A Sea Change in Political Methodology

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2018

UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD he Tragedy of Political Science is the title of a 1984 book by David Ricci that made a bold argument concerning the evolution of the discipline. Ricci's thesis, put simply, suggested that as political science had become more 'professionalised' throughout the twentieth century so it had also become less relevant, more verbose, less engaged, more impenetrable, increasingly distant from practitioners of politics and the public. The discipline had simply not lived up to the high hopes of C. Wright Mills for the social sciences-as set out in The Sociological Imagination (1959)-but had, if anything, become ensnared in a trap of its own making. In 1967 the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) was created in the United States in order to encourage social engagement and activism amongst political scientists in direct rejection of the American Political Science Association's (APSA) commitment to political neutrality and refusal to engage in major social debates. The 'tragedy' as both David Ricci and the CNPS argued was that at a historical point when American society desperately needed the evidence and insights that political science could deliver the discipline apparently either did not want to engage or had little to say. Political science-to paraphrase C. Wright Mills-had failed to deliver on its early promise. To offer this disciplinary narrative is to offer little that is novel or new. The flaying of political science has emerged into a popular intellectual pastime in recent years and there are clear exceptions to this broad account in the form of individual scholars or subdisciplines that have retained a clear social connection. Engaged scholars, however, arguably became very much the exception rather than the rule in a profession that incentivised sub-disciplinary balkanisation, methodological hyper-specialism, theoretical fetishism and the development of esoteric discourses. This is, of course, an account of American political science that came to a head with the emergence of the Perestroika Movement in 2000 with its demands for greater methodological pluralism (within the discipline) and greater social engagement (beyond the discipline). While political science beyond the United States was never quite so seduced by the promises of rat-choice, quantitative, largen, mathematical methodologies to fuel a 'raucous rebellion', the issue of whether and how the discipline should be required to demonstrate its non-academic relevance, social impact or public value has become a global challenge for the discipline. This, in turn, has spawned a growing pool of scholarship on the structural and contextual factors underlying T

2 Recently publIshed by Talcott" Parsom und~r the title Th. Theory of Social and Economu: OtganUa&lon \London \941) tJ Cf. b.lB contribution. to the. dlllCUSS1Qn an "Dle PtoduktLVitit del: V()\.ks... Wlruchaft" at the m~tJ.ng of the: Vercin fUr Sonalpohtlk in 1909 (relmnUd ttL GC'.sa:JnmcUe A.u.fsa.U:.e Z:1lT SOLt.ologu u.nd Son((.l~ol"(lk) and "Ule Gret.U.\l.tz... lehre und du psychophY9lsche Grundgesetz" (1908) (reprInted III G,.rammdte tlu,(situ it,.,.. Wuuft.SchafCslchfC) VI FOREWORD hundred pages One of the most important of his methodological essays -"Roscher und Kmes und dIe 10glSchen Problems der Imtenschen National okonoffile" has not been Included in the present collection, whIle another important sectIon of the Gennan editlOn--"Methodlsche Grundlagen der SozlOlogJe" -has already been pubhshed in EngllSh 4 Yet except for the analysIs of the procedure involved in the vcrstehende explanation of behavIOur whIch 1s contained In the latter essay and in an earlier and les.s elaborate version, In the essay uUber elmge Kategonen der verstehenden SOZlologle,"5 Ii the mam propositions of Weber's methodology are fully con tamed here.

Systemic Practice and Action Research, 2008

The Oxford Handbook of Methodological Pluralism, 2023

The twentieth-century expansion of Interpretivist Methods in the social sciences could be characterized as nothing short of an epistemological revolution. Political science is unique for the way that Interpretive scholarship has been marginalized, where elsewhere it has transformed disciplines, becoming a normal part of inquiry. At the same time, the communications revolution has had an extraordinary impact on both knowledge production and political and social change. While computational methods and Big Data have renewed Political Science's con dence in quanti cation, Interpretivist scholars have been slow to address how digital data and communications a ordances impact both what we study and how we study it. This chapter points out that communications studies as a eld is founded upon Interpretivist assumptions and is part of this methodological revolution. What this means for Political Science is that given the widespread impact of the Interpretivist Turn there is simply no legitimate reason for the continued marginalization of Interpretivist Methods. What it means for Interpretivists in Political Science is that there is already a rich seam of social theory and methodological practice upon which Interpretivists can draw for a Digital Interpretivist Political Science and which provides scope for connecting Interpretivists across disciplinary divides. The aim of this chapter is to provide an introduction to this social theory and cross disciplinary spaces in hopes of facilitating these kinds of connections.

This paper intends to investigate into the adequacy, challenges and implications of social research that is based on scientific approach. It originates from two basic questions. Firstly, is scientific criteria of social research adequate to contribute to the construction of an holistic Social Sciences? Secondly, what are the challenges and implications of the "scientificity" of the Social Sciences? In general, the concentration of the mainstream social research has been more on the scientific perspective. Observable facts, proven evidences, empirical and measurable evidences are the main manifestations of this scientific perspective. Such a "scientificity" has been developed through conventional research methodology. The problem is, could social research be an holistic research methodology only by concentrating on the scientific realm? If intangible realm such as spirituality is included, is the conventional research methodology posesses adequate tools of analysis in understanding the intangibles? This paper intends to answer these questions and observe the challenges and implications faced by the scientific perspective. For these purposes, a textual analysis will be adopted. It will be shown that scientificity of social research is not a sufficient way to understand an holistic Social Sciences. It is based on some of the challenges such as for instance the question of how to observe the unseen, and quantifying the unquantifiable. From the challenges, it will cause certain implications that will be discussed in this paper.