Generic Social Processes: Reimagining a Conceptual Schema for Grounded Theory in the Contemporary Era

Abstract

ABSTRACTGrounded theory (GT) has gone through a number of changes since Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’s seminal introduction to the tradition. Newer constructivist versions of GT allow for pre-formed theoretical and conceptual strategies to guide data collection, for the idea that knowledge should emerge only inductively from the field is no longer seen as tenable. Within this context, we present Robert Prus’s “generic social processes” framework as a set of conceptual tools especially useful in guiding constructivist GT. Yet this framework has been challenged in light of contemporary debates on the epistemological status of generalized sociological claims, the ontological nature of the social world, and the importance of explanatory knowledge. These debates lead us to consider new adaptions to this now-classic schema of generic social processes with an eye to the future of GT and a more conceptually rich ethnography.