Social science methods for the 21st centuryMike Savage

University of Manchester

Uncertain times There have been huge investments, and a considerable

enhancement of social scientific methodological capacity, which has delivered undoubted good

This has occurred at a crisis moment when digitalisation offers profoundly challenging ways of gathering, analysing and deploying new kinds of social data (see Savage & Burrows 2007).

These new currents are redrawing boundaries between natural and social science, and between academic and commercial research.

In this conjuncture the academic social sciences need to appealing to technical authority alone and recognise they are paradigm wars going on around methods

The remarkable rise of social science

The growth of the post-war social sciences is one of the most important, yet un-researched, aspect of post-war change. – Social scientists are 3% of UK academics 1948 > c. 45% 2001– Social scientists play pioneering role in elaborating new

‘technologies of the social’ in post-war years• National sample survey (from 1930s)• The qualitative interview (from 1950s)• The ‘case study’ (from the 1960s)

– Social scientists generate ‘epoch descriptions’ which come to define the meaning of social change itself

• ‘Affluence’ (1960s)• Post-industrialism (1970s)• Globalisation (1990s)

• Social science disciplines largely replace the humanities in defining the nation through a focus on its ordinary qualities (see Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method)

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The prospects for social science today….

There is now an argument that in the 21st century, new kinds of social research might eclipse the academic social sciences. This is based on: – Problems with conventional social science research repertoires

(e.g. falling response rates, the routinisation of interview methods)

– The growth of huge commercial research agencies, who (sort of) do social research though with little academic input

– The way that social research agendas are increasingly intertwined with natural sciences (e.g. climate change; medical research), so making it more difficult to champion narrowly ‘social’ research repertoires. (RCUK emblematic of larger changes?)

– The challenge of digital data, which means that social traces are routinely left, without the need for social scientists to conduct specialist fieldwork to extract data.

Straws in the wind?

• The future of the Census• E-borders• Debates in marketing research.• The politics of MPs expenses • The end of Social Trends• ‘crowdsourcing’ devices

2: A new kind of social science?

• Over the past decade, social data has proliferated beyond our previous imagination, and we now routinely leave remarkable data traces.

• Consider Tesco loyalty cards, google, geo-demographics, etc

• Does this offer the prospect of new kind of social research? See the following example

• MIT Media Lab: Reality Mining

Social science reactions

• Reality mining could be dismissed as– Lacking theoretical awareness – Gimmicky– Having too much ‘noise’ and lacking necessary

information (e.g. on individual respondents)• However, this kind of research is strongly in

keeping with current social theory, with its concerns with – The relational and ‘post-human’– Transactions, interactions and complexity– Dynamism, movement, and flow

• We need to recognise that different kinds of paradigms of social research are being mobilised and that we need to be alive to other ways of doing social research

Paradigm battles (1): ‘depth’ vs ‘surface’

In defining their identities and activities, academic social scientists invoke ‘depth models’, implicit in positivist, realist, and hermeneutic methods

• Both the interview and the sample survey are championed as a means of delving into, and revealing, ‘hidden’ social processes.

• Both allow ‘inference’, ‘abstraction’ and the search for regularities, a ‘causal’ social science in which particularities are subsumed to ‘underlying’ forces

• Digital data, by contrast – works through surfaces using data on whole (sub-)populations. – is concerned not with revealing the hidden, but with arraying

surface data in visible and accessible form.– It concerned with particularising, as much as generalising.– Is implicated in an audit and commercial ‘neo-liberal’ climate. – Can be seen as part of ‘descriptive turn’.

Paradigm wars (2): individuals & networks • The rise of the sample survey in the mid 20th century

depended on discrediting the ‘field analysis’ approach, in which it was deemed essential to study whole populations.

• Sociological focus was placed on, and remains with, individuals (even despite the intellectual prominence of post-humanist theoretical currents).

• Hence, despite the early prominence of British network research in the 1950s (Barnes, Bott, Mitchell) this tradition was largely dispersed (Burawoy 2000).

• But, transactional data allows the radical revival of network methods, where understanding the links between transactions, and not the attributes of the individual ‘transactor’ becomes a central research issue.

• E.g. Amazon; Tesco loyalty cards; marketing research, etc.

• Here, there is also potential for cross fertilisation with academic social network analysis expertise

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My parting shot

• The second half of the 20th century was the golden age of the social sciences.

• It is too soon to assess how knowledge will be transformed during the 21st century.

• But there are important developments taking place in the natural sciences and in commercial sector and social scientists cannot afford to be complacent…