Conceptual Location of Social Quality

Abstract

The previous chapter presented theoretical aspects of social quality. The concept is intended to assist in analysing major societal trends, contradictions and challenges from the perspective of everyday life. It can also provide instruments with which to assess the impact of public policies. To apply these instruments successfully we need to understand the related methodological or epistemological framework. Together they represent the overall conceptual framework. This will be scientifically coherent if the ontological characteristics are consistent with the epistemological characteristics. The necessity of this interrelatedness is important but neglected in mainstream social research. By referring to Connolly (2001: 6), Giri criticises one of the assumptions of modernity reflected by social research, namely the primacy of epistemology. This results in a neglect of ontology which, in the modernist mode, social research was considered only an epistemic engagement, a project of knowing about the world with proper procedure and scientific method. But this only embodies a questionable ‘social ontology’ which in its ‘empiricist’ version treats human beings as independent objects susceptible to representation, or at least, a medium in which the designative dimensions of concepts can be disconnected rigorously from the contexts of rhetoric, action, evaluation in which they originate. (2007: 2)