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The article presents the author's response to Martyn Hammersley's paper "On Feminist Mythology." Hammersley questions whether or not it is justifiable to privilege the significance of gender. What strikes me here is the assumption that gender is indeed privileged by feminists in a uniform way. The case for criticism is considerably weakened when Hammersley himself cites leading feminist writers who have not only questioned the privileging of gender over other factors such as race and class, but who presumably do not privilege gender in their work. Hammersley's references to methodological injunctions to explore women's experiences suggest a reading of feminist work which is limited to redressing the balance in theory, policy and research by focusing exclusively on women. The later part of his paper which focuses on the validity of experience as opposed to method is really making two claims: firstly, that in using experience as part of the approach to research then anything goes--critical awareness, rigour and so on are abandoned; secondly, that the recognition and inclusion of experience in knowledge or knowledge production does not automatically increase the validity of that knowledge. I have more sympathy with the second claim than with the first. Firstly, however, I do not believe that experience and method are polarized in quite the way, which Hammersley suggests. My view is that recent feminist debates have been about the role of experience in method rather than verses method.

This paper examines the character of the debate about 'quantitative' and 'qualitative' methods in feminist social science. The 'paradigm argument' has been central to feminist social science methodology; the feminist case against 'malestream' methods and in favour of qualitative methods has paralleled other methodological arguments within social science against the unthinking adoption by social science of a natural science model of inquiry. The paper argues in favour of rehabilitating quantitative methods and integrating a range of methods in the task of creating an emancipatory social science. It draws on the history of social and natural science, suggesting that a social and historical understanding of ways of knowing gives us the problem not of gender and methodology, but of the gendering of methodology as itself a social construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To provoke debate, the paper, after fifteen years, repeats and expands on an analysis of the use of empirical data and the role of quantification in articles published in some major British journals of sociology. The earlier paper argued that the training of undergraduates, and the influence and example of their teachers, tends to orient them, well before graduate education begins, towards particular kinds of research topic and, where empirical data are used, approaches employing no quantification or very simple techniques. It suggested this would be a self-reinforcing process unless there were far-reaching changes in undergraduate curricula which were unlikely to come about. It predicted that the divide between these aspects of British sociology and that practised in North America and many parts of Europe would widen further. British sociology has become somewhat more empirical over the past fifteen years, with the bulk of this expansion in the qualitative area. The more sophisticated quantitative approaches are not much more in evidence than before. This raises a number of questions which should be a matter of debate. It is worrying that the debate does not seem to be taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was prompted by Martyn Hammersley's (1992) paper 'On Feminist Methodology'. I suggest that Hammersley's assessment of feminist writings on method is flawed, mainly because his conceptualisation of these writings is too narrow. He portrays a uniform feminist methodology, ignoring obvious differences as well those which are more subtle. In criticism of Hammersley's assessment, I take the case of feminist ethnographic writings and indicate the range of writing even in this particular area of feminist methodology. Discussion centres on issues raised by Hammersley both explicitly and implicitly in his paper, namely personal reflexivity, power and knowledge. In contrast to Hammersley, I indicate both diversity of topic and method as well as what is shared by feminist ethnographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Pinch and Clark's recent article on the strategies of market pitchers for managing local economic reasoning. We suggest that their research is illustrative of the lack of seriousness and relevance to social issues of a small proportion of sociological studies. In developing this argument, the paper considers the methodology, ethical issues and substantive content of the article. We conclude by noting that, whilst the study of the work of market pitchers is clearly an important research topic, such study should have regard to local social and economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews general aspects of the theory and practice of the sociology of culture. It considers the contributions of mainline sociology, in the analysis of effects, institutions and formations, and relates the emphasis on effects, the selectively smaller emphasis on institutions and the relative neglect of formations to theoretical and methodological assumptions in orthodox sociology. It then considers contributions to the sociology of culture from other disciplines, in the study of traditions and of forms, and in attempts (Lukacs, Goldman, the Frankfurt School) to relate forms to formations. In this connection it reviews selections between orthodox cultural sociology and the theories and practices of formalism and structuralism. Finally, the paper proposes an approach based on recognition of 'the materiality of signs' and the consequent recognition of cultural technologies--'sign-systems'--as forms of historical and social relationship and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at some available members' methods for dealing with perceptual accounts that occasion non-acceptance on the part of accounterecipients. Perceptual-account producers and recipients include former mental patients, mental welfare officers, 'flying-saucer' witnesses and investigators of such sightings. The paper constitutes an ethnomethodological discussion of the management of communicative and cognitive order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the notoriously disordered and contradictory nature of Pareto's last and greatest work, the Trattato, is largely attributable to the place he was cast in the development of European social thought. Pareto set out to construct a rationalist-positivist model in the tradition of Bentham and Comte. But his acquaintanceship with a rising intellectual tradition, generally associated with the name of Nietzsche, confronted him with psychological and individualist themes which both revealed how little human action is governed by reason, and put in question the hypothetico-deductive model of Western science and its belief in objective truth. Pareto's resulting intellectual uprootedness translated itself into his last work. This work gained the virtue of presenting an original perspective on social behaviour, but suffered at the same time from not finding a methodology appropriate to its new interests. This paper also aims to show the centrality of Nietzsche's influence on Pareto, an influence almost completely neglected in the secondary literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first e-special issue for the journal Sociology and its chosen focus is the article ‘The coming crisis of empirical sociology’ by Savage and Burrows (2007). This article challenged sociologists with a variety of questions about the role, relevance and methodological opportunities for sociological research in the 21st century. On publication it stoked the already charged debates on a public sociology (Burawoy, 2004), the role of publicly funded research (ESRC, 2009) and relevance of sociological research in an age of burgeoning social media (Brewer and Hunter, 2006). This e-special provides a reprise of these debates and explores relevant papers in Sociology, as well as alerting readers to recurring themes and new directions on the topic of methods and social research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is concerned with the status of generalisation in interpretive sociology. The case made is that generalisation is inevitable, desirable and possible. It is held that interpretivism must employ a special kind of generalisation, characterised here as moderatum. However, an acknowledgement that such generalisations can be made must bring us to specify the limits of generalisation in interpretive research. These limits are the limits of interpretivism itself and the paper concludes that this implies the adoption of methodological pluralism in order to realise the full potential of the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparisons are central to sociology and prominent among them are comparisons between the way two variables are related in different contexts (e.g. the present compared to the past, blacks compared to whites, industrial societies compared to agrarian ones). It is crucial, therefore,; that analytic techniques used to test for such differences accurately reflect the true situation. A variety of statistical approaches have been used, most notably, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with dummy variables and interaction terms. Recently, however, Goodman's log-linear procedure has been advocated as a `better' way of dealing with certain types of comparisons and particular models h&sre been widely used. However, there is some question as to their applicability in answering theoretical questions typically posed in comparative sociological research. In this paper, we address this issue. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we set up a typical but hypothetical set of data that would be appropriate for testing comparative theories of socio-economic achievement or intergenerational mobility. this allows us to examine the ramifications of choosing particular analytic techniques on the conclusions drawn about theoretical propositions. following conventions established in the literature, we apply two analytic techniques to the same set of data under a variety of conditions. Specifically, we compare the use of widely applied OLS regression and log-linear models where we set (1) the slope differences and (2) the mean differences in the variables between the contexts to vary. The simulation suggests that the regression procedure is able to pick up differences which would be of theoretical interest to the sociologist while the log-linear procedure, given the particular situation modelled here, does not. This is more likely to occur in those cases where the contexts compared have very different distributions. This does not reflect any problems in the log-linear technique itself. Ordered models are more likely to detect these differences because they are parsimonious with respect to degrees of freedom. However, this is not the only factor, methodological or theoretical, that needs to be considered in the choice of techniques. In particular, the findings alert us to difficulties inherent in testing sociological theories where (1) operationalizations of important concepts can result in very, different measures and (2) conventional applications of these techniques fail to provide a valid test of proposed theoretical questions. Focussing on factors which may account for the differences observed, we address issues in the existing debate over the use of log-linear and regression models. We discuss the theoretical questions in stratification research for which log-linear techniques can be a useful tool and those for which it is misleading. Finally, we outline the theoretical and methodological tradeoffs in using each technique and suggest another not commonly employed in sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is composed of three sections: (i) Addresses the debate between positivism and ethnomethodology; defeats positivism's claims of incorporation or tangentiality; and raises the issue of the revolutionary potential of ethnomethodology itself (a) Analyzes some of the problems involved in identifying developments and revolutions within bodies of knowledge. (3) Compares conventional and alternative accounts of a particular action setting with which the authors have been specially concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent attempts to develop symbolic interactionist methodologies have sought to treat the interview as an object of sociological enquiry as well as a research instrument. But their accounts in terms of interactional rules and presentation of selves are primarily concerned with reactions to interviews, and the display of the interview setting in talk is treated as a resource rather than as a topic for investigation. Since such a reliance on the availability of phenomena is also a feature of the `natural attitude', lay and sociological usages of the interview share striking similarities. More specifically, both employ the documentary method of interpretation and, in order to claim a correspondence between theft accounts and some external reality, use remedies to counter misunderstandings. On the basis of tapes of selection interviews, the paper examines the competences and policies routinely adopted to provide for the contexting of talk as interview talk. Given that talk serves to display its setting (this is its reflexive character), talk becomes interview talk as members' managed accomplishment of a knowable context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical methodologies assume 'resolution into simple elements' as a necessary preliminary stage of scholarly investigation. They explicitly, or more often implicitly accept, therefore, that the conclusions reached reflect not only the phenomena analysed, but also the applied system of analytical subdivision. The paper explores and compares the main systems of analysis in current sociology: institutional, class and communal. It suggests a taxonomy of analytical systems and a cross-classification which is introduced to throw light on their conceptual properties at the societal as well as the individual level. It proceeds by discussing the issues of: (A) The societal roots of selection of analytical schemes in sociology; (B) The advantages and blind spots of the specific analytical systems; and (C) Attempts at the integration and reduction of analytical systems in contemporary sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]