What would it take to open up a research field that has narrowed without anyone quite noticing? That sociology of knowledge question animated Jesse Smith’s presentation to the HxSociology virtual community. An assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University — one of the new civic-thought centers reshaping the institutional landscape of higher ed — Smith builds his case from four premises: that values irreducibly shape research, that they can distort inquiry when they harden into a closed paradigm, that sociology today operates under just such a progressive paradigm, and that closed paradigms only crack open when a competing paradigm, grounded in opposing values, offers genuine alternatives rather than mere critique. His conclusion is a call for the development of a conservative sociology — not, he is careful to clarify, as a bid to inject more ideology into the discipline, but to surface and balance the value commitments already silently shaping it. His presentation is transcribed below. Watch the full HxSociology event on our YouTube channel.
What I want to do with this time that I have is make the argument that it would be a good thing to have a conservative sociology. And ultimately, this is a sociology of knowledge argument that if the problem we have is progressive skew that is hindering insight in sociology, then a conservative sociology would be the most direct way to address that skew to enhance insight and ultimately strengthen the discipline. And I realize this could be an unpalatable conclusion to many people in no small part because it may sound as if I’m advocating more politics and more ideology in sociology when in fact what we need is less. That’s ultimately not my position and I hope that is clear in this presentation. But the way that I want to proceed is by laying out four premises from which I think my conclusion about a conservative sociology will follow quite naturally.
The first premise I want to offer is that values irreducibly shape research and this isn’t something that can be avoided. Values cannot be purged. Now to be clear, they don’t determine conclusions but they do shape them in various ways. And this will be true even if we rigorously adhere to scientific standards and follow theory and method. Values still enter in at various places.
First and maybe most importantly, values shape what kinds of questions that we ask in the first place. And social reality is infinite and complex. There’s literally an infinity of questions we could ask, phenomena we could explore. And when we choose to study something, we’re doing that to the exclusion of everything else that we might have examined. And this I think is irreducibly a value judgment that this thing is more important than all the other things. And some really brief examples of this. A very large literature, especially after 2016, asking why did people vote for Donald Trump? There was not a comparably large literature asking why did people vote for Hillary Clinton? I think this would be an example of a value kind of encoded in sociology. Or there’s a dearth of study of military sociology, despite the military being a major social institution of a lot of consequence. We could come up with many other examples.
Values further shape how we develop our concepts, label them, relate them to each other. And again, a minor example, if you take the General Social Survey questions about gender roles and Likert scales about the statement that most men are better suited emotionally for politics than women, or a preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works. This is often rolled into a scale. And I’ve seen this scale sometimes labeled the sexism scale, sometimes labeled a gender traditionalism scale. Exact same empirical reference, but the way you choose to label it reflects a value commitment and will do some kind of theoretical work.
Within the research process, there are a number of decisions that we make that are not clearly determined by theory and method. I would use quantitative examples based on my training. So how do you code things? How do you categorize? What do you control for? Often this reduces to a judgment you have to make as a researcher. Qualitative research will have different decision points, but a similar underlying principle.
And finally, maybe second most importantly after the question we choose to ask is how do we interpret our results? And this is a philosophy of science point that any given empirical pattern could be explained by multiple theories, could support multiple conclusions plausibly. So whichever conclusion we choose to privilege will ultimately reflect some kind of value judgment. And again, an example, if you have a finding of a racial disparity of out-of-school suspension rates, do you explain that in terms of bias and discrimination, or do you explain it in terms of cultural or behavioral differences that correlate with racial identity? Whichever conclusion you privilege, that also will be a value judgment.
And so values enter the research process in various ways, and in this sense we should view them as partially constitutive of the research process, only partially, but they are part of it. We shouldn’t think of them as contaminants, but rather something that’s making up part of our conclusions. And people are suspicious of values, but if I say research involves a lot of acts of judgment or of research or creativity, we would tend to accept this, and I would argue values operate in a similar space.
The values that operate, there may be overlap between the values that inform our scholarship and our politics. That wouldn’t be that surprising, particularly in a discipline like sociology where there’s built-in content overlap. And values operate not just at the individual level to us as researchers, but also for the collective level.
Now, lest you suspect me of advocating for some kind of postmodernism here, let the stern visage of Max Weber put that idea to rest. I’m certainly not suggesting that everything is political, that there is no truth, that we should not be constrained by logic and empirics or anything to that effect. It’s a matter of recognizing where values fit in and what they do with our research. I think what I’m arguing is perfectly consistent with Weber’s concept of value neutrality. And the key distinction that needs to be drawn here I think is not between science and values but rather between science and politics, which we should view as fundamentally different activities with different goals and different rules. And this premise is important just to establish that you could have a conservative sociology that does not cross the line from scholarship into politics.
My second premise here is that values can undermine science when they get encoded into a closed paradigm. And it’s easiest to make this point maybe by contrasting it with its ideal. So ideally you might have a community of social scientists that has a shared commitment to rigor, shared standards of theory and evidence, but you have diverse people with different values and different perspectives they bring to a topic. So if researcher A conducts a study, and maybe quite a rigorous study, at various decision points, then they made decisions that were reflective of one set of values. Researcher B might have similar social scientific commitments, but a different set of values, and so they may then critique researcher A saying, I think they shouldn’t have made all these decisions. I’m going to conduct my own study where I make these decisions differently, and then afterwards you can compare the results, hopefully arrive at some kind of synthesis. And this is what’s supposed to happen. This is how science ultimately advances. And this is basically articulating the Mertonian norms of communality and organized skepticism needed for effective science.
Now the opposite of that is a situation where values become so deeply encoded in a research program that they systematically push our conclusions in one direction when other directions may have been equally available and possible. And ultimately their influence becomes standard, tacit, and maybe unrecognized or uncontestable. So questions about a phenomenon are always framed in the same direction. Internal research decisions always push us toward one conclusion rather than another. In any given empirical pattern, some conclusions are consistently favored even when others would be equally consistent with the data. And this builds on itself to the point where you don’t even know how to conceptualize how it could be otherwise. And this becomes what I call a closed research paradigm where inquiry is systematically narrowed or distorted in certain ways.
And this could take a couple of different forms. I’ll just give some examples. So you can get systematic distortions in bodies of knowledge because you examine one part of a phenomenon and ignore the other parts. I think research on white evangelicals in the past 10 years or so would be an example of this. There’s a tremendous amount of research focusing on authoritarianism or patriarchy or ethnocentrism among white evangelicals, and a dearth of research on aspects of white evangelical culture that might foster social cohesion or well-functioning families or more positive aspects. And so the overall picture you would get of the phenomenon is quite distorted even if maybe most of the individual studies might be reasonably sound, but the body of knowledge is not.
Another form of closed paradigm to take is when, and this is perhaps even more serious, when your theoretical framework is set up in a way that you’re consistently steered toward one conclusion and diverted from the others, or maybe others are foreclosed at the outset. And a very good example of this that has been addressed effectively by some heterodox members, John Iceland, Eric Silver, Ilana Redstone have all written about this, is the theory of structural racism. And so you have the phenomenon and you ask, why do we have racial disparities on various outcomes? And the answer we’re given is structural racism. You ask, what is structural racism? It’s like, well, it’s the processes that perpetuate the disparities in different outcomes. And so you have a fundamentally circular explanation that doesn’t really explain anything. It just kind of steers you back to the same focus while cutting out other possible explanations. And so this has been explored, as I said, quite effectively in other work and would apply to other research areas as well.
These closed research paradigms are maintained through various processes. There’s just moral enforcement. I think we’ve seen especially in the past few years where people just get angry at you if you question the existing paradigms. There can be an appeal to precedent where people say, you can’t make that argument because the existing literature doesn’t support it, notwithstanding the existing literature being the problem you want to address. And so in various ways, then these get perpetuated. And importantly, once a set of values is encoded under a research paradigm, it exists independently of the researchers themselves. So for example, even researchers without a progressive value system may keep using a survey scale that encodes those values just because it’s standard within their area of research. And so this is when we can have a problem.
Premise three, I won’t spend a great deal of time on because we’re largely aware of it, whether or not you accept the claim, you at least have heard it, and it’s common within Heterodox Academy, but that sociology currently operates under a closed progressive paradigm. And I recognize that’s a very broad statement. We could qualify it and say it applies more to some subfields than others or some journals or some departments, et cetera. And I would certainly agree with that. But we do see it in a great many subfields and arguably we also see evidence of this in the mainstream of the discipline. And this is what Chris Smith in The Sacred Project of American Sociology argues. This is something that’s come up in critiques of the conference themes in ASA in recent years. So this does seem to be a fairly pervasive phenomenon, even if it’s not an absolute phenomenon.
Now premise four here and my final premise is that the way you challenge a closed paradigm is to try and open it up via challenges from a competing paradigm. And this competing paradigm has to reflect an opposing set of values from whatever the dominant one is. I’ll break this down into two pieces as they’re both important, the opposing values and the competing paradigm.
So first of all, why the need for opposing values? If you want to challenge the existing paradigm, you have to have the perspective to be able to see what’s wrong with it. And this is also a philosophy of science point. I’ve been influenced by Helen Longino here. You have to have the perspective to be able to see the problems and articulate what they are, which can be difficult once they are deeply embedded and just kind of tacit within a program. So to go back to my earlier example of a white evangelical, supposing you come from a white evangelical background and you might be very familiar with that subculture. And then you enter sociology and you read the research literature on it and you think, this literature is really not describing my observation and experience with this phenomenon. And I find it objectionable in various ways. It’s like, well, you have a perspective, a body of knowledge that might allow you to articulate and challenge what the problem is and say, we need to look at these other explanations. We need to work in this body of evidence that has been neglected, etc.
Secondly, you need a value commitment at the level of motivation. You know, challenging a reigning paradigm is a difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of scholarly labor, theoretical and empirical work to be able to mount the challenge. It can be professionally risky. Doors may close on you. It’s really much easier to operate within an existing paradigm and then find your niche within that. And so it likely requires some kind of value-based motivation to want to make the sacrifice and take the risk to be able to mount a challenge.
However, it is not sufficient merely to have an opposing set of values or even to be able to see the problems with the existing paradigm. You ultimately have to be able to provide an alternative to truly challenge it. It might be fine if based on your white evangelical background, you can see problems with the literature, but unless you can articulate those in a social scientific language and framework and a pathway, then it’s just going to fall on deaf ears. And by their nature, paradigms don’t easily allow for critique. And just critiquing a paradigm, my observation is that it often proves to be ineffective. You can write a critique of a research program or a research agenda and explain everything that’s wrong with it. But even if your critique is quite effective and people accept it as being effective, it often tends to fall on deaf ears unless you can tell people, well, here’s what you should be doing instead. And so you have to be able to offer new lines of inquiry, theories, practices, evidence to pay attention to, introduce new solvable problems that will actually make your critique actionable. And if it’s both actionable and compelling, then maybe you can actually change the direction of the research. I won’t get into the details of the example, but you may be familiar with the debate on the psychology of morality between Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan from, I think the ‘80s, when this happened. This is a good example to me of a case where you have a clash of paradigms that ultimately proved to be fruitful in advancing explanation.
So these are my four premises, and having laid these out, I think it follows very naturally to my original conclusion that sociology would benefit from a conservative paradigm, one that observes Merton’s norms and Weber’s principle of value neutrality. And this establishment would help us explicitly identify and challenge progressive assumptions, open up new avenues of inquiry, create a fuller picture of social reality. And ultimately the purpose wouldn’t be to destroy or replace a progressive paradigm, which I don’t think would be possible anyway, but perhaps to sharpen it, balance it out, and in the long term achieve some kind of synthetic insights.
So I thank you all. If you want to consult a fuller version of this argument, then you can look at my article in Theory and Society from a few months back. Thank you again, and I look forward to the ensuing conversation from this event.
