Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron argue that “for the sociologist, familiarity with his social universe is the epistemological obstacle par excellence.” The researcher is very much a part of the world under study and subject to much of the same influences and constructions as the agents involved in the research project. Thus, the investigator tends to take the world for granted by unconsciously internalizing “everyday notions.” Problematics are constituted around preconstructions, demarcating objects of study on salient social problems such as the problem of ageing, the problem of youth, the problem of leisure, etc., which are falsely recognized as scientific objects. This taking over of prescientific definitions of problems has been the characteristic of sociology and the main concern which Bourdieu and his colleagues address.In the construction of the object, it is imperative to break with familiar concepts and notions of the world, to move beyond the limits of common-sense problem formulations, and develop an autonomous object area instead, which has systematic foundations and formulates its own questions. The object is determined by conditions of possibility – the researcher’s disposition, and position within the academic field and the society. Being scientific means that the object is free from preconstructions, which requires a scientifically grounded knowledge or faith to the fabricated knowledge. As Saussure puts it, the object is constructed from a particular point of view. The investigator’s view of the object owes to his position in the social space and the scientific field.
The positivist tradition, on the other hand, asserts that the construction of the social fact must be objective and free from the biases of the researcher, who stands above the phenomena under study, because the broad aim is to uncover general “laws” that will predict certain relationships. Weber is critical on this illusion of value-free investigation. The researcher is very much a meaning-giving individual, along with other meaning-giving social agents, and is situated in the process of social life in general and research in particular. In contrast to the lofty positivist scientist, sociologist is necessarily involved in, and not above, the world under study.
Marx notes that the social world, the “real subject” in its “concrete totality,” exists independently outside the mind. The agents’ knowledge of it is mediated through the construction of concepts and categories, which find expression in words. Ideas about reality that words contain are best described as the property of the social agents bonded by common language. Thus, each concept or category – the practical knowledge social agents use to understand their world – are historically and culturally specific, existing as an “abstract one-sided relation within the given, concrete living whole.” Contact with reality, in so far as the agents become aware of it, is contact with a conceptualized reality.Marx says that “the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending… The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of the thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, and practical appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before...” Researchers are studying the same object, yet this is constructed in a diverse approach because of their varying frameworks owing to their stances in the field of social space.
In organizing the research problematic, Marx rejects the empiricist approach of taking the concrete totality, for example the population of a society, as the starting point of the research. Scientific investigation cannot begin with the concrete and then move towards more simple concepts until the relationships and connections are reached. For Marx, this is “a chaotic conception of the whole.” This is simple submission to the preconstructions, to the abstractions of common-sense. An illustration of this would include research engaging in the application of standardized survey instruments, taking apart the concrete totalities and replacing them with the set of abstractions such as occupation, income, educational level, etc.
“The concrete... is the concentration of many determinations... [a] unity of the diverse.” Bourdieu says that “the common sense knowledge of the agents, their ‘practical sense,’ is the starting point for any sociological understanding.” This is one step in developing an autonomous object area. The “practical sense” has its own logic, meaning, agents have a better knowledge of the social world under study than the researcher. The prime task of the investigator, equipped with scientific knowledge, is to reconstruct what is “concrete in the mind” of the agents – their conceptualized reality or practical knowledge. This is reconstructing social reality that is historically and socially unique to the agents designated as subjects of research.
For Weber, “total reality” can never be grasped in its entirety because of its infinite characteristics and complexity. Only a finite portion of that infinite reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation. The construction of social fact, which involves the selection of problems, phenomena, and relationships to be studied, is always based to some degree on the values of the researcher, the sponsors, and others. The analyses of social phenomena always depend on “one-sided viewpoints according to which – expressly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously – they are selected, analyzed, and organized...”
It has been thought in the positivist tradition that the social fact achieves its importance, in the sense that it becomes “worthy of being known,” on the basis of the regular recurrence of certain relationships. These regularities constitute the general “laws,” which contain the “essential” aspect of reality. Individual events that cannot be explained by these “laws” are considered as “accidental” and, therefore, unimportant part of reality. Weber criticizes these assertions. He argues that the attempt to reduce reality to a system of “laws” leaves behind the meaning and significance of the reality in question. In contrast to the repeatability that is characteristic of the artificial constructions of empiricists, social facts are always located in their historical and social singularity.
Given the infiniteness of the social world, how is the researcher able to discern what portion would constitute the object of research? The construction of social fact is based, not on the knowledge of regularities, but on the cultural significance which the object has for the investigator. That small portion of concrete reality is colored by value-conditioned interest and it alone is significant to the researcher. The perception of the reality’s meaningfulness enables the investigator to focus on the characteristic richness and uniqueness of the object. That alone will constitute the object of causal explanation. “Cultural significance” cannot be conceived on the basis of general “laws.” A presuppositionless investigation of the social reality is, therefore, impossible.
To summarize, in constructing the social fact, it is imperative upon the researcher to cultivate awareness of its dispositions and stance within the social space (reflexivity) alongside the field position occupied by the agents to realize the value-relevance of the social reality relative to their positioning, and to sociologically reconstruct and make explicit the practical knowledge of the agents under study using the tools of the researcher’s “craft.”
Reference: Bourdieu, P., J. C. Chamboredon, and J. C. Passeron. (1991). “The Craft of Sociology.” Walter de Bruyter & Co. Berlin. Texts from Marx’s “Grundrisse” and Weber’s “The Methodology of the Social Sciences”
