Sunday, November 7, 2010
The transcendence of story-telling
Reading Yin's "The Case Study Crisis" caused a mental outburst that has been building in my mind since the beginning of the semester. As a former humanities student I can't help feeling that a lot of the discussion that takes place in the social sciences is... well... pedantic. The idea presented in Yin (attributed to Miles) that case studies are on the whole unscientific and thus in need of reform only served to reinforce the feeling that a rigid adherence to scientific ideals may lead to babies being thrown out with their bathwater (or valuable methods being dismissed as unscientific). I understand that the accomplishments of the social and natural sciences are a direct result of this rigid adherence to method and system, I just can't see myself being the one doing the policing (the accusation of being "unscientific" sounds too much like the accusation of being "unamerican", as in "House Unamerican Activities Committee"). That said, my spirits are buoyed by Luker's statement that "we are doing theory generating" as opposed to theory testing (pp125). She uses this phrase in the context of sampling but I take it to represent her conception of social science more generally, something akin to Kuhn's revolutionary science. In both cases there is a realization that there ought to be some people working out the existing problems in all of their minutia and some people that are working on the boundaries of the discipline to create new problems. Einstein once called his method "combinatory play": he would take existing concepts -- or methods or systems -- and combine them or reshape them in new ways. To bring this back to Yin: I think story-telling is an important form of combinatory play, a method that sacrifices a degree of objective validity for the creativity that the story-teller imparts to the story, presenting the subject matter in a new and potentially fruitful perspective. In short, I think there is a place for Yin's case study as there is a place for the case studies of someone like Bruno Latour (his "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Door" is brilliant).
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I'm not sure why we social scientists are so disturbed when our methods and discipline is criticized by others. I find it interesting to see the critiques, but don't take too much to heart. Do you think it's possible that there is actually an underlying insecurity that we may not feel like "scientists" and it is perhaps this that draws us to the writing of Luker who makes that all okay? She let's us dance our way through, giving us permission to break outside a mold of traditional research methods. If we are studying human behaviour or communication or human interaction with information or stimulus, does that not make us researchers in science? Why do we need validation at all? Why are we looking for the acceptance of the traditional scientists of the world? Isn't that like David seeking a buddy in Goliath? It seems to me that case studies are an acceptable and valid form for contributing to theory and discourse, just like ethnography and many others that come under fire. Just because we're not boiling water in a beaker, which has more finite properties than the study of behaviour, it doesn't make the contributions and methods of social scientists any less valid. So I say, bring on the criticism, we can handle it. And of course, rebuttals are always sweet.
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