New Rules of Sociological Method New Rules of Sociological Method A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies Anthony Giddens Second Edition Polity Press Copyright © Anthony Giddens 1993 The right of Anthony Giddens to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published by Hutchinson, 1976. Second, revised edition first published in 1993 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Reprinted 1994, 1997, 2005, 2007 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Maiden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. 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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk Contents Preface vii Introduction to the Second Edition 1 Introduction to the First Edition 16 1 Some Schools of Social Theory and Philosophy 28 Existential phenomenology: Schutz 29 Ethnomethodology 39 Post-Wittgensteinian philosophy: Winch 50 Summary: the significance of interpretative sociologies 57 Hermeneutics and critical theory: Gadamer, Apel, Habermas 60 2 Agency, Act-identifications and Communicative Intent 77 Problems of agency 78 Intentions and projects 82 The identification of acts 84 The rationalization of action 88 Meaning and communicative intent 93 3 The Production and Reproduction of Social Life 100 Order, power, conflict: Durkheim and Parsons 100 Order, power, conflict: Marx 106 The production of communication as ‘meaningful’ 110 Moral orders of interaction 114 vi Contents Relations of power in interaction 116 Rationalization and reflexivity 120 The motivation of action 122 The production and reproduction of structure 125 Summary 132 4 The Form of Explanatory Accounts 136 Positivistic dilemmas 138 Later developments: Popper and Kuhn 141 Science and non-science 144 Relativism and hermeneutic analysis 151 The problem of adequacy 155 Conclusion: Some New Rules of Sociological Method 163 Notes 171 Index 179 Preface This study is only intended as one part of a more embracing project. While it can of course be read as a self-contained work, it touches upon various issues that are not dealt with in a detailed way, but which are vital to my project as a whole. This latter involves three overlapping concerns. One is to develop a critical approach to the development of nineteenth-century social theory, and its subsequent incorporation as the in stitutionalized and professionalized ‘disciplines’ of ‘sociology’, ‘anthropology’ and ‘political science’ in the course of the twenti eth century. Another is to trace out some of the main themes in nineteenth-century social thought which became built into theories of the formation of the advanced societies and subject these to critique. The third is to elaborate upon, and similarly to begin a reconstruction of, problems raised by the – always troubling – character of the social sciences as concerned with, as a ‘subject-matter’, what those ‘sciences’ themselves presuppose: human social activity and intersubjectivity. This book is pro posed as a contribution to the last of these three. But any such discussion bursts the bounds of this sort of conceptual container, and has immediate implications for work in the other areas. As a single project, they are tied together as an endeavour to con struct a critical analysis of the legacy of the social theory of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the contemporary period. viii Preface This book is about ‘method’ in the sense in which social phi losophers characteristically employ the term – the sense in which Durkheim used it in his Rules of Sociological Method. That is to say, it is not a guide to ‘how to do practical research’, and does not offer any specific research proposals. It is primarily an exercise in clarification of logical issues. I have subtitled the study a ‘positive critique’ of ‘interpretative sociologies’. Anyone who reads on will see that this does not mean ‘positivistic’. I use it only to mean ‘sympathetic’ or ‘constructive’: the sense that predates Comte’s translation of the term into a definite philo sophy of social and natural science. ‘Interpretative sociologies’ is something of a misnomer for the schools of thought that appear in the first chapter, since some of the authors whose work is discussed there are anxious to separate what they have to say from ‘sociology’. I use the term only because there is no other readily available one, to group together a series of writings that have certain shared concerns with ‘meaningful action’. The themes of this study are that social theory must incorpor ate a treatment of action as rationalized conduct ordered re- flexively by human agents, and must grasp the significance of language as the practical medium whereby this is made possible. The implications of these notions are profound, and the book is confined to tracing through only some of them. Anyone who recognizes that self-reflection, as mediated linguistically, is in tegral to the characterization of human social conduct must acknowledge that such holds also for his or her own activities as a social ‘analyst’, ‘researcher’, etc. I think it correct to say, more over, that theories produced in the social sciences are not just ‘meaning frames’ in their own right, but also constitute moral interventions in the social life whose conditions of existence they seek to clarify. Introduction to the Second Edition Quite a number of years have passed since this book first saw the light of day, but I hope it has not lost its relevance to current problems of social theory. In New Rules I deal with a number of forms of interpretative sociology, as well as with certain more central sociological traditions. When I wrote it, I regarded the book – and continue to do so today – as a ‘dialogic critique’ of the forms of social and philosophical thought which it ad dresses. That is, it is a critical engagement with ideas that I see as of essential importance, but which for one reason or another were not adequately developed in the perspectives from which they originally sprang. Some have seen such a strategy as a misplaced eclecticism, but I consider such dialogic critique as the very life-blood of fruitful conceptual development in social theory. New Rules of Sociological Method dovetails with other ‘posi tive critiques’ which I sought to provide in elaborating the basic tenets of structuration theory. In complementary writings that I undertook at about the same period, I addressed approaches to social analysis either left aside, or treated only in a marginal way, in New Rules. Such approaches included naturalistic sociology – a term which I now think of as preferable to the more diffuse and ambiguous label, ‘positivism’ – functionalism, structuralism and ‘post-structuralism’. The Constitution of Society (1984) established a more comprehensive framework for the notion of