Related Papers
Qualitative Sociology
2 3 Qualitative Sociology How Do We Know What We Mean? Epistemological Dilemmas in Cultural Sociology
2014 •
Mabel Berezin
Journal of English for Academic Purposes
The writing of this thesis was a process that I could not explore with the positivistic detachment of the classical sociologist” 1 1 From S3 in our corpus. Although we list the writers and titles of our corpus at the end of this paper, in the text we discuss the theses by discipline (H for Histor...
2006 •
Louise Ravelli
Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology
Making Research Sociological
2010 •
Chaitanya Mishra
Developing a distinctive disciplinary vantage point is crucial to becoming a professional. Thesis writing at the Master's level allows the professional opportunity of thinking and writing independently. For students of Sociology in particular, it is fundamental to recognize that the social is everywhere. There is nothing that is not socially constituted. Further on, a Sociology student should develop the sociological vantage point in order to see how the social is constituted. This the student can do by engaging and ‘dialoguing' with well-known sociological theorists. The student will then be able to think about how and why societies are historically constituted, how and why societies are diverse, internally differentiated and hierarchized and how and why societies transform themselves. They will learn to unravel the relationship between different levels of a society. In addition, they will also learn the significance of the structure even as they visualize historical human ...
Qualitative Inquiry
On the Social Relations of Research: A Critical Assessment of Institutional Ethnography
2007 •
Kevin Walby
ABSTRACT Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience and examines how textual sequences coordinate consciousness and ruling relations. This article explicates some of the shortcomings of IE, so future institutional ethnographers can work with these. I offer a critical assessment of IE, focusing on its ontology of the social and the issue of truncation, the constitutive hermeneutics of interviewing, and the production of possible subjects in data analysis. The promise of IE is its critique of traditional sociology and introduction of ethnographic practice inquiring beyond nominalism into extra-local social relations that, through texts, govern local action. But IE establishes itself in a binary of emancipation versus regulation, so it is less concerned with its necessary complicity in objectification. IE must continue to be a sociology of possibilities, open to its own contradictions and continual reflexive intervention into itself.
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory
Unformulable Practices? Articulating Practical Understanding in Sociological Theory
2006 •
Mattias Wahlström
Language & Communication 13/2:81-94
Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of method in researching language 1993
1993 •
Ben Rampton
Methodological troubles as problems and phenomena: ethnomethodology and the question of ‘method’ in the social sciences
Michael Mair, Christian Greiffenhagen
Across the disciplinary frontiers of the social sciences, studies by social scientists treating their own investigative practices as sites of empirical inquiry have proliferated. Most of these studies have been retrospective, historical, after-the-fact reconstructions of social scientific studies mixing interview data with the (predominantly textual) traces that investigations leave behind. Observational studies of in situ work in social science research are, however, relatively scarce. Ethnomethodology was an early and prominent attempt to treat social science methodology as a topic for sociological investigations and, in this paper, we draw out what we see as its distinctive contribution: namely, a focus on troubles as features of the in situ, practical accomplishment of method, in particular, the way that research outcomes are shaped by the local practices of investigators in response to the troubles they encounter along the way. Based on two case studies, we distinguish methodological troubles as problems and methodological troubles as phenomena to be studied, and suggest the latter orientation provides an alternate starting point for addressing social scientists' investigative practices.
Anthropology & Education Quarterly
The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality
1993 •
Suzanne de Castell
Journal for General Philosophy of Science
The diversity of modes of discourse and the development of sociological knowledge
1979 •
Billy Joe Lingahan
This paper presents an analysis of the structure of contemporary sociological knowledge in terms of a theory of scientific discourse. The concept of ‘discourse’ is introduced as a theoretical refinement of the concept of ‘paradigm’ and is applied to the classes of knowledge claims of the natural and social sciences. It is concluded that general modes of scientific discourse are definable in terms of their vertical differentiation from everyday discourse, while particular modes of sociological discourse are additionally definable in terms of their horizontal differentiation. A classification is then proposed which identifies three modes of sociological discourse: natural, technical and formal.
A dialogue on Sociology and Ordinary Language Philosophy
Leonidas Tsilipakos
