Abstract
Recent years have seen numerous sociological disagreements devolve into heated debates, with scholars openly accusing their peers of being both empirically wrong and morally misguided. While social scientists routinely reflect on the ethical implications of certain research assumptions and data collection methods, the sociology of knowledge production has said little about how moral debates over scholarship shape subsequent research trajectories. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, this article examines how sociologists respond to criticisms of the moral worth of their research. The article outlines three typical responses: (1) accepting the criticism and changing direction completely; (2) accepting the criticism but changing discursive framing to incorporate existing research without being subject to critique; and (3) navigating through the debate by devising new research directions that do not trigger such criticism. To demonstrate, the article looks at how sociologists of religion responded, in their published scholarship, to criticisms of secularization theory as depreciating religious people and spiritual experience. Across the responses, we show that sociologists have included moral considerations in their empirical investigations, and have switched among several diverse moral justifications to address—and also avoid—criticism. We conclude by demonstrating that this model can be extended to other domains of sociological inquiry, including the study of gender-based wage inequality and methodological nationalism. The article highlights the importance of mapping the moral frameworks sociologists use for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of morality.
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Notes
We use the term moral in the formal sense, to denote understandings of good/bad or right/wrong, and not in the substantive sense, which refers to a person or a situation’s alignment with collectively held standards of morality (“she is a good person, therefore she is moral”). See Hitlin and Vaisey 2013 and Tavory 2011 for full discussion of this distinction.
For an overview of the various approaches that consider macro phenomena using a pragmatic approach,see Gross 2018.
While this study cannot provide an exhaustive layout of all the courses sociological controversies may take or to predict their outcomes, it highlights the most common ways sociologists handle uncertainty about the moral worth of their work. For instance, this article does not address what happens when scholars actively ignore moral critiques.
This article does not offer suggestions on how to resolve such conflicts, but rather highlights their endemicity in the production of sociological knowledge.
Recently, psychologists have similarly made attempts at self-inventory (Duarte et al. 2015).
Moreover, Boltanski and Thévenot’s self-labeling as “pragmatic” has been in itself controversial, see Quéré and Terzi 2014, pp. 95–99.
For a broad overview of the background, development, and applications of the new French pragmatic sociology, see Blokker 2011, as well as the other articles in the same issue. Lemieux (2014) also expands on the intellectual background of Boltanski and Thévenot’s project and its early reception in France.
However, in his later book On Critique (2011 [2009]: chapters 3–5), Boltanski identified the limitation to actors’ awareness and critical abilities in specific institutional and political contexts.
Boltanski elaborates on the bases for individuals’ critical capacity and the conditions for critique in chapter 2 of On Critique (2011 [2009]).
Nevertheless, the new French pragmatic sociology owes much to Bourdieu, see Potthast (2017). Susen (2014b, pp. 314-318) usefully lays out the multiple points of convergence (and divergence) between Boltanskians and Bourdieusians. Bénatouïl (1999, pp. 387-388) further highlights the interests the two approaches share.
However, recent scholarship has countered this claim by emphasizing that moral justifications may function as a distinct form of “moral capital” in the Bourdieusian sense (Ignatow 2009; Swartz 2010; Valverde 1994). Yet, much like the new French pragmatism, such research owes much to Bourdieu’s theory, but also departs from it in significant ways (Curtis 1997).
Within the confines of this article we cannot possibly do justice to the breadth and depth of work as ornate as that of Boltanski, Chiapello, Thévenot, and their collaborators. In addition, a burgeoning auxiliary literature exists on their approach. For a collection of articles providing some sense of this work, see Susen and Turner 2014 .
To model the three most common types of responses, we draw on Boltanski and Chiapello’s model of critiques of capitalism, as developed in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005 [1999]), and adapt this model to track scholarly debates as well. This model is partially derived from Garfinkel’s (1967) more generalized model of the responses to perceived injustice.
Boltanski and Chiapello originally used the term mystification to highlight the evasive features of this response. However, we adopt the term reconstitution from Clayman’s (1995, p. 107) discussion of Garfinkel to point to the generative sides of this type of discourse.
Although the three types of responses are largely contemporaneous, reconstitution will usually begin at a somewhat later stage than the other responses.
For a compelling example of such discussion, see Zuberi (2001).
While this term is typically translated as “city” or “city-state,” these English versions do not fully capture Boltanski’s intended meaning, and we choose to retain the French cité. Similar concerns have led others to translate the term as polity, world, and regime.
Several different types of tests exist, about which we do not go into detail here. See Boltanski 2011 for full details.
For similar arguments in the recent literature see Dromi 2016, Forthcoming; Stamatov 2013; Young 2006.
Similarly, when Fox and Tabory (2008) found that areas with both high and low levels of state support for religion predicted increased religious attendance compared to areas with middling levels of state regulation, the authors still emphasized that a free religious market was better because their “scaled measures that capture the essence of what the intertwining of state and religion actually entails suggest that government involvement in religion leaves some people religiously cold” (p. 268).
For example, the New York Times published a collection of opinion pieces in 2012 titled “Can Predictive Policing be Ethical and Effective?” in which social scientists and commentators debated the ethics of the use of social science methods to pre-empt criminal activity. (http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/18/can-predictive-policing-be-ethical-and-effective [retrieved 12/15/15].
See also Gellner (1982).
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Acknowledgments
The authors contributed equally to this article and are listed alphabetically. The authors are indebted to Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Jacobs, Michèle Lamont, Ann Mische, Margarita Mooney, Philip Smith, and Eleanor Townsley for invaluable feedback on this project. The authors also thank Matthew A. Andersson, Thomas Lyttleton, and Candas Pinar for their comments on previous versions of this article. Finally, the authors thank the Editors and reviewers at Theory & Society whose input has greatly improved the final article.
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Dromi, S.M., Stabler, S.D. Good on paper: sociological critique, pragmatism, and secularization theory. Theor Soc 48, 325–350 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09341-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09341-9