Abstract
This article examines the relationship between sociology and modern society by exploring the methodological implications of a modern ontology of society. Focusing on one of the signature methods of sociological research, the survey, we discuss how modern society has given rise to the survey subject who is able to participate in survey research. We finally consider recent developments that foreshadow the fall of the survey subject.
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Notes
Different concepts of modernity abound in the relevant literature. This article is not the place to discuss the fine points of all these concepts (for a good overview, see Seth 2016; for a critique of modernity, see Ascione 2016b). Rather, for a pragmatic definition of the term “modernity,” it may suffice to identify some of the core features of modernity on which there appears to be a fairly broad consensus. These features include the following: in the intellectual and philosophical spheres, the ideas developed in the age of Enlightenment; in the social and political spheres, the principles underlying the American and French revolutions; in the economic and technological spheres, the developments associated with the “industrial revolution.” Thus, modernity could roughly be described as the socio-cultural constellation that has emerged in the centers of Western Europe and North America in the eighteenth century, before spreading to wider areas of the globe. It should be noted that this broad basic concept of modernity encompasses both capitalist and socialist subvariants of modernity.
The term appeared earlier in an obscure manuscript by Abbé Sieyès (Guilhaumou 2006).
After the religion-based (static, cyclical, cataclysmic, or chiliastic) views of old, various dynamic inner-worldly views of history emerged. The radical endpoints of their range—like mirror-image twins—can be marked by the all-affirming stance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who “says Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming even all of the past” (Nietzsche 2000, p. 764) and the apocalyptic stance of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History whose “face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Benjamin 1968, p. 257).
To highlight the specific characteristics of modern estrangement, we distinguish the modern type of estrangement between individuals and their own society from estrangement (or, in this case, simply strangeness) between different societies or cultures and their respective members. It is a testament to the powerful rise of modernity that the estrangement of modern society from its members has become a matter of course. This is the familiar type of estrangement for sociology, being its precondition, and it is therefore anything but strange for the sociologist (wherein lurks the danger of dulling sociological self-reflection and succumbing to a new naïveté of the seemingly self-evident). Pre-modern societies, by contrast, lacking this type of estrangement, are, for that very reason, strange to the sociologist. Results of this interference of the two types of strangeness are problems that arise in a transcultural application of narratory analysis in sociology, as Matthes (1985b) has shown.
We should add that this process of modern estrangement can elicit ambivalent value judgments about it—it could be seen as alienation, but also as emancipation. The increased gulf between the individual and society has been thoroughly discussed in developmental psychology (Kegan 1982; Loevinger and Blasi 1976), however mostly without linking it to the specific historical and societal preconditions of modernity. Giddens’s (1991) work on self-identity in modern society made an important contribution to “sociologizing” concepts of developmental psychology.
The protagonists of modernity appear to be happiest in the pursuit of the “pursuit of happiness.” As long as the subjugation of the individual under a traditional society was real, and the opposition to it, heroic, the very pursuit of the ideals of modernity with their central promise of individual happiness could already form a compelling base for identity and give life meaning. Problems creep up when the actual pursuit of happiness becomes possible, for then choices become necessary and also challenging.
For example, the members of the Frankfurt School (among them Theodor Adorno, whose theories are discussed in this article) became highly influential meaning producers, the priests of the some groupings in the New Left, especially during and in the aftermath of the student and youth movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book One-Dimensional Man (1964) by Herbert Marcuse, one school member who did not return to Frankfurt after the war, but stayed in the USA, was required reading for many a serious activist. On the whole, however, the Frankfurters were such apocalyptic prophets of doom that they saw little chance for the student movement actually bringing about a substantial positive change. Only tenuously connected to the original Frankfurt School, the New Frankfurt School (e.g., Henscheid 1977) transported this abiding pessimism from scholarship into literary and humoristic realms by converting it to gallows humor. Appropriately, its flagship satirical magazine is titled “Titanic.”
This is the underlying idea for Habermas’s (1973a) characterization of the social sciences as “emancipatory” by their very nature.
For instance, qualitative research methods are commonly used also for applied purposes. Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the pioneers of applied research, worked on both quantitative and qualitative methods. An interesting detail of sociological lineage is that Barney Glaser, one of the founding fathers of “grounded theory,” was Lazarsfeld’s student.
The deep-seated dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative methodologies has been pragmatically softened by researchers using both methods alternately or even in the same project in mixed methods, multi-methods, or triangulation approaches (Saldern 1992; Sandelowski 2014; Seipel and Rippl 2013b; Tashakkori and Teddlie 2010).
In a parallel effort, Robert Gephart (1988) has conducted an ethnomethodological study of the work of statisticians. We extend this approach from a focus on the statisticians to a focus on the originators of much of the statisticians’ data, the survey subjects who are recruited and coopted into the process.
In addition, there is a growing technical threat to the representativity of telephone surveys because residential telephone landlines can no longer be assumed to provide access to the whole residential population. Even though statistical techniques have been devised to counteract sample selection bias (e.g., Heckman 1979), the increasing difficulty of collecting representative samples is a serious issue.
It may be à propos here to reference the Information Age through one of its own major motors: See Wikipedia article “Information Age.”
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