A RT I C L E
Identity, values and method:
taking interview research seriously in
political economy
PA M E L A C AW T H O R N E
University of Sydney
Q
R
65
Qualitative Research
Copyright ©
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks,
and New Delhi)
vol. (): -.
[-
() :;
-; ]
Qualitative research tends to be regarded as nonrigorous, subjectively biased and, in general, unscientific. This paper
is a restatement of the merits of this type of research allied to a
repudiation of the arguments of its various critics – particularly the
positivist tradition in economics. Primarily, it takes issue with the
supposed greater objectivity attained through quantitative and
positivistic research methods. But it is equally critical of a too narrow
understanding of language and text and of (some types of) worries
about disempowered informants. Instead, it is argued that seeking to
understand, interpret and report honestly the things people say and
the things people do in all their ‘messy complexity’ enables deep and
rich knowledge claims to be made. However, for the full richness of
such claims to emerge, they must be mediated reflexively and selfconsciously through the purposes – and associated theoretical
frameworks – researchers bring to their work. An understanding of
the Wittgensteinian approach to language, if allied with a Marxian
framework for the broader understanding of social processes, is
argued to provide powerful analytical tools in the practice of
qualitative social and economic research.
ABSTRACT
K E Y W O R D S : development, fieldwork method, Fiji, garments, India,
Marx, positivist economics, Wittgenstein
1. Introduction
I currently work in the School of Economics and Political Science of the
University of Sydney, Australia, in a sub-group devoted to the study of
Political Economy. But until very recently (January 2000), Political Economy
was formally a part of the university’s Department of Economics. Now we are
an autonomous group but still part of the Faculty of Economics and
Business. Before I came to Australia in 1991, I worked in the UK in the
interdisciplinary field of development studies, undertaking a Master’s degree
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at the University of Bath and a doctorate in Development Studies at the Open
University.
Since coming to Australia, therefore, I have worked in research and
teaching environments dominated by economists, most of whom are
conventional neo-classical economists. Before 1991 (whilst I was working in
a development studies context), economists of a broader Keynesian and/or
radical bent tended to be predominant in the literature; even since 1994,
when I began work in the University of Sydney, a number of my closest
colleagues (in Political Economy) are economists strongly critical of the neoclassical orthodoxy. But, whether neo-classical or self-definedly heterodox,
economists are still economists. In particular, they all share a certain set of
assumptions about how research is to be conducted, about what constitutes a
proper, scientific research method, and indeed about what kind of research is
to be regarded as important and worthwhile and, therefore, about what kind
of research is not important or worthwhile. Since the article which follows is
about how and why I have come to be increasingly sceptical of this
economics-oriented research orthodoxy and have come to engage in a
research practice which is regarded by its devotees as eccentric at best and at
worst as downright illegitimate [see for example, Kabeer (1994: xiv)]1 I need,
first of all, to outline what this research orthodoxy consists of.
However, prior to doing that, I should also stress that I am here concerned
with empirical research in economics – that is with what economists (whether
conventional or heterodox/radical) actually do when they decide to
investigate economic phenomena in the real world. It is important to note
this because this activity, in itself, has a relatively low status within the
profession as a whole.
The most prestigious research in economics tends to be of a kind described
as ‘pure theory’. At the centre of such theory and theorizing is the
elaboration and/or critique of abstract mathematical models. These models
are usually claimed to throw some light on real world phenomena, but in the
models such phenomena appear, if at all, in highly stylized forms – either as
sets of initial assumptions or as some highly simplified types of statistical data
‘fitted to’ (as it is said) the model or models in question (see Jones, 1994, for
an extended critique of ‘a priorism’). Economists whose preference is not to
test reality by means of models, but to consider the worth of models by
reference to empirical data sets which are rich, dense and complex, tend to be
economists who are looked down on within the profession simply because of
their empirical or non-theoretical orientation. Hence, defence of their already
shaky status within the profession dictates that they conduct empirical
research in a certain way, by reference to certain protocols, which will render
such research at least respectable in their own eyes and in the eyes of their
more high status theoreticist colleagues.
Cawthorne: Identity, values and method
2. ‘Proper’ empirical research in economics
(i) Empirical research in economics must be as statistical as possible. That is
to say, it must make the greatest possible use of national accounts and
other official statistical data. Economists recognize, of course, that there
are empirical phenomena which are incapable of being quantified or
which may be distorted by the attempt at quantification, but their
predominant view is that economists – as economists – should not be
concerned with such phenomena.
(ii) Empirical research in economics should involve not merely the use of
large official statistical data sets but their further statistical manipulation
by the researcher; that is, the use of multivariate correlation and
regression techniques, significance tests and so on.
(iii) Empirical research in economics may include the direct collection of
primary data by the researcher, as well as the use of secondary data like
national accounts. But again, these primary data should be as statistical
as possible and should be capable of the same kind of statistical
manipulation by the researcher as is the secondary statistical data. In
particular this implies that:
(iv) where empirical research in economics involves the use of survey techniques, the sample frame selected or constructed must be large enough
that statistically significant results can be obtained. In practice, this generally means that such research must be conducted on a scale which can
only be obtained by a researcher having access to very large sources of
corporate or official funding and by working as part of, or as coordinator
of, a large group of researchers. Since most ordinary economists do not
(at least most of the time) have access to these kind of resources, this
tends to mean that the bulk of their research is of type (i) above,
sometimes also involving manipulations of type (ii) and sometimes not.
This then is the research universe to which I have been most commonly
exposed particularly during the last seven years or so of my academic career.
But as noted above, that career has also been one in which issues about
economic development in the South or the Third World have been
predominant. Having had a varied pre-academic life as a teacher of
economics (in Brixton and Ware, UK), as a field and office worker for a
number of UN agencies (particularly the United Nations Industrial
Development Organisation and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
for Palestine refugees), I then worked for a large non-governmental
organization – Oxfam – before becoming an academic relatively late in life.
And, from the first, my academic research focused on the same fundamental
questions (around Third World poverty) which had preoccupied and obsessed
me in my earlier career.
In that context, it did not take long for me to discover that both the
development economics profession and the much more interdisciplinary
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development studies profession was, and remains, deeply divided over these
fundamental questions. On one side – and strongly represented within the
neo-classical economics orthodoxy – are a group of people who think that
the impact of the global free market on the people of the Third World is generally positive, raising material productivity and living standards, modernizing economic and social structures and slowly overcoming economic and
cultural underdevelopment.
On the other hand are a group of people who see the impact of global
capitalism or even western imperialism (neo-colonialism) as predominantly
and entirely negative, leading to the exploitation and pillaging of the people
and resources of the Third World for the benefit of the west and opening up
vast inequalities of condition both among Third World people themselves and
between them and the ever richer populations of the western nations at the
privileged core of the global capitalist system. No-one who works in the field
of development studies can fail to be untouched by or entirely oblivious to
this fundamental ideological division within it. Indeed my own work – on the
role of the clothing and textile industry in the economic development of
southern India and (more recently) Fiji – was begun very much under the
influence of the Marxian-influenced dependency perspective, with its deep
scepticism about the reality of Third World economic development undertaken under western global capitalist hegemony.
However, the experience of fieldwork research, first in India and then in
Fiji, quickly brought to my attention the existence of a curious anomaly in
this debate. This was that, while orthodox development economists and their
radical dependency critics argued continually (and sometimes violently)
about both the reality and the human welfare implications of Third World
economic development, neither group showed much, if any, interest, in
discovering what view the Third World people actually involved in these
processes might have of the matter. That is to say, judging at least from the
economics-oriented research, it seemed that questions about whether the
human welfare implications of economic and social change in the Third
World were positive or negative were supposed to be answerable entirely by
reference to such data as: income distribution statistics; gini coefficients; real
wage data and their trends; and nutrition data and their trends (as well as
more conventional data such as growth rates of income and output, exports
and imports and their composition and so on).
Therefore, for both neo-classical and heterodox development economists
(working from the same fundamental research protocols), it was equally illegitimate to take into account the opinions (and thus the attitudes and values)
of the Third World actors in these processes. If they were ‘really’ being
developed, somehow we could declare them so entirely from ‘objective’ data.
Conversely, if they were ‘really’ being exploited, impoverished and pillaged, we
could equally declare them so entirely from the same ‘objective’ data.
But I have gradually realized that this simply cannot be so. That is, it seems
Cawthorne: Identity, values and method
that while the views of the actors in these processes (which are, in any case,
not at all uniform) cannot be the sole basis on which we make judgements of
the progressiveness or otherwise of the vastly complex and contradictory
processes referred to under the heading of economic development, careful
collection, assessment and weighting of participant views must play a part in
such a judgement; otherwise, whether positive or negative, they are exercises
in the most arrant and arrogant ethnocentrism.
The tendency of the economistic research tradition – in all its ideological
variants – to rule such data out of court (as ‘soft’, ‘subjective’ and above all
‘unquantifiable’) convinced me, slowly, but in the end completely, that that
entire tradition was, and is, seriously defective. It convinced me, that is to say,
that what we currently call economics research has, at the very least, to be
modified so as to render legitimate and acceptable the consideration of
aspects of human reality which have profound implications for economics
but which are for the most part simply ignored or totally marginalized in the
current research processes of that discipline.
Moreover, whilst this positivistic objectivism seemed a bad enough fault in
the conventional neo-classical approach to development economics, it
seemed, to me at least, even more reprehensible in the case of its dependency
protagonist which self-consciously related itself to Marx and Marxism. How
could an intellectual tradition which (or so I believed) had taken its initial
philosophical orientation from Hegel’s problematization of the subject–object
distinction, have ended up producing an economistic variant which was as
purblindly objectivist in its methodological premises as the positivistic
economics it so insistently attacked?
This question was all the more important for me because in the great
debate or divide in development economics I had generally identified with the
dependency or neo-Marxist side. Yet I found many of my neo-Marxist
colleagues as uninterested in hearing the testimony of Third World voices
about development processes as their neo-classical adversaries. In particular,
as I soon discovered, they were very resistant to any testimony which was in
any way positive about those experiences, which in any way endorsed
notions of amelioration or improvement or even hopefulness as aspects of
such processes. Yet to be so dismissive (on the grounds that one could provide
and was providing objective insights into the reality of these economic and
social processes) meant, I realized, placing a morally awesome weight on a
realist version of Marxism.
Yet I knew that there were other accounts of the philosophy of Marxism
available. In particular, reliance on Marxism as realism entails
a determined disregarding of any troublesome questions about the values
and interests of the Marxist observer. It means, above all, ignoring how
such values and interests might affect Marxist accounts and explanations
of reality and one’s judgement of the merits of these supposedly objective
observations and explanations as against those of participants.
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Indeed, I now came to notice that, just like their neo-classical adversaries,
Marxist and neo-Marxist economists tend to operate techniques of linguistic
description and analyses in which, as observers and judges, they disappear.
They too, I now noticed, were simply not present in their research texts as
observers or judges. Only their observations and judgements were present but
presented as the observations and judgements either of nobody or of some
disembodied theory – a theory which, somehow unaided by an actual person
or persons, captures reality or is captured by it.
Thus, the discovery of what I initially thought of as unfortunate lacunae in
all varieties of economics research on development issues (the disinclination
to take into account the views of participants in economic processes in the
descriptions and analyses of those processes by economists) – a gap which
was complicating or weakening my own empirical research efforts –
eventually led me on to a process of reading and reflection in the philosophy
of social science more generally. This broader reading has, in turn, led me to
rethink both my research procedures and my understanding of the very
meaning and significance of those procedures in ways considerably more farreaching than I had originally intended.
In the following two sections of this article I outline that reading itself and
some of the more significant implications I have drawn from it. It seems to me
quite likely that readers of the article who are not economists, and who have
been formed in very different research traditions – traditions far more
congenial to the use of qualitative data in particular – will find what I have to
say unremarkable, even if interesting. They may also think that I might have
reached similar conclusions to the ones drawn here by means of routes other
than those (through Marx and Wittgenstein) which I happened to follow. No
doubt this is true (though it will, I hope, be clear from what is said above, why
in my case, a rereading specifically of Marx was likely to be central to the
route I chose).
But if any reader finds my conclusions unremarkable, or even perfectly
conventional within their own disciplinary perspectives, I hope they will also
accept that within the world of economics and political economy (whether
orthodox or radical) thoughts such as those found below, far from being
unremarkable, are regarded as so heterodox as to threaten the very status of
their author as any kind of economist.
Indeed the full extent of the problem and of the chasm-like division we face
in the social sciences today is shown by the fact that this piece finds an outlet
in Qualitative Research, where it may easily be convicted of preaching only to
the converted. For there is a sense in which it would be far more appropriately
placed in an economics journal were it not that the vast majority of such
journals would (and do!) simply classify its entire content as ‘not economics’
(from which it follows that I am not ‘an economist’). In fact the world of
social science research is now so completely ideologically bifurcated around
issues of method that the choice I face is not between preaching to the
Cawthorne: Identity, values and method
converted and preaching to the unconverted. The choice seems rather to be
one of preaching to the converted or keeping my silence. In that
circumstance, I choose to risk doing the former in the hope that I might
simultaneously reach and provoke a few of my unconverted colleagues.
3. Marxian economics as a positivist research tradition
As is explained in greater detail in the sixth section of this article, virtually all
of my field research on export garment industries (in South India, in
Australia, in Fiji) takes the form of loosely structured in-depth interviews
conducted with owners, managers, workers and appropriate institutional
representatives working in the relatively small samples of such firms which I
select in generally non-random ways. As I also emphasize in that section, this
research method is one forced upon me both by the exigencies of the field
situation itself and by the very limited resources (of time, people and money)
at my disposal.
Given the economics research tradition outlined above, sceptical questions
can be asked about the statistical significance of any results which I obtain by
such methods – given both the small size of the samples I use and the
difficulties which there often are in determining the typicality of my sample
within the much larger universe of firms. But though these are serious
questions, it is not these technical questions which, interestingly enough,
make for the most fundamental difficulties which many experience in coming
to terms with my research.
That more fundamental difficulty is at once both more simple and more
philosophically profound. For, I talk to people. To listen to my research
presentations or to read my work is to hear the voices of particular, named,
Indian, Fijian or Australian people2 who are engaged, in one way or another,
in the business of manufacturing and/or selling garments. They are to be
heard talking about that activity, about their role in it, about their views of
others so engaged (the views managers have of workers, workers of
managers, male workers of female workers and vice versa). Of course I also
collect, and make extensive use of, more objective data as well – on the wages
the workers receive, on the profits owners make, on the prices which are
charged for garments and how these are made up. But even these more
objective data provide only a context in which to relate to specific named
people, specific named businesses, specific named workers and managers.
So my research is ‘peopled’ and that in itself makes it very strange to my
colleagues, both conventional and heterodox. For when economists do
empirical research they do it with and through aggregated categories in
which discernible, individual people simply disappear. Thus, no economist
would find it strange to be told (for example) that 60 percent of all workers in
Fiji earn less than the minimum wage; but they would, and do, find it strange
to hear the voice of one (or four or six) such workers talking about how they
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spend such wages, or how those wages compare with those in their previous
occupation or occupations. Economists would not find it at all strange to hear
that the price paid to garment manufacturers (in general) in India constitutes
(say) less than 15 percent of the final retail price of such garments when they
are sold to consumers in Europe, Australasia or the United States; but they do
find it strange to hear specific named Indian garment manufacturers
commenting on this fact and talking in detail both about how the price which
they charge for garments is determined, about the costs they have to cover
and about the profits they can make within that cost and price structure.
In short then the puzzled, indifferent or even hostile reception of my
research brought a remarkable fact about economics powerfully into focus.
That is, that when economists concern themselves with so-called microeconomic relationships (with the doings of supposedly ‘individual’ producers
and consumers) they do so entirely in a theoretical mode in which any type of
empirical investigation is simply pre-empted by a set of ideal-typical logical
postulates concerning the doings of those famous – or infamous – creatures
called ‘economically rational actors’.
That is, empirical research in economics, insofar as it is conducted at all, is
entirely macro-economic, concerning itself with the statistically measurable
outcomes of the actions of hundreds of thousands or even millions of
individuals, individuals who, at this level of aggregation, simply disappear
into broad-brush, wide-range abstractions – ‘major export sector’, ‘lowest
paid workers’, ‘capital intensive enclave industries’, ‘balance of payments’,
‘balance of trade’, ‘rate of urbanization’ and so on and so forth.
In short then, in engaging in empirical micro-economic research (of
whatever sort) I am already doing something radically heterodox, even
eccentric, in the eyes of my economist colleagues (including my Marxist or
radical economist colleagues). And that reflection brings us to the
philosophical issue which I referred to above. Because it seems to me quite
logical for my conventional neo-classical colleagues to regard my microeconomic empirical work as a priori illegitimate. It is quite logical for them to
do so (even if I think it mistaken) insofar as they consider theoretical microeconomics to be some kind of sound foundation for understanding how
actual individuals in the actual world are motivated to the kinds of actions
classified as ‘economic’.
However, my Marxist and neo-Marxist colleagues are all distinguished by
their explicit rejection of neo-classical micro-economics. In general they have
little but scorn for the postulate of atomized, economically maximizing
individuals producing, selling and buying according to an economic logic
entailed by the organizing postulate of perfect competition. But if this kind of
micro-economics is rejected – as I too reject it – as any kind of guide to how
actual firms, actual workers, actual wholesalers and retailers, actual
exporters and importers operate in a real world of (always) imperfectly
competitive markets, then all that can remain is the empirical investigation
Cawthorne: Identity, values and method
of real micro-economic behaviour. These investigations can be of the
kind which I conduct, or of some other kind, but, once theoretical microeconomics is rejected, they must always be of some strongly empirical kind.
In other words, it seems to me that were my more radical colleagues’
research priorities consistent with their theoretical convictions, then not only
would they be approving of the kind of research I do, they would be doing
similar kinds of research themselves. This has led me to wonder why this is
not the case, why the kind of research which I conduct is conducted so rarely
by those reared in radical or heterodox versions of the economics research
tradition. Even now I am not certain what the answer to this question is, but I
do have an hypothesis which I will now outline.
4. Positivistic Marxism and the denial of indeterminacy
My research, as I said, is peopled. I meet and interview particular flesh-andblood human individuals with particular and discernible beliefs,
personalities, attitudes. They take time off from their world of work to speak
to me, but I am often also in a position to see them acting in that world –
giving and receiving orders, dealing with technical and other problems, being
frustrated, angry or amused. To do this kind of research is to be powerfully,
existentially reminded of a basic methodological or philosophical postulate,
i.e. the kind of activity we call ‘economic activity’ is just one kind of activity
engaged in by human beings and if actual discernible human beings did not
engage in that activity, there would be no aggregate economic outcomes to
measure at all – no exports, no imports, no wage rates, no rates of profit, no
income and wealth distributions – none of those statistical ‘things’, in short,
which my colleagues love and love to manipulate.
Well, yes. But does not everybody know that? Is not the above paragraph
just a statement of an obvious, banal, truism, which none of my colleagues
would even consider denying?
Maybe. But there is something else which follows from this truism, which is
equally powerfully, existentially present in my research experience, and
which is not, in my view, obvious or banal at all. My ‘time out’ interviews
with economic actors (or more exactly with people engaged in activities
which they and other people classify as ‘economic’) being, as they are,
conducted amidst the swirl of ongoing events, always carry a heavy load of
indeterminacy.
The owner of a medium-sized factory in Chennai, is dissatisfied with the
prices he is being offered by a particular overseas buyer; he is looking to make
a higher priced contract with larger volumes with another buyer, but he has
yet to clinch the deal and he is worried about it. Will he do so or not? It is not
determined at the time of the interview. Some worker informants in the same
firm tell me of their dissatisfaction with some aspects of their wages and
conditions. There have been strikes and other actions over these issues before
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and dissatisfaction is building again. Will there be another strike or strikes?
Perhaps, but it is not clear at the time of interview. A factory owner in India
or Fiji would like to be able to improve the quality of his (they are invariably
‘his’) product by installing some state of the art machinery, but the stuff is
expensive and he is unsure whether he can obtain sufficient credit from his
current sources or, even if he can, whether he will be able to realize all the
potential savings in labour costs without that producing ‘trouble’ with the
work force. Is the investment worth it, either from a narrowly economic or
from a wider labour relations point of view? He too has still to make a
decision at the time of the interview.
Fieldwork-based empirical micro-economic research then has the merit of
reminding one continually and powerfully that there is nothing automatic or
impersonal in these happenings, and, more significantly, nothing absolutely
predetermined or absolutely predictable about economic processes – that
ultimately they are driven by the actions and decisions (and the inactions and
indecisions) of millions or hundreds of millions of specific human beings. For
although nobody would dream of denying that truism when it is explicitly
enunciated in this way, it is a truism very easy to forget when, in one’s research
activities, one comes solely into contact with the paper or electronic outpourings of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) or of Her Majesty’s Stationery
Office (HMSO) or of some sub-department of the Overseas Economic Council
for Development (OECD) or International Labour Organization (ILO).
However, this great advantage of my kind of research is counterbalanced
by an equal and opposite disadvantage. For, by definition, what has yet to be
determined cannot be conceived by me as an ‘outcome’. After I have left the
field, my dissatisfied factory owner either will, or will not, clinch a better
contract; the workers I have interviewed (and others) either will, or will not,
go on strike; my worried would-be investor either will or will not install his
new machinery; but for now I do not know what they will do (for neither do
they). I will only be able to find out what they have done if I return to the
same field location again after an interval. This very research method then
makes me acutely aware of writing about processes, not about outcomes, of
writing about struggles not about victories or defeats, of writing about
problems and not about solutions – in a word, of writing about indeterminacy rather than determinacy.
But, and this is important, that sense of ‘ever openness’ is precisely what
my colleagues can – what? evade, avoid, negate, occlude? – when they work
on their statistical data. It is the very retrospectiveness of such data which
give them such a comforting sense of closure. I read these statistical tables
and I ‘know’ that Fiji exported this quantity of garments last year. I read some
others and I ‘know’ that there was this number of days lost to strikes in the
garment industry in India last year. I read yet a third group of tables and I
‘know’ that there was this rupee amount of new textile machinery imported
last year.
Cawthorne: Identity, values and method
That all statistics, merely by virtue of being statistics, are historical data –
are digital freezings and fixings of past events, past decisions, past actions – is
another obvious fact very little stated. From this fact follows another, perhaps
less obvious but certainly more important. This is that whether what we call
‘economic processes’ are to be regarded as open or indeterminate and as
(therefore) ‘made by human volition and action’ or whether, on the contrary,
they are to be regarded as determined, subject to causal factors and therefore
capable of being captured in theoretical generalizations, is as much a
question about how one studies such processes as it is about the reality of
those processes themselves. Indeed there is good reason to doubt, I think,
whether the phrase ‘the reality of those processes themselves’ actually means
anything if taken in abstraction from any particular method of study.
5. Marx, Wittgenstein and economics as alienation
But how does all this relate, or how did I relate it, to Marx and Wittgenstein –
since these two have been the major influence in how I have gone about
being, and thinking about the practice of being, a research academic? It
relates to Marx insofar as you have only to return to the pages of Capital to
discover that, unlike so many modern Marxists and neo-Marxists, Marx
collated statistics and quoted the ‘bluebook’ testimony of both factory
overseers and workers. He generalized solemnly about past processes of
capital accumulation and wrote contemporary political tracts, tracts which
were not simply comments on, but actual contributions to, the ongoing
undetermined struggles of workers and others. Most importantly of all
perhaps, and just because of this ‘duality’ of his method, Marx both
lambasted capitalism for its exploitation, oppression and injustice and
celebrated its transformative economic dynamism and social-liberational
power. It is clear, in the Communist Manifesto and in many other texts, that
Marx saw this duality of capitalism, not as different aspects of its nature,
aspects which could somehow be separated out, either conceptually or in
fact. Rather he saw this duality, in good Hegelian fashion, as a contradictory
unity. Capitalism, that is to say, is not dynamic and liberational despite the fact
that it is exploitative and oppressive. Rather it is dynamic and liberational
because it is exploitative and oppressive and equally it is exploitative and
oppressive because it is dynamic and liberational.
The real issue however is how we are to philosophically understand those
last dialectical remarks, and it is here that I have found Wittgenstein and
Kitching’s exposition (1988, 1994) of him, most helpful. However, because
Wittgenstein is a rather unfamiliar thinker to a readership of social
scientists,3 – less familiar certainly than Marx – I think a few preliminary
points about his thought are in order. For without them the deeply
Wittgenstein-influenced discussion both of Marx and of the main
methodological concerns discussed later in this article would be rather
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incomprehensible. Briefly, then, (and with apologies for a relatively crude and
general account) I would like to emphasize the following points.
(i) For the later Wittgenstein (of the Philosophical Investigations) the
fundamental observation is that as people act in and on the world they
produce4 a language appropriate to, and necessary for, the performance
of those acts. But, and in turn, as they develop their language (creating,
for example, what Wittgenstein calls new ‘suburbs’ or ‘regions’ of
language, such as mathematical symbolization) so they also develop
their capacity to perform new acts (both linguistic and non-linguistic) in
and on the world. A group or totality of human actions and their
consequences is what we call a ‘social context’, for human beings are
always interactive as well as (individually) active. There are a number of
important implications which come from this view of language.
(ii) Language should not therefore be thought of as a labelling device
(academics tend to think of themselves as the most sophisticated of
labellers and debates proliferate, without resolution, around definition5).
In contrast, ‘Wittgenstein’s stress ... is on language as speech, [arising
out of] ... something human beings do, as a form of action. This view
allows him to challenge an older and almost ubiquitous view of
language, which stresses reference, correspondence, representation’
(Pitkin, 1973: 85). Words should not be thought of as merely, or just,
labels – ‘rather that they are a kind of signalling device; that language is
learned from instances of use and meaning is compounded out of
instances of use and finally that meaning is context-dependent and that
meaning and sense need to be completed by context’ (Pitkin, 1973: 85).
(iii) The grammar, or use of language, has a multitude of humanly relevant
points or purposes, (Wittgenstein calls these ‘language games’) but it is
not amenable to analytical deductive logic, of the kind he himself
explored in the early philosophy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In
the later philosophy, on the contrary, the contextually rich and multilayered meanings found in the ordinary language6 of social life are
strongly contrasted to the kind of much more tightly bounded (but also
rather ‘thin’) kind of meanings which can be generated using
mathematical symbols, and which precisely because they are abstract
(and therefore both context and meaning ‘thin’7) are much more
amenable to the expression of deductive logical relations.
(iv) Wittgenstein therefore frees language from the deductive constraints
commonly placed upon it. Instead, we are allowed the complexity and
ambiguity of a richly diverse language that reflects the different people
and contexts in which it is used. ‘For a large class of cases, though not for
all, in which we use the word “meaning” it can be explained thus: the
meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (Wittgenstein, 1953:
remark 43).
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(v) We do not construct language in our heads (this is Wittgenstein’s socalled ‘private language’ argument). On the contrary, nothing which
goes on inside our heads conceived in isolation from ‘non-mental’
activity can determine the meaning of what we say/think/write. That
meaning arises from/is always connected to action is perhaps the
Wittgensteinian insight that is most significant for the work of all social
scientists.
(vi) In creating a language in and for action we are constrained by our
human ‘form of life’, a concept with a strong humanist and even
biological dimension (and rather similar to the early Marx’s notion of
‘species being’). We understand each other and agree on the truth of a
myriad of statements about the world primarily because we are creatures
possessed of a certain perceptual apparatus and because all people, as
people, experience certain things about the world in similar kinds of
ways: we suffer pain, experience love, friendship, ecstasy, shame, greed
and so on. Cultural and other differences, including gender, come only in
addition to (and provide a varied context for) those commonalities. Here I
part company with much post-modern development discourse and
(where feminism has succumbed entirely to a too-easy gender or cultural
relativism) with those varieties of feminism too.
(vii)Wittgenstein’s insistence that in order to know the meaning of words we
must always pay attention to the relationship between the linguistic and
non-linguistic acts of human beings allows a new way of approaching
issues such as ideology and false consciousness which have always
plagued more traditionally realist ways of understanding Marxism.
Thus, for example, if the meaning of most/all words resides in their use,
we can ask whose interests or purposes are served by certain patterns of
use, or by the dominance of some patterns of use over others. We can
also ascribe ‘false consciousness’ to someone on the grounds that their
linguistic acts are in tension with, or in contradiction with, their nonlinguistic acts (what they say does not square with what they do, or vice
versa) and thus avoid the arrogant implication that we (Marxists) know
what is ‘really’ in other people’s heads (and their hearts?) better than
they do. Indeed Wittgenstein’s private language argument is central
here. If meanings are not the product of ‘mental states’, or states of
people’s heads at all, but are given by contextual interpretation of public,
visible speech and non-speech acts, then to claim to know what someone
means (even to know that she or he means falsely) is not a claim to be
able to see ‘inside’ his or her head at all,8 (although Marxists, along with
other people, have often understood it to be, and have got into awful
ethical and psychological hot water as a result).
In sum then (and to return to our main themes), Wittgenstein, much more
even than Marx, relates thought and conceptualization to action. What are
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the implications of such a relating? Here is one. It is possible to understand
Marx’s dialectical conception of capitalism, to which I earlier drew attention,
in an essentially realist way. From this realist perspective, Marx is here saying
something about an economically and socially real entity called capitalism,
i.e. he is saying that there is this ‘thing’ – this ‘it’ ‘out there’ called capitalism –
a thing which simultaneously possesses such real but contradictory
attributes or characteristics as ‘being exploitative’ and ‘being dynamic’ or
‘being oppressive’ and ‘being liberational’. And if you do understand what
Marx is doing in this realist way then you can, for example, deny that there
is a single real entity called ‘capitalism’ out there in the world and (therefore) deny that there is an ‘it’ which can possess such contradictory
characteristics, or indeed any set of uniform characteristics at all. (A lot of
post-structuralist criticism of Marxism takes off in just this way – by understanding Marx as this kind of realist and then rejecting him as such).
However, these kinds of difficulties can be avoided if words like ‘capitalism’,
‘exploitation’, ‘dynamism’ are seen, not as names of real socio-economic
things or objects, or of real characteristics of such objects, but as tools or
instruments, working in Marx’s discourse to achieve certain moral and
political purposes which he held dear. In this alternative Wittgensteinian
conception of what Marx is doing, capitalism is a conceptual universe actively
created by Marx in order to serve certain explanatory, descriptive and moral/
condemnatory purposes, rather than the name of a real socio-economic
entity that Marx passively observed.
Similarly, to describe certain relations between certain discursive entities
called ‘capitalists’ and ‘workers’ as ‘exploitative’ is an active discursive
decision taken by Marx in service of certain moral-political purposes, rather
than a passive registering in his thought of some ‘real’ relation of
exploitation ‘out there’. All this implies that the first critical question which
any reader should ask of Marx is not ‘is what he says true?’ but ‘do I agree
with his objectives?’ Of course, having begun in this way one may still
conclude that, even if one agrees with his objectives/purposes they are, in our
world, no longer well served by his descriptive/explanatory/rhetorical devices.
(Indeed, to a degree, this is the view which I do take). But even if one does
take this view it is not because one has boomeranged from a naively realist
view of what Marx is doing to an equally naive anti-realist view of why he
should not/cannot do it (as many post-structuralists have done).
But we risk being side-tracked here. The central point from the perspective
of this article is that this Wittgenstein reading of Marx’s discourse puts Marx
the man, the subject, back into Marxism. It asks not just ‘what did Marx
observe?’ but ‘why did he choose to describe it that way?’ It asks not just ‘is
capitalism really like that?’ but ‘why did Marx construct this “it” this
“capitalism” at all?’ It asks not just ‘but is capitalism really exploitative?’ but
‘what did Marx hope or intend to achieve by claiming that it was?’ Conversely,
and equally importantly, it also asks not just ‘but is capitalism really one
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thing – one entity?’ it also asks ‘what do we lose – morally, politically – if we
stop saying that it is?’
As a result of Wittgenstein’s approach to language and of Kitching’s
Wittgensteinian approach to Marx and Marxism, I came to realize that not
merely Marx as subject but subjects in general must be central to all conceptualizations of research method. That is, both I and the people I talk to in the
course of my research must now be central to my research method – central
that is to say both to how I conceive it and how I practise it. In everything I
now do I try, very consciously, to make subjects present as active makers both of
social and economic reality and of descriptions/explanations of that reality.
By the same logic, I must also appear, as the active subject, the active
maker/author of the research. That is, I must appear in my own texts both as
a contributor to the interviews (dialogues) which are always a central part of
my research texts and also as an author of and participant in the research
process – an author and participant motivated by certain aims and objectives
which I try, as openly and honestly as I can, to lay before the reader.
Given this general intellectual reorientation – derived from Marx and
Wittgenstein – (or perhaps more exactly from a Wittgensteinian rereading of
Marx) I now object, ever more insistently and strenuously, to my colleagues’
research practice on the grounds that they are radically unwilling to present
themselves as active subjects in that practice. (Although of course they are
active in their so-called ‘objective’ practice – it would not be a practice if they
were not). But I also object to these research practices on the closely related
grounds that even the most heterodox and radical of my economist
colleagues legitimate such practices by reference to ‘theories’ which have no
theorists or users, by ‘concepts’ that have no conceivers and as contributions
to the making of ‘truths’ which are apparently told by nobody to nobody. It is
in fact my view, now, that this strange, inhuman, unpeopled research
practice which is called ‘economics’ is a particularly severe intellectual form
or expression of that phenomenon which Marx called alienation. But to say
that is to open a whole other Pandora’s box of issues, which cannot be dealt
with here.
That being so, I now wish to complete this article by providing readers with
a rather more detailed account of my actual field research practices and their
evolution over time – an evolution produced partly by the practical exigencies
of the field situation and partly by my reflections on the implications of the
philosophical ideas found above. In fact, the same dialectic features here once
more. On the one hand, the practice of fieldwork stimulated reflections on
method and conceptualization and, on the other, such reflections fed back
into further developments of, and confidence in, the research methods I was
using. However, since the first sections of this article have dealt most
extensively with the philosophical/conceptual side of things, the account
below gives much greater emphasis to the learning occurring from and
within the fieldwork experience itself.
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6. Fieldwork: some details
Beginning with doctoral work in India in 1985, I have investigated a number
of different dimensions to the process of industrial development and change
(in India, in Europe, in Australia and more recently in Fiji) with a primary
focus on the garment (or clothing) industry. Throughout this time, I have
used extensive interview-based data collection methods to inform that work.
Talking to many different kinds of people across different cultures, languages
and places gradually taught me to take what they said very seriously indeed
and this is at the heart of the claim made in this article that we should take
qualitative research as a whole much more seriously than we commonly do.
The fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation9 was planned in careful
adherence to what I understood (at that time) to be a properly scientific
methodology for such research. That is to say, I went to some considerable
effort to construct a stratified sample of firms in the town in which I worked
and also to use questionnaires which I had pre-prepared. These questionnaires were intended to strongly structure the informant interviews which I
would conduct, and would be supplemented by other official and unofficial
sources of statistical data where possible. I soon discovered however, once
I had arrived in India and began my work in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, that
being systematic – particularly in the construction of a sample of firms – was
impossible. More exactly I became increasingly concerned about the
following:
(a) the reliability of such (very limited) official Indian statistical data as were
available (especially in regard to the largely unregulated small-scale
industrial sector on which I was working).10
(b) the usefulness of highly structured questionnaire-based interviewing
methods, and
(c) the practical feasibility and utility of stratified sampling procedures,
(which, in theory, would have allowed statistically significant results to
be obtained).
As a consequence of this first field experience, I increasingly began to break
with certain kinds of conventional research practices and methodologies (a
process which caused me considerable anxiety) and I summarize below the
main elements in my current fieldwork methods which have been the
outcome of that break.
(i) I no longer try to undertake systematic random or stratified samples of
respondents for interviewing. Rather I aim to interview people as ‘representative’11 of others in similar structural positions: for example, owners of
different sized firms which reflect the industry structure; those representative
of bureaucracies and organizations associated with the industry; a range of
men and women who actually work in the factories and workshops –
managers and middle people (such as line supervisors) as well as those on the
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factory floor doing the operative jobs. Some might regard this as akin to
stratified sampling. However, it is not, since to be properly constructed,
stratified samples must be drawn from a broader statistical universe against
which one can check the typicality of the strata created.
However, if one is dealing with a new sector of economic activity in which
official survey data either do not exist or are highly unreliable in various
ways, then there are no universal data from which such sample frames can
be drawn. It would of course be possible for more lavishly equipped
researchers to check the representativeness of the results obtained using
more standard methodologies, and this indeed is one of the merits of the
more informal methods I employ. That is, they are both feasible for the lone
researcher with limited resources, and they may help to structure the
research hypotheses and testing methods of larger scale more systematic
research, which indeed the efforts of the lone researcher may serve to
stimulate.
(ii) While the sample of respondents is not scientifically selected, I still use
interviews as the basis for collecting primary data. I do not always tape
record interviews, since I have frequently found that this procedure is
inhibiting of respondents who do not know one well, and tends to restrict
their openness in providing information. Where I do not make tape
recordings of interviews, I take detailed notes in a notebook during the
course of the interviews and enter these in my research diary or log, as soon
as possible after the interview is over and while its nuances are still fresh in
my memory.
(iii) I have almost entirely ceased to structure these interviews in other than
very limited ways. That is, while I still use a pre-conceived set of questions as
a guide and replicate this same set of questions across a series of interviews of
similar representative groups, I try to follow every avenue as it opens up
during the interview. My interviews therefore have become closer to
conversations than interviews, at least in aspiration (although there are clear
limitations on the extent to which such interviews can be ‘conversationlike’). In particular, much depends upon whether the interviewee sees him or
herself as the status equal of the interviewer or not. That is, the more the
interviewee sees him or herself as in a situation of being formally questioned
by a status superior, then the more inhibited and staccato the interview will
tend to be. The respondent will tend to restrict him or herself to answering
the question asked in as narrow a way as possible, will make few or no
additions or comments of his or her own, etc. Conversely, the more the
interviewee feels status at ease in the interview situation, the more
‘conversation-like’ and free-flowing the interview is likely to become and (in
general) the richer and more varied the data it will generate.
Interestingly however, I have also found that such status complications are
nearly always totally unimportant to outstanding informants, that is,
informants who impress by their intelligence, perceptiveness and curiosity
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about the world. For such people class, race and gender distinctions are of
little importance. All that then remains an issue is cultural and linguistic
understanding, about which there has always been such debate among
ethnographers and more recently by postmodernists. In my experience,
however, even these divides cease to be terribly important when there is a real
wish to communicate on both sides. Reflective people stand out no matter who,
what or where they are and they make difference recede and ‘human
commonality’ stand out. I believe my responsibility as a researcher lies
always in ‘not talking down’, in trying very hard indeed not to jump to rapid
conclusions, not to assume too much (or, so far as possible, anything!) and,
last but not least, in not being in any way pretentious. A number of feminist
writers on epistemological issues argue that the ability to behave in these
ways is itself gendered.
This does not, perhaps counter-intuitively, lead to the situation in which
one is lost in an impenetrable maze of conversation and anecdote. Rather,
meaningful and useful quotes can be collected and the more of this kind of
detail one has, the better position one is in to be able to cross-check
information given by other informants. Another way of putting it is to say
that one builds up a much more complete picture of the world one is seeking
to understand and interpret than would ever be possible by analysing a set of
‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers on a standard questionnaire or by testing (proving or
disproving) a strictly conceived set of hypotheses.
(iv) Whether feeling status at ease or not, all respondents vary in their
acuteness as observers of their own and others’ actions, in their
reflectiveness about the causes or reasons for those actions, and in their levels
of information and curiosity about the world. However, to put it crudely, if
you conduct enough interviews with enough people in the representative
group, you will get enough that are good to balance the ones that are bad and
you also collect a large number of interviews that are ‘mutually-confirming’
(that is, interviews in which both factual descriptions and informant
evaluations of those descriptions tend to match and confirm each other). This
is the nearest I now get to random sampling.
(v) In the context of my own research I found that, unsurprisingly,
considerations of power and status were far more inhibiting in my interviews
with ordinary factory workers than in those with owners and/or managerial
staff (nevertheless, the point made above still stands). That is, the workers
definitely do not perceive the relationship between themselves and the
interviewer as equal, and particularly not if one is a white westerner and (in
their eyes), eo ipso rich and privileged. However, gender can make a
significant difference and all women tend to be more comfortable with me as
a woman than either men and women together, or just men. There are also
significant differences in the responses of men and women where status
issues arise: women, even where they do not perceive themselves as a ‘status
equal’, still tend to probe the details of one’s own life, compare it with their
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own and thus reach beyond differences, reducing discomfort and tension;
men tend to see you as simply a rich foreigner and thus dwell on differences
increasing discomfort and tension. Moreover, in heavily patriarchal societies,
women researchers tend either not to be taken seriously (a response which
can work to the advantage of the researcher on occasion) and/or, more
difficult, be viewed with intense suspicion.12
(vi) But leaving aside power and status differences between the workers and a
European interviewer, workers everywhere are often also inhibited by fears
about managerial responses if they provide ‘wrong’ information; they are
also unsure of the relationship between an interviewer and the management
(which produces further inhibitions). So I have tended to use more carefully
structured and more detailed pre-prepared questionnaires in these cases. But,
even in such cases where the interview can be turned into a conversation,
I try very hard to make it do so (by encouraging informant comments,
questions, further reflections and despite the difficulties of using an
interpreter, in all but a few cases).
To put this most simply, interviewing collapses clearly and relatively
quickly any simple distinction between what is called ‘factual information’
given by informants on the one hand and informant evaluations of, or
attitudes to, that information on the other. That is, they depend on the ‘point
of view’13 of the person providing the factual information involved.
Collecting interview-based data powerfully and directly reveals this to be so.
Take the following example as an illustration: I was told by the Managing
Director of a large garment export firm in Delhi (Aniruth Sonal of Sonal
Company, 1995) about a number of labour ‘difficulties’ with their in-house
machinists involving a dispute over pay, after which they all walked out.
Unions then became involved, and there followed a series of ugly, sometimes
violent confrontations, demonstrations and so on. Recounting such an
incident involves, of course, establishing some factual detail as to what
exactly happened when (a sequence of events involving times, dates, people,
place and so on); the cause of the grievance (no small matter which involves
a number of different points of view); when and how the ‘confrontations’
occurred; what subsequently happened as demonstrations were held and so
on. This is the verbal description he gave:
In the beginning with this factory there was a strike by a number of workers
because the unions here are just trouble making and corrupt [He claimed that
in the Okhla area, where his factory is located, there were 200–300 different
unions] ... so they simply brainwash the workers just to cause trouble then they
get a pay rise – say Rs. 500 – and Union officials ask for half for helping them
get a pay rise. They’re so ungrateful, they get good pay here. But we fixed them
that time. I found some gate guarders – they were big – (laughs) who scared off
union officials and after that there was no more trouble – although initially,
after the first lot of workers were sacked there was a lot of trouble – slogans on
the gate and so on, it got really bad. So we don’t keep workers on the roll
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anymore here. There’s none of this trouble in Bangalore [this company has a
number of factories there, as well as in Bombay]. There, we can get completely
finished articles packed for Rs. 40 compared to Delhi where one tailor is paid
Rs. 37 for one piece. They just don’t want to work in Delhi – just get the money
– they want to work in Bangalore and because they’re on salary they don’t
work hard.
The meaning that Aniruth gives to his ‘factual’ description, and the language
he uses in giving his account (‘ungrateful’ workers, ‘corrupt’ unions, and the
whole tone of his account) betray his point of view. For a Marxist, of course,
this would be regarded as labouring the obvious: a clear example of the ways
in which capital/labour relations are viewed and get ‘played out’. Thus and
equally predictably, the Secretary of the Center for Indian Trade Unions
(CITU, the Communist Party of India affiliated union) gave an entirely
different account of the whole episode using a quite different language to do
so, as did one of the workers in the Sonal factory (‘we work hard and all they
can do is threaten us and try to keep us from any contact with the Union
people’ (male machinist, Sonal factory, 1995)
However, if the above might seem predictable, and entirely unproblematic
to anyone of Marxian persuasion, I encountered other informant ‘points of
view’ on reality which were not at all expected (at least by me) and, at the
time, caused me acute methodological and theoretical anxiety. To take just
one of several possible examples, data collected during fieldwork in Tiruppur
showed that the numerous small workshop owners in the knitwear garment
industry did not distinguish between themselves and their workers. Moreover,
in those same interviews they provided at least plausible justification for
this view. For they themselves, as they stressed, had frequently been workers
for other owners until scraping together the capital to start up their own
small businesses and, given the overall fragility of their position in the
production hierarchy, could quite easily find themselves employees again.
Moreover, numerous (male) workers in the industry aspired to do the same
thing. In this case, the only revolution in sight was a revolution of rising
expectations.
7. Conclusions
In the overall economic context of a rapidly growing industrial sector as
garment exports in India took off from the mid-1980s onwards,14 the
multiplication of economic spaces which new independent producers could
fill, together with a definite tendency for real wages to rise among at least
some classes of worker (allowing them to accumulate small amounts of
capital), all created a macro-economic environment in which this blurred
worker/small owner conception of the world could arise. This in turn led me
to reflect that certain forms of moralistic and undialectical radicalism (often
calling itself – perhaps dubiously, but commonly – Marxism) can involve its
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enthusiasts in an implicit or explicit denial of an important fact – namely,
that capitalism, even in its early (or primary) stages of accumulation can play
a progressive role in improving (in however limited a way) the lives of (some)
poor people. It is particularly difficult to reach such conclusions when a
Marxian value framework is used to assert not only that all wage labour is
exploited labour, but that labourers who are so exploited are also absolutely
impoverished in the process.15
This is a position that Bill Warren (1973, 1980) argued against with great
polemical force over 20 years ago now, but which seems to have an endless
capacity for emotional resurgence no matter how convincing its intellectual
demolition. I cannot hide the fact that, as a result of my research experience,
I have found myself increasingly sympathetic to the Warrenite view of the
partially progressive role that capitalism can play in (some parts) of the postcolonial world, even if Warren himself – as a result of over-generalization –
also seems to me insufficiently sensitive to the social and human
contradictions of the accumulation process as it works itself out in specific
social, political and cultural arenas. But in any event, the reduction of
Marxism either to a unilinear moral progressivism (as in Warren) or (possibly
worse – because of its political effects) an equally unilinear moral pessimism
(as in Frank, 1967, or Wallerstein, 1994, and so much of both the old
dependency and the modern post-colonial literature16) is a reduction which
my research or, more exactly, my informants (the people, or some of them, of
the Third World) encourage me to resist.
As well as factual/numerical information, then, I have come to regard
people’s views or opinions expressed in conversation (things regarded by
positivists as epistemologically distinct from and inferior to the facts but – as
in the case of the above – often part of the facts) as just as important in trying
to get at certain kinds of information as anything that will result from simply
administering narrowly factual or structured questionnaires.
Indeed I would stress, as is clear from the arguments presented above, that
it is only in seeking such qualitative information that we are enabled to pick a
route through complex social, political and economic realities. It is me
picking the route – it is my purposes, my concerns and my interpretations,
albeit in interaction with those of my informants – that determine that route,
which is, of course, also linked to some type of political and ethical agenda –
in my case as some kind of Marxist, some kind of feminist, some kind of
socialist.
As for the people I interview, they produce the information I record out of
their knowledge of their work world. They also know a great deal about the
context. In short, many are both extremely good informants as well as
interesting and intelligent commentators on ‘their’ world. Such authentic
information is what is needed in the construction of an account of the
economic, the political, the social, which is as complex and modulated as the
reality it describes. However, it must also be supplemented by the researcher’s
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own understanding and beliefs about wider realities and in particular about
longer-term historical trends about which informants may be ignorant or
simply unconcerned.
I have therefore come to believe the best in-built check on ill-founded
academic pride in knowledge and, in particular, on the tyranny of theory, is
to go and talk to people not engaged in theorizing. (I believe it is of the
greatest epistemological as well as political significance that academics spend
altogether too much time obtaining knowledge from other academics.) For
the things that people tell you are precisely not always the things you either
want to hear or expect to hear. Such objectivity as we have occurs, in my view,
in doing this kind of empirically oriented fieldwork research and from having
to take account of what we are told in writing up our material. While we all
work within certain kinds of theoretical/ideological paradigms, the
importance of doing empirically-based research is that it forces an honesty in
trying to take account of things that do not fit with pre-conceived conceptual
(theoretical) structures. I now conceive this process as ‘informed conjecture’
– a very great distance both from the ‘testing of hypotheses’ (although one
develops mini-hypotheses all the time in the process of ‘trying out’ different
explanations of one’s data) and from the providing of jigsaw pieces to be used
in some, also pre-conceived, grand theoretical schema. Grand claims of any
kind must always be subjected to a scrutiny that can only come from
informed and detailed empirical research and, above all, from a proper sense
of historical perspective.
I hope that this account has made it clear how my fieldwork research
experience over the last 12–13 years has been simultaneously an education
in method, in theory, in philosophical reflection on that theory and (last but
by no means least) a political education. At the root of it all has been a deep
enriching of my understanding of how human economies and societies work
– a working that I now think involves the attitudes and values of the people
who make them up as much as it does the rate of economic growth, the
pattern and scale of investment, the growth or decline of per capita incomes
(or their distribution) or any of the other magnitudes which we may measure
and manipulate in a manner beloved of a whole range of social scientists
(from orthodox Marxists to orthodox neo-classical economists). The point of
this discovery (it has certainly felt like a discovery to me – which is of course a
testament to the power of the theoretical and methodological ideas with
which I began research) is not of course to say that we should cease
measuring what can be measured, or cease to manipulate statistically and
rigorously what can be so manipulated. It is rather to say that what all these
quantitative magnitudes mean, what they imply for the way the world is or
(even more) for the way it should be, is not something that such magnitudes
alone can ever tell us.
Thus, for example, the finding that economic inequality has increased
(using various standard measures of changes in the distribution of income
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and wealth) does not in itself tell us what should be done about this, unless
we also know something about the way the people (whoever, wherever and
whatever they are) who are ‘experiencing’ this growing inequality perceive it
and its consequences, and what therefore ‘they’ want done about it. Only
more qualitative forms of research can supply us with these types of data,
and of course they may show (in this case) that there is no single perception
of the process at all, but a whole variety of perceptions, structured around
class, gender or other bases.
If all that is the case then I, as the researcher finding and presenting these
conflicting data have to choose between them – be on the side of one set of
informants rather than another, endorse one set of perceptions of that
inequality and its consequences rather than another. A similar responsibility
to choose also falls on the reader of my ‘contradictory’ research findings. But
that’s fine. Perhaps the most important lesson of all that qualitative research
teaches is that responsibility, and sometimes personal responsibility, for the
knowledge claims one makes cannot and should not be avoided, for they are,
after all, my claims.
Qualitative research, then, destroys all illusions (not just most illusions, all
illusions) that the facts ‘speak for themselves’ or that the identity and values
of the knower are irrelevant to the knowledge that she or he produces.
Qualitative knowledge does not ‘get one off ’ but precisely ‘puts one on’ the
hook of a kind of personal moral responsibility for what one says and writes
and there is nothing, I want to say, wrong with that. On the contrary it is
perhaps the most pernicious consequence of all of a kind of extreme
‘scientistic’ outlook on sociology and economics that it too easily allows
people (in their role as professional economists or professional social
scientists) to evade responsibility, not only for what they say, but for who they
are and what they believe.
NOTES
1. ‘The model of human behavior that economists offer is austere, abstract and
formal, totally devoid of the ambiguity, conflicts, noise and mess which
characterize the world as we know it and [which] play a more important role in
the more empirically grounded approaches to social reality’ (Kabeer, 1994: xiv).
2. It is also, of course, to hear my voice, see the discussion in section 6.
3. There is a wealth of literature on or about Wittgenstein. The works I have found
most useful for my own purposes are Rubinstein (1981); Rossi-Landi (1981);
Finch (1977) and above all, Pitken (1973). Also Monk’s biography (1990) is
invaluable and fascinating to read.
4. It is one of the most important and neglected facts about the writings of the early
Marx, that in those writings production is not understood simply to mean what is
usually called (misleadingly) ‘physical’ or ‘material’ production, but includes the
production of new ways of thinking and of the symbolization systems which
accompany them and make them possible. On this see Kitching (1988).
5. The academic discussion that developed around the ‘mode of production’ in India
during the early 1970s onwards is an excellent example of how debate eventually
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6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
simply runs out of steam as definitional problems proliferate. That literature
included: Patnaik (1972); Chattopadhyay (1972); Alavi (1975); Banaji (1977);
Rudra (1978); Bardhan (1979) among others. Eventually all protagonists
withdraw, exhausted, from the fray, see Kitching (1984). There are many other
possible examples. Two of the more recent might include the debate around the
so-called ‘informal sector’ or around the concept of ‘flexible specialization’.
At one time, philosophy influenced by Wittgenstein was known as ordinary
language philosophy. In one sense this is accurate, since Wittgenstein does spend
a lot of time analyzing the complexities of so-called ordinary uses of language.
But what he ends up concluding is that natural language is quite extraordinary in
its richness of connotation and implication. By the criterion of ‘meaning
richness’ it is developments of language such as mathematics and symbolic logic
(whatever their technical usefulness) which are ordinary in this sense, a fact
which is seen instantly the moment we try to make social life fit into logical or
mathematical symbolization.
The ‘and’ here is a bit misleading. Symbolic systems which are ‘meaning thin’ are
so because they are ‘context thin’, and vice versa.
Wittgenstein said, famously, that if God could look inside our heads ‘He’ still
would not know what we meant. The point here is the claim that what God could
‘see’ if he could look ‘inside our heads’, would only be what we non-Gods could
‘see’, that is, physical states of the brain – changing brain states. But although
such states, and their changes, are the mechanisms by which we think, they do
not show (to God or anybody else) what we think.
See Cawthorne (1990) and Cawthorne (1995) for a later summary of some
aspects of my doctoral research.
A number of those problems are elaborated in Cawthorne (1990: 34–53).
This is not a novel idea – Alfred Marshall is renowned for his concept of the
‘representative firm’. See also Schmitz (1982) who makes explicit methodological
use of ‘representativeness’ in his own work.
On this and a number of other interesting practical fieldwork difficulties see
Abbott (1995, 1998).
Kitching constructs an argument for Marxism as ‘a point of view’ (1994:
133–179).
See Chatterjee and Mohan (1993).
For a detailed elaboration of this point see Cawthorne and Kitching (1999,
forthcoming 2001).
See for example Ankie Hoogvelt’s work (1982, 1997).
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
I would like to thank an anonymous referee whose perceptive suggestions were most
helpful in the redrafting of an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank
Gavin Kitching, who greatly assisted in the redraft, and whose work on Marx and
Wittgenstein (1988, 1994) provided the main impetus to my reflections on fieldwork
methods and their wider implications in the first place.
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has been a lecturer in political economy in the University of
Sydney since 1994 (she migrated to Australia from the UK in 1991) teaching courses
on the social and ecomic consequences of industrial change in the OECD countries
and in the developing world (particularly India and more recently, Fiji) and on
structure and change in modern economies. Prior to that she was a doctoral student,
undertaking fieldwork-based research in south India and a summer school lecturer in
Third World Studies at the Open University in the UK. Her current academic research
interests are in industrial development using detailed case studies of individual firms;
fieldwork methodology; the working of ‘commodity chains’ and ethics and trade.
Address: School of Economics and Political Science, Political Economy, University of
Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia. [email: [email protected]]
PA M E L A C AW T H O R N E