’s consciousness.

Ehtnomethodology

The term ethnomethodology was coined by Harold Garfinkel who is best known for his work Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). ‘Ethno’ refers to the stock of common sense knowledge available to members of society; ‘methodology’ refers to the strategies which actors use in different settings to make their meanings understandable.

Ethnomethodology is a perspective within sociology which focuses on the way people make sense of their everyday world. In this regard, Garfinkel attests that “Ethnomethodological studies analyze everyday activities as members’ methods for making those same activities visibly rational and reportable for all practical purposes”.

People are seen as rational actors, but employ practical reasoning rather than formal logic to make sense of and function in society. It refers to the analysis of the ways in which we actively make sense of what others mean by what they say and do. Much of our everyday interaction occurs through informal conversations with others.

Garfinkel analysed these conversations. He showed how these conversations are based on shared understandings and knowledge. He refers to these shared understandings and knowledge as ‘background expectancies’.

The theory argues that human society is entirely dependent on these methods of achieving and displaying understanding.

Although this approach was developed by Garfinkel, it is based on Schutz’s phenomenological reconstruction of Max Weber’s interpretive sociology.

From the above discussion Non -Positivists in sociologists seems to have following elements:

• Study of society should be confined to understand the internal , intended meanings which are understood by the actors or which rise in interaction process
• Scientific methods, similar to natural sciences cannot be used in sociology. In general Non- positivists favour the use of qualitative methods like verstehen, deduction, comparative analysis etc. They argue that there is no methodological unity of science, i.e., that we cannot use the same tools to study natural and social sciences.
• As discussed in different approaches Non-Positivist methodology varies in terms of establishing causal connections. Weber advocates establishing causal pluralism, but phenomenologist are against such efforts. In these methodologies in general the emphasis is on understanding.
• Unlike positivists, Non-Positivists deny the possibility of developing universal laws of human societies.
• Scientific knowledge can be seldom tested is testable.
• Non-Positivists consider understanding the subjectivity of a person as a task of social investigation. It admits that absolute objectivity is not possible. But at the same time sociologists like max Weber argue that social investigations should be done objectively as far as possible.