GIDDENS93: New Rules of Sociological Method - A Positive Critique of Interpretative Socilogies
[GIDDENS93A]
Giddens, Anthony.
1993.
New Rules of Sociological Method -- A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies.
Polity Press, pp. 186.
[HM24 Gid CLMS, ISBN 0-7456-1116-8]
MEMO: about "method" in the sense in which social philosophers characteristically employ the term - the sense in which Durkheim used it in his Rules of Social Method [p. viii].
Interpretative sociologist are "strong on action, but weak
on structure". On the other hand, fuctionalist and structural
approaches, while "strong on structure", has been
"weak on action "
[p. 4].
Conclusion [pp. 163-170]:
The social world, unlike the world of nature, has to be grasped as
a skilled accomplishment of active human subjects; the constition
of this world as "meaningful", "accountable",
or "intelligible" depends upon language, regarded, however,
not simply as a system of signs or symbols but as a medium of
practical activity; the social scientist of necessity draws upon
the same sorts of skills as those whose conduct he or she seeks
to analyse in order to describe it; generating description of
social conduct depends upon hermeneutic task of penetrating the
frames of meaning which lay actors themselves draw upon in
constituting ans reconstituting the social world.
Sociology is not concerned with a "pre-given" universe of
objects, but with one which is constituted or produced by the active
doings of subjects.
The production and reproduction of society this has to be treaded
as a skilled performance on the part of its members.
The realm of human agency is bounded. Human beings produce society,
but they do so as historically located actors, and not under conditions
of their own choosing.
(The duality of structure:) Stucture must not be conceptualized
as simply placing constraints upon human agency, but enabling.
Processes of structuration involve an interplay of meanings, norms,
and power.
The sociological observer cannot make social life available as
a "phenomenon" for observation independently of drawing
upon her/his knowledge of it as a resource whereby it is constituted
as a "topic for investigation".
Immersion in a form of life is the necessary and only means whereby
an observer is able to generate such characterizations.
Sociological concepts this obey a double hermeneutic
The hermeneutic explication and mediation of divergent forms of life
within descriptive metalanguages of social science
Explication of the production and reproduction of society as the
accomplished outcome of human agency.