Key Readings
*Sampson, H. (2004) ‘Navigating the waves: the usefulness of a pilot in qual- itative research’, Qualitative Research, 4: 383–402.
Whyte, W.J. (1955) Street Corner Society:
The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (2nd enlarged edn). Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Postmodernism
Definition
Postmodernism is to be understood as a contrast to the modernist perspective that has dominated western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlighten- ment, as a rejection of the optimistic assumptions that social reality is gras- pable and describable in some final or sufficient sense, and that our selves and our social worlds are coherent wholes. Implicit in this contrastive stance is a critique of modernist methodological rigour.
Distinctive Features
The distinctive features of postmodernist methods cannot, by their nature, be exhaustively described. To be true to their nature, they must necessarily be contingent and emergent and even inchoate, just as their begetter, the philoso- pher Derrida, would sometimes be deliberately and playfully obscure. All this is rather irritating for the earnest student chasing, as a postmodernist critic might have it, the Bubble of Enlightenment. So some minimal distinctive fea- tures will be set down here, even though this old-fashioned attempt at repre- sentation might be seen by the same postmodernist critic as doomed to failure. The first principle of a postmodernist methodology is the rejection of all claims to a scientific method. Adequate representation of social reality is deemed to be an impossible project and all accounts are necessarily partial, so the pur- suit of scientific rigour by various means (establishing comprehensiveness of coverage, avoiding bias, demonstrating validity and generalizability, and so on) is a futile endeavour. It is not that ‘scientific’ accounts generated by such methods are ‘wrong’, rather they are held to be simply partial accounts to be set alongside others in a new poly-vocal social science. But since the claims to scientific rigour are viewed as simply ‘claims’ – techniques to usurp spurious authorial authority – it follows that postmodern methods do not seek to imi- tate the methodological forms of an allegedly misguided modernism.
A corollary of the rejection of scientific authority is the celebration of alter- native accounts of social reality and some postmodernist work is marked by methods which promote an active collaboration between the researcher and the researched, perhaps through publishing an extended single transcript of an interview with a minimal introduction. There is a surprising parallel here with some oral history work.
However, overwhelmingly, the methods of choice for postmodernist researchers are those borrowing from poststructuralist literary critics and writ- ers in cultural studies, namely those pertaining to the deconstruction of texts. A text is conceived broadly as any cultural product, films and TV programmes being popular subjects of study. And deconstruction refers to the analytic dis- section of the methods of construction used by the author/director of the text to convey meanings, both overt and subliminal. There is a parallel here with narrative analysis.
Much postmodernist analysis is self-referential in that it focuses on the methods of construction used by fellow social scientists (to the occasional irrita- tion of the modernist social scientists concerned) to convey meaning and legiti- mate authorial authority. Lather (2002), drawing on the work of the critic Walter Benjamin, has suggested that through the critical examination of these once- authoritative and now battered ‘ruins’, the analyst can discern the beliefs that sustained them in their heyday and are only now transparent in their skeletal Postmodernism
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remains. The postmodernist deconstruction of the authorial ‘voice’ in social science has been the crucial stimulant of the ‘reflexive turn’ in research methods.
Examples
Wacquant (1998) has furnished an extended transcript from an interview with a black ghetto hustler, Rickey, as an example of collaboration between researcher and researched, which is careful to eschew any realist claims for the status of the (carefully edited, and therefore constructed) transcript. Geertz’s (1988) analysis of the writing of ethnographic texts is an elegantly constructed deconstruction of the anthropologist’s authorial voice from one of the foremost anthropologists of the twentieth century.
Evaluation
Seale’s (1999) methods text, The Quality of Qualitative Research, begins and closes with an examination of the postmodern challenge to qualitative research methods, taking several postmodern analyses (including Wacquant’s article) as extended examples. Seale follows (albeit with occasional departures) the response of the ethnographer, Martyn Hammersley, to the postmodern challenge to ethnographic methods (Hammersley, 1992). Hammersley aban- doned with some relief a commitment to naïve realist representation of social reality and to ‘author-evacuated texts’ (the phrase is Geertz’s), but has resisted the view that all representations of reality are equally legitimate and has argued that methodological techniques can assist in the judgement of which partial viewpoints have most plausibility and credibility. Hammersley’s nuanced response, termed ‘subtle realism’, is not of course in contradistinction to the postmodernist position, which would accept subtle realism was one possible response among many in a world with plural social realities.
Associated Concepts:
Bias, Discourse Analysis, Generalization,
Narratives, Oral History, Reflexivity, Validity (see Reliability).
Key Readings
Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives: The
Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge:
Polity.
Hammersley, M. (1992) What’s Wrong
with Ethnography: Methodological Explo- rations. London: Routledge.
Lather, P. (2002) ‘Post modernism, post- structuralism and post (critical) ethnog- raphy: of ruins, aporias and angels’, in P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland and L. Lofland et al. (eds),
Handbook of Ethnography. London: