Re Imagining Social Science
In 2015 IACR held its annual conference at Notre Dame (USA) around the theme of Re Imagining Social Science. It is rather fashionable to acknowledge that there is a crisis in the social sciences today and proclaim that our understanding of social science is due for a transformation or a new way forward (see, for example, Latour 1993, 2005; DeLanda 2006; Gorski 2004, 2015; Gross 2009; Reed 2011) But what would it mean to re imagine social science? Would it mean to rethink its theoretical foundations? Reconsider its purpose? Re evaluate its practices? Proposed solutions to this crisis generally involve proclaiming the need to move beyond some determining concept or paradigm that stands over and above the social scientist, haunting the social scientific imaginary. We need to move beyond positivism, beyond realism, beyond postmodernism, beyond the Leviathan, beyond totality, beyond essence, beyond methodological individualism, beyond homo economicus, beyond value neutrality, beyond the subject, beyond anthropocentrism, and so on. Realisms, structuralisms, constructionisms and pragmatisms proliferate, all claiming answers, all claiming a better way forward. Of course, for the less theoretically minded, the effects of these debates are felt less directly; nevertheless, following theory, so too practice. Disputes have raged about the best way of getting at and interpreting social phenomena, and all too often this has involved setting methodology against methodology. Quantitative is set against qualitative; different styles of ethnography, interviewing, surveying, field theory and systems analysis are all weighed and often set against each other. The underlying contours of these disputes are quite simple: depth against generality, micro against macro, ideographic against nomothetic, particular against universal. Practices and methodologies are retheorized, different conceptions of normativity proffered along with new acronyms and heuristics (NAH) all wanting to suggest new and often superior ways of doing social science. Arguments about laws and language, discourse and data, realism and relativism, positivism, post positivism and postmodernism have at the very least obscured our view, leaving social science with a weariness regarding theory, and a veritable industry based upon creating new or recycling old insights, often by importing theory from 'exotic' continents (namely France) or 'rediscovering' past and forgotten paradigms, all the while leaving the social scientist with a perpetual sense of fatigue, resignation and deja vu. We are at once wanting to get on journal of critical realism, Vol. 15 No. 4, August, 2016, 327 341