Abstract
In 2009, I was fortunate enough to attend a meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism (SSSI), which was held on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois alongside the larger meeting of the Qualitative Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QCQI). There were, perhaps, 40 people attending the SSSI meetings. In contrast, there were several hundred people at the Congress from a wide range of disciplines, including communication studies (what in the United Kingdom would be called cultural studies). Many of the sessions had the feel of a political rally rather than an academic conference.
The argument in this book was advanced by several presenters and plenary speakers, including Norman Denzin. I hope that the author and 18 ‘supportive’ reviewers will not mind if I make some comments as a sympathetic critic. Like them, I believe that we desperately need a strong critical sociology in these deeply conservative times. But I have to be critical towards the way interpretive approaches are represented and what seems a contradictory and potentially authoritarian version of the critical tradition.
The main argument is that ‘to varying degrees, all social research paradigms are implicated in sustaining hegemonic social orders’ (p. 35). A central problem is ‘Cartesianism’, which ‘asserts an ontological premise in which there is a radical separation between subject and object and between people and the external world’ (p. 31). This assumption informs ‘analytic induction’, which is employed by all qualitative research traditions (even ethnomethodology) in producing what are claimed to be ‘objective’ findings based on ‘empirical evidence’ obtained in ‘a localised context’ (p. 72). Through reanalysing three pieces of data (a newspaper report, an excerpt from a television programme and an interview), the book seeks to show that feminism, critical race theory and post-structuralism address the structures of power and hegemony that are unavailable to interpretive qualitative researchers.
Although critical qualitative research is often presented as cutting edge, there is nothing new about these arguments. During the late 1960s, critical scholars such as Alvin Gouldner (1968) roundly criticised symbolic interactionists for writing about oppressed groups without considering the structural causes. In recent times, however, there has almost been a collapse of critical theorising, which had lost moral and scientific credibility even before the collapse of the Soviet Union. No one has said anything compelling that defines or explains current problems, such as climate change, and what may become a long period of political and economic instability and declining living standards. Instead, in this text, we are left with a Manichean struggle between good and evil races reminiscent of the excesses of radical feminist epistemology during the 1980s, a dismissal of empirical research that might cause us to question our own political certainties and almost a complete lack of engagement with actual political debates and issues.
Although there are some interesting sections, there is something odd about a critical review of interpretive traditions that does not consider empirical studies, such as Elliot Liebow’s (1967) Tally’s Corner, that describe the experiences of subordinate groups and the processes that result in inequality. There was no reference to the debate between Louis Wacquant (2002) and Mitchel Duneier (2002) about the politics of representation. There is also something contradictory about presenting post-structuralism as supporting critical theory when the epistemological assumptions are quite different (for a discussion, see Travers, 2006). Perhaps most worryingly, there is an underlying authoritarianism or intolerance towards other viewpoints that also characterises those lobbying for quantitative methods in recent times.
‘Given that social research methods were developed during periods of devastating racial oppression’, we are told that ‘researchers must consistently ask how white racial ideologies are embedded in existing research paradigms’ (p. 21). This, however, begs some difficult questions. How are non-white or post-colonial methods different or morally better? Why should the critical theorist know more about ‘whiteness’ as the alleged underlying power structure than other members of society? And to what extent do these extreme views reflect growing class and racial divisions within the United States in the last decade? I would not expect students of any colour to welcome being lectured on ‘whiteness’ by this self-appointed critical elite, itself largely white and middle class. Nevertheless, this book offers a provocative viewpoint that is worthy of consideration alongside other positions.