Cross-theme research: The Social Life of Methods
Theme Convenors: Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage
In this theme we will focus on social scientific research methods not in the usual way - as tools for analysis - but as objects in their own right. Our starting point is the recognition that the past century has seen the proliferation of diverse social science methods, both within and without the academy, with their insertion into numerous domains of government, business and administration. However, with a few notable exceptions (for instance in the work of Callon, Mackenzie, Hacking and Law) social science methods are still mainly analysed internally, according to their own internal criteria of validity, as if they exist in isolation from wider relationships and affiliations. By resisting the technocratic and instrumentalist framing of methods as devices to extract (better or worse) kinds of findings and analysis, we instead use our focus on methods to pose a series of key interdisciplinary questions for the analysis of socio-cultural change.