Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework Review

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Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework ReviewGerring's unique take on the endless methodological battles among social scientists--quantitative versus qualitative, interpretivists versus positivists, modelers versus historical institutionalists--will help you understand what's really at stake when academics debate methodologies. But more than that, this book will help you rethink your own approach to methodological issues. Political scientists, I beseech you: throw away the stale, pat homilies of KKV, and learn from someone who's thought more and probed deeper into core issues in social science methodology.Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework Overview

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Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples Review

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Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples ReviewLooking at Western research practices from the 'underside' of a positivist paradigm deeply entrenched and diffused throughout public and private educational, governmental, and corporate tentacles, Linda Tuhiwai Smith is a Maori (New Zealand) intellectual presenting a counter-methodological narrative stemming from a collective indigenous historical cynicism and whose voice bespeaks the refusal to be objectified by an inherently racist and imperialist mode of constructing knowledge and re-presentations of non-Western peoples. Deconstructing Western research paradigms is simply an act of defiance and resistance for Smith, particularly since she constructs a radical alternative methodology rooted in self-determination, social justice, intellectual property rights, and active participation in all knowledge-making, contributions to the research processes, and dissemination of 'findings'. The exigency of articulating a research methodology aimed at critical praxis for Western and non-Western peoples interested in indigenous issues emerges at a point where globalization and neo-liberal imperial practices and investments are opening new spaces for the unilateral and/or predominant benefit of Western research regimes that continue capitalizing and objectifying indigenous peoples through racist and incorrigible projects that erase human dignity, i.e. Human Genome Diversity Project.
The book can strategically be divided into two main sections: the first section explores the contemporary and historical legacy of an imperial tryst between Western scientific, economic, and ideological formations shaping relations with alterity (Chapters 1-5); the second section outlines a radical alternative methodology for conducting research on indigenous peoples and issues (Chapters 6-9). The first chapter reveals the 'Enlightenment' and positivist threads that weave imperialism, history, writing, and theoretical practices that continue to shape current research and socio-political policies on an international level. Smith states: 'research within late-modern and late-colonial conditions continues relentlessly and brings with it a new wave of exploration, discovery, exploitation, and appropriation' (24). Deconstructing the historical legacy of imperial practices is also a call for rewriting and rerighting history with indigenous perspectives. The second chapter outlines the Baconian processes by which Westerners come to view the world as a standing reserve of objects for empirical inquiry, discursive appropriation, and mimetic comportment processes aimed at subjugating and 'controlling' nature and indigenous peoples with an intellectual will to power stemming from racist ideologues who trace some form of theoretical lineage back to Bacon, Kant, Hegel, Hume and others. Borrowing from Stuart Hall, this process moves from classification of the world and others, to collapsing images for a convenient system of representation, to presenting a reified model for comparative analysis, and, finally, establishing criteria for hierarchical positionality. Chapter three delves further into deconstructing research, as viewed through imperial eyes, and how this methodology produced a self-perpetuating apparatus comprised of multifarious disciplines for the construction and future survival of colonial 'knowledge' and all those who invest in these truth regimes that purport to be 'universal', 'neutral', objectively sound, and constructed on a foundation of 'absolute certainty'.
Chapter four and five highlight many instances of how imperial research regimes continue to invest in the discursive and 'scientific' construction, re-presentation, and exploitation of indigenous peoples for profit and social control. The globe has become one large information colony where research is the means to inscribe social and ideological control and Westernized fabrications of history on the backs of indigenous peoples around the world. The most infamous example of how the imperial research regime continues to exist is through scientific projects stemming from private corporate entities mainly subsidized by governments. The Human Genome Diversity Project attempts to subjugate indigenous peoples by mapping and reifying DNA and possessing it as 'intellectual property' for future use. The attempt to patent the genetic make-up of the Hagahai people (New Guinea) by the U.S. government is indisputable proof of how these scientific projects threaten the future, autonomy, and human rights of indigenous peoples.
The second part of the book focuses on constructing an indigenous alternative to decolonize indigenous peoples from Western regimes of research based on emergent tribal social issues, practices, and beliefs. The center of this decolonizing project is constructed through Polynesian metaphors of 'space-time'. The center of social activity and identity is an archipelago comprised of self-determination in terms of tribal autonomy on a social, economic, and research level, as well as the full participation in inter-tribal and inter-national relations. Healing, decolonization, transformation, and mobilization are the four main 'directions' that frame the spaces of this project. Survival, recovery, and development are the main 'tides' that connect and transform all directionality of the project. This methodology is intended to transform indigenous peoples from passive objects in Western research to active-participants in an indigenous process of reconfiguring themselves and the world around them. Respect becomes the main affective principle for the survival of indigenous peoples and the project: 'through respect, the place of everyone, and everything in the universe is kept in balance and harmony'the denial by the West of humanity to indigenous peoples, the denial of citizenship and human rights, the denial of the right to self-determination'all these demonstrate palpably the enormous lack of respect which has marked the relations of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples' (120). Without respect, there is no dignity.
Chapter seven outlines a means of articulating such a project to indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and the challenges associated with it. Chapter eight provides a list of current indigenous research projects. Chapter nine provides a case study of the Maori peoples in which the method outlined in chapter six was put into practice. Chapter ten details with the methodological transformation of passive objects to active agents and lists tactics for strengthening and sustaining critical research for decolonizing processes.
Generally, when the researched become researchers, self-determination and healing can take place, communities can create and control research processes and the subsequent naming of the world, and they can define their relationship with others and the environment.
If a critical theroetical/methodological 'flaw' or problematic of this decolonial methodology exists, it might come to presence from a post-structural disdain for outlining a process by which people can 'liberate' themselves from Western imperialist research regimes. But then again, post-structural thought is mainly a Western construction and/or response to
'modernity' and its discontents.Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples Overview

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The Definition of a Profession Review

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The Definition of a Profession ReviewAnyone who has ever done field research knows that you have to sell authority figures on the merit of what you are doing. Social Scientists don't always like to think of themselves in this way, but it is a necessity. This book explores the brilliant insight that early intelligence testers adopted a medical metaphor, and did so in a way that was remarkably similar to their contemporaries in the dental field. And both established credibility first in the schools as a means towards social progress. I, for one, knew absolutely nothing about dentistry at the turn of the last century before reading this book. Nor did I ever suspect it was relevant to my interests in standardized testing and personality. This book neither criticizes testing, nor praises it. It merely explains the process by which a group of researchers established credibility of their field - and it does so very well.
{If history of testing is a topic of interest, I would rate higher - a 5}.
It is a good companion to The Big Test: The Secret History of the American MeritocracyThe Definition of a Profession Overview

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Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions Review

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Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions ReviewCulture
A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions
by A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhorn
with the assistance of Wayne Untereiner and appendices by Alfred G. Meyer
Vintage Books
1952
Please note- I have the Vintage paperback version, which has a separate listing and which is "unavailable." If you want to see the cover of the book I am reviewing- look at that listing. As far as I know, this could be the same edition- it's not clear from the title listing here.
What does the word "culture" mean?
I was watching a college football game on ABC last week and the announcer was talking about a new coach and how the coach wanted to install a "culture of winning." And the other announcer said, "Why does everybody use this word "culture" what does it even mean?"
I thought he had a good point. From the announcer's point of view he would prefer a phrase like "winning spirit" but that phrase also implicates cultural analysis.
Although this book was originally published in 1952, "No. 1 of the Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University"($425.) it still packs massive explanatory punch. If I'm going to read straight social science, I want big time explanatory power. Of whatever the author is talking about. I don't want to get bogged down in the minutiae of a "scientific" field that is not central to my profession.
From that perspective, Culture is a whale. You don't have to take my word for it. Go try to buy this old paperback book on Amazon. That's social science utility, right there.
Kroeber takes a very detailed approach to the origins, history & present usage of the term "culture" by everyone- if by everyone you mean the academic traditions of germany, russia, britain & the united states. For some reason, France is excluded- not a small matter in the field of "culture study." I mean... Foucault? Like him or hate him he's pretty central to any discussion of the field.
On the other hand, it was nice to read about the meaning of culture without all the French gobbledygook gook. French cultural theory is incomprehensible.
Kroeber begins with a discussion of the coining of the term in Germany. We're talking 1750's or thereabouts. In England, writers used "culture" to mean "manners or cultivation." The British analogue to the emergent term in Germany was "civilization." I'd imagine there are still plenty of living Americans who use "civilization" for culture without even considering whether it's the "right" word.
In the 1800's British and American social scientists honed in on "culture" and gradually abandoned describing culture as "civilization." Then, in fine social-psuedo science form circa 1900-1950, other social and hard scientists tried to define what, exactly, "culture" means. There are a lot of definitions. Hundreds. Krober breaks them down into categories, "psychological," "genetic," "normative." There are seven categories including the hilarious "incomplete" section.
So Kroeber goes through all this using clear writing, to the extent possible. All the excerpts are short so you can just skip through them if they bum you out.
The second section includes longer excerpts. Here you begin to see a refinement of what the author's feel are the significant contributions to a very complex, confused topic. I also lost interest more often, since the passages were getting longer and involving more discipline specific jargon. Ultimately, the idea is to integrate/blend the identified categories.
The third section is a more free flowing discussion of what the author's view are significant aspects of cultural analysis, whether or not they are contained in the definitions. For example, they discuss the relationship between Culture and Language. That relationship turns out to be key, and is not discussed at all in the definition section.
The final part is the summary. Obviously, this is the pay off, and if I didn't know I was boring the tears out of anyone who made it this far, I would just quote it verbatim. But one takeaway point was "avoid individual actors in writing cultural history." That coincides with my own predilections regarding cultural history. It's "history without people." I was also left with a much more expansive sense of modes of inquiry into cultural problems. I suppose that's why this book is so expensive.
I could write about this book forever, but it's 9 AM. Time to get on the horn!Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions Overview

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