Methodological Pluralism, British Sociology and the Evidence-based State

Abstract

We very much welcome Professor Carl May’s courteous and cogently argued response to our original article. His observations elaborate issues which also concern us, and contain much with which we would agree. The fact that we would like to take this opportunity to respond briefly to, and clarify, some of the specific issues he raises should not obscure this general concord. At the outset, we would like to establish that if our references to ‘junior sociologists’ or ‘qualitative sociology’ have been taken to be pejorative (as we feel Professor May sometimes seems to imply) that was certainly not our intention: inevitably one’s personal understandings lose something when they are conveyed in the written word. At the heart of his contribution is his view of how British sociology has developed. We agree that there has been a major intellectual shift towards constructionist and subjective models of explanation, which is reflected in choice of research methods. However, this is not a complete explanation on its own, and we also hold a slightly different view of the details of the historical form that this change has taken. For instance, we believe Professor May risks perpetuating the myth popular among qualitative sociologists that, in ‘the Dark Ages’, British sociology was highly quantitative (Payne et al., 1981). The real curse of early British sociology was that it was so non-empirical. Again, whereas Professor May is right that sociology has become rather fractured into specialisms in recent years, this is equally the case in other countries such as the USA, and yet in that country quantitative research remains well represented in mainstream journals. We also see the development of new qualitative approaches as starting earlier (in the 1960s) than May suggests. Thus while there were attempts by the ESRC and its predecessor, the SSRC, to promote survey research from this time, it was not to counter qualitativism but to encourage the development of empirical research skills which even at that stage were under developed. This longer