This chapter is about how ethnographers might deal with the issue of social structures. Two main questions are addressed. First, are there such things as social structures? Second (predicated upon a positive answer to the first question), is it possible to use ethnographic methods to examine those struc-tures and their relationship with social action? The suggested answer to this is that the philosophy of science known as critical realism provides a sound basis for moving ethnography beyond the examination of specific social instances, in order to examine the general structural context of those instances.
The chapter has three main sections. The first section entails an historical review of the way (primarily sociological) ethnographers have dealt with the issue of structure. It starts by looking at the foundational work of Durkheim and Weber, and their attempts to incorporate the structuring of human action into their theories of research. Following from this baseline, there is an examination of the phenomenological and postmodernist turns in ethnographic theorizing, which concentrates on how the influence of these two movements led to the erasure of structure from the ethnographic imagination. The section concludes with a brief review of what Brewer (2000) terms post-postmodernist approaches to ethnography, which is seeking tentatively to pull back from the extremes of methodological individualism and scepticism.
The second section introduces critical realism and attempts to argue how the use of this philosophical position as a grounding for ethnography is capable of solving many of the problems raised by phenomenology and postmodernism in relation to the place of structure in our understanding of the social world.
The final section works through a practical example of the use of critical realist ethnography. This is an ethnographic study of power relations between nurses and doctors in an intensive care unit which attempts to gen-eralize beyond the interactions observed and comments of individuals heard, in order to show how those relations are socially structured.
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The elementary forms
Probably the most seminal attempt to understand the nature of structures using ethnographic information was that of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]), which relied for empirical data upon ethno-graphic studies of the religious practices of Australian aboriginals. However, the point of Durkheim’s use of ethnography was not simply to describe the ideographic experiences of the individuals observed. His aim was far bolder:
I will make every effort to describe the organization of this system with all the care and precision that an ethnographer or a historian would bring to the task. But my task will not stop at description. Sociology sets itself different problems from those of history or ethnography. It does not seek to become acquainted with bygone forms of civilization for the sole purpose of being acquainted with and recon-structing them. Instead, like any positive science, its purpose above all is to explain a present reality that is near to us and thus capable of affecting our ideas and actions. That reality is man. ... I have made a very archaic religion the subject of my research because it seems better suited than any other to help us comprehend the religious nature of man, that is, to reveal a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity. (Durkheim 1995: 1)
The latter sentence does not entail a theological statement, rather a funda-mentally sociological one. As Durkheim stated elsewhere:
Religion contains in itself from the very beginning, even in an indistinct state, all the elements which, in dissociating themselves from it, articulating themselves, and combining with one another in a thousand ways, have given rise to the various manifestations of collective life. (Durkheim 1897, cited by LaCapra 1985: 247)
Thus, Durkheim’s project was to use ethnographic material on the religious life of an ‘organic’ society (cf. Durkheim (1984 [1893]), where, ‘[a]t the same time all is uniform, all is simple’ (Durkheim 1995: 5), in order to uncover the elementary forms of religion which constituted one of the most fundamen-tal structures underpinning collective life. By examining the undifferentiated components, as displayed under conditions of organic solidarity, Durkheim then argued that the significance of this ‘fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity’ could be traced through the development of society, allowing us to understand better how religion, or at least the transformed remnants of religion, continued to have a profound influence upon the collective life of modern society.
The purpose of this brief synopsis is not to defend Durkheim’s thesis on the social structural position of religion, still less to defend his belief in the veracity of positive science. Rather, it is to note that from the era of its for-mulation as a distinct academic discipline, sociology approached ethno-graphy from a particular standpoint. Namely, it aimed to use ethnographic
material to tell us something wider about social life than the particular experiences of those who were the subject of ethnographic studies.
Weber’s Verstehende
It might be argued that contemporary ethnography has an altogether differ-ent sociological pardiffer-entage, namely the Verstehende sociology of Max Weber, which was based on a distinctly nominalist position, and thus would seem to place the focus of research firmly on individuals rather than structures:
When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a corporation, a family, or an army corps, or to similar collectivities, what is meant is ... only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons.
(Weber 1978 [1956]: 14, original emphasis)
The problem with such a position is that, whether or not it is correct, people in general tend not to adopt it, and instead regard collectivities as having a reality beyond that of individuals, and act accordingly. This is a point that Weber concedes, but to which he responds with an idealist interpretation:
These concepts of collective entities … have a meaning in the minds of individual persons, partly as of something actually existing, partly as something with norma-tive authority. ... Actors thus in part orient their action to them, and in this role such ideas have a powerful, often decisive, causal influence on the course of action of real individuals. (Weber 1978 [1956]: 14, added emphasis)
Thus, Weber is brought to a position whereby, while denying the material reality of structures, he accepts that they have real causal effects. In doing so, he comes very close to Durkheim’s position, who, while arguing for the coer-cive power of social facts, is perfectly prepared to accept that they ‘have no existence save in and through individual consciousness’ (Durkheim 1982 [1895]: 52). The significant issue here is that Weber’s acceptance of the causal efficacy of social collectivities leads him further to accept that research focus-ing on the meanfocus-ings of individuals is not sufficient on its own to gain full sociological understanding.
A correct causal interpretation of typical action means that the process which is claimed to be typical is shown to be both adequately grasped at the level of mean-ing and at the same time the interpretation is to some degree causally adequate. ...
even the most perfect adequacy on the level of meaning has causal significance from a sociological point of view only insofar as there is some kind of proof for the existence of a probability that action in fact normally takes the course which has been held to be meaningful. (Weber 1978 [1956]: 12)
There are ambiguities here in relation to the distinction between cause and correlation, ambiguities which were played out in Weber’s own empirical
analysis of the relationship between religion and socio-economic organization (see Parkin 1982). However, the point is that, like Durkheim, Weber had aspirations for sociological knowledge that went beyond the ideographic uncovering of understandings of particular individuals.
Phenomenological ethnography
While Durkheim and Weber made significant statements about the use of ethnography as a method of sociological exploration, they were less than comprehensive on ontological, epistemological and methodological details of their approaches. Despite the considerable length of Elementary Forms, it is almost entirely taken up with empirical information and theoretical extrapolations based on that information. Durkheim pays little heed to the methodological quandaries relating to ethnography that contemporary ethnographers would take as standard; questions such as the status of accounts of western ethnographers examining non-western social practices, or of the secondary use of ethnographies. While Weber’s development of the Verstehende method was more comprehensive, he remained vague about key conceptual issues. This vagueness was seized upon by Alfred Schutz in his Phenomenology of the Social World (1972):
The present study is based on an intensive concern of many years’ duration with the theoretical writings of Max Weber. During this time I became convinced that while Weber’s approach was correct and that he had determined conclusively the proper starting point of the philosophy of the social sciences, nevertheless his analyses did not go deeply enough to lay the foundations on which alone many important problems of the human sciences could be solved. Above all, Weber’s central concept of subjective meaning calls for a thoroughgoing analysis. As Weber left this concept, it was little more than a heading for a number of important pro-blems which he did not examine in detail. (Schutz 1972: xxvii)
Schutz’s argument that Weber failed to state clearly the essential attributes of Verstehen, subjective meaning or social action allowed him the opportu-nity to develop Weber’s methodology in his own direction. Specifically, it allowed Schutz to graft on his own interpretation of Husserlian phenome-nology. The key notion that he adopted from Husserl was that what appears to be the natural ordering of the world is in fact the result of conceptual judgements of the mind.
This move meant that Weber’s rather ambiguous, but essentially two-way conception of the causal flow between structures and actions was now firmly grounded in a uni-directional causal flow, with structures being reduced to the status of epiphenomena of subjectivities. For Schutz, the social world was ‘essentially only something dependent upon and still within the operating intentionality of ego-consciousness’ (1967: 44). The problems of this emphasis on the subjective at the cost of recognition of the causal effects of the wider social world upon the subjectivities of individuals
have been identified by Giddens (1976), who has criticized Schutz’s position on the grounds that it can take account neither of the unacknowledged effects of actions, nor of determining conditions that are not mediated by the consciousness of actors.
This discussion of Schutz has been confined to the level of theory. We need to ask what are the consequences of such a position being adopted by the empirical ethnographer? I wish to argue that the significance of Schutz’s ideas for ethnographic sociological research lay in the tendency for many ethnographers to rely exclusively on uncovering, in an unproblematic fashion, the subjective interpretations of individuals, at the cost of examining how social structures and processes influenced those interpretations.
Let me take one example, that of Hockey’s (1986) ethnographic study of British soldiers. Hockey clearly situates his study within the subjectivist tradi-tion, noting that his research involved stressing ‘the importance of interpret-ing the behaviour of people in terms of their subjectively intended meaninterpret-ings’
(1986: 10). Part of the study involves an account of soldiers on combat duty in rural Ireland. In good ethnographic tradition, the soldiers’ everyday lives are richly described. Unfortunately, description is as far as it goes. The simple but crucial question of why the soldiers were acting in the way that they were in the location in which they found themselves is beyond the remit of this sub-jectivist inquiry. For example, we are given a description of highly armed troops, who are psychologically on a combat footing in a foreign country, the native inhabitants of which they treat with, at best, suspicion. This information is of limited utility unless we ask why this is so, and in order to do so, we need to understand how the political, social and economic relations between Ireland and Britain have been historically structured.
The restriction of the interpretation of behaviour to the subjectively intended meanings that immediately generated it obviates the possibility of deeper analysis of the social situation encountered by the ethnographer. In short, the social phenomenological assumption that individual interactions and interpretations are all there are leads to analytic superficiality. While understanding the interpretations of the social actors is a necessary condition for sociological knowledge, it is not a sufficient one (Porter 1993).
The import of this critique of phenomenological ethnography is that if ethnography is to be an effective method of social research, it needs to be grounded in an ontological, epistemological and methodological model that can provide a deeper understanding than subjectivism is capable of; one which is able to link the subjective understandings of individuals with the structural positions within which those individuals are located.
Postmodernist ethnography
As we have seen, Durkheim, in his study of elementary forms of religious life, felt few qualms about using ethnographic data about the beliefs and practices of people in a culture radically different to his and using them to
make sweeping generalizations about the nature of human society in toto.
Thus, the intricacies and complexities of the lives of these people were sub-sumed into the framework of his functionalist ‘meta-narrative’, to use Lyotard’s (1984) term.
Here we can see the ethnographer as a figure of authority, claiming the right to explain people’s lives from his or her singular point of view. This issue of explanatory presumptuousness was especially acute in the disci-pline of anthropology, where one found western ethnographers presuming to explain various non-western cultures according to their own western lights. This academic imperialism involved an uncomfortably close affinity with the military, economic and political imperialism of western capital and nations.
The construction of the non-western ‘other’ within the self-serving rubric of the western paradigm has come in for severe criticism (see, for example, Said 1978). One of the results of this sort of critique has been a crisis in con-fidence on the part of western ethnographers. One of the responses to this crisis has been to radically undermine the authority of the ethnographic author. This involves moving from a critique of the particular meta-narratives that ethnographers adopted to frame their explanations to a generalized attack on the use of any sort of meta-narrative. Thus, for example, Crapanzano warns that the events being described by the ethnographer will be ‘sub-verted by the transcending stories in which they are cast’ (1986: 76). Here we can see a full swing across the spectrum of epistemological confidence – from the point where ethnographers assume unproblematically the validity of their authorial position, to the point where ethnographies are seen as nothing more than the inventions of their authors (see Clifford 1986).
A concomitant rejection of patriarchal meta-narratives led many feminist ethnographers to adopt a similar critique. Thus, for example, Stanley (1987) developed her radically perspectivist ‘reverse archaeology’. Reverse archaeo-logy goes beyond the traditional perspectivist tenet that different observers will have different perspectives on the same phenomenon, to asserting that the same observer will have constantly different perspectives on the social patterns that they observe. Once again, we have moved from the unreflexive certainties of patriarchal thought to the acceptance of the indeterminacy of knowledge.
From particular politico-epistemological problematics, postmodernism rapidly moved to occupy a central space in thinking about qualitative research (see, for example, Scheurich 1997; Cheek 2000). In short, pluralism, perspectivism and scepticism became the order of the day.
The rejection of authorial meta-narrational certainties and their replacement by a robust epistemological scepticism has even more profound conse-quences for our knowledge of the social world than that of the phenomeno-logical turn in qualitative research. Phenomenology still held on to the anchor of subjective experience, and the possibility that the perspective of the subject was amenable to interpretation at the point of encounter between its horizon and that of the researcher’s (see Gadamer 1975). With postmodernism, even
this is abandoned to the kaleidoscope of changing patterns and perspectives that allow us little or no confidence to assume that one interpretation of the social world can claim epistemological superiority over any other.
The difficulty with such a position is that, if ethnographies are simply authorial inventions, rather than reflections, of greater or lesser accuracy, of social reality, then what is the point of ethnography? While the problem of intellectual arrogance is solved, it is done so at the cost of abandoning the very raison d’être of ethnographic research. This, I believe, is the reductio ad absurdum of the postmodernist position. If absolute uncertainty and rela-tivism are accepted, there is little else for ethnographers to say about the social world, for what they say can claim no superiority in terms of adequacy over that which anyone else says.
Post-postmodernist ethnography
While it is as yet too early to tell definitively, there are indications that post-modernism has passed its high-water mark. There are good practical reasons for this, in that if ethnography is to be of any utility for our understanding of society, it has to posit some form of generalizable truth claims. This is not to say that the issues highlighted by both phenomenology and postmod-ernism can be rejected out of hand. From phenomenology, we can glean the importance of understanding subjective meanings as the basis of social action. From postmodernism, we are made aware of the dangers of making absolute claims about those understandings. There is now a growing accep-tance that an adequate ethnographic model needs to incorporate these insights, while at the same time going beyond them, in order to take into account the patterning of social behaviour. Thus, for example, in Chapter 5 in this book, Malcolm Williams argues that while strong claims about the capacity to generalize from ethnographic data cannot be sustained, this does not obviate the need for some sort of generalization. As a consequence, he advocates ‘moderatum generalizations’, whereby it is claimed that aspects of a particular situation can be seen to be instances of a broader recognizable set of features.
These moves beyond postmodernism are not confined to the realms of sociological theorizing, indeed they are far more crucial to the endeavours of practising qualitative researchers, in that it is they who are required to demonstrate the broad pertinence of their work. To take one substantive area of research, that which looks at the health behaviours of young people, it is increasingly being recognized that we cannot understand why young people behave as they do in relation to the consumption of such things as tobacco and alcohol unless we include social structure in our explanation. Thus, Pavis et al. (1998) state that ‘Our research suggests the persistence of signifi-cant structural limitations in the pathways to adulthood, although these may be different to those experienced by previous generations’ (1998: 1,412).
Similarly, Denscombe (2001) puts forward the thesis that one of the primary
factors in explaining adolescent smoking are the ‘uncertain identities’ of young people. While the notion of uncertain identity may seem in itself to be a very postmodern one, Denscombe wishes to uncover from whence such uncertainty comes. He concludes that ‘the evidence from this research would still tend to support the contention … that the social/historical context of late modernity heightens the significance of uncertain identities in the lives of young people’ (2001: 175).
Examples from other substantive areas of qualitative research could be used just as well to demonstrate that while researchers remain sensitized to postmodernism’s attack on the arrogance of sureness, there is a drawing back from its extreme position, and an acceptance that it is both permissible and desirable to make knowledge claims which extend beyond the individual.
This leads to the question of what sort of philosophy of science can be used to ground this post-postmodernist (Brewer 2000) position. Such a model would be required to allow for the possibility of generalization, while at the same time avoiding the errors in previous models identified by phe-nomenology and postmodernism. In other words, it would be a model which accepts that there is a reality beyond individuals, but which does not over-extend its claims about how much we can know about that reality (in response to postmodernism) or about the degree to which external reality controls the decisions of individuals (in response to phenomenology). In short, what is needed is a realism that is not naive.
A number of attempts have been made to construct just such a realist basis for ethnography, most notably Hammersley’s (1992) ‘subtle realism’ and Altheide and Johnson’s (1998) ‘analytical realism’. Critical realism differs from both of these models in that it gives less away to the phenomenological and postmodernist critiques. As such, its claims are contentious. However, I hope to argue that the use of critical realism as a basis for ethnography is both viable and useful. The first stage of this argument is to outline what the philo-sophical position of critical realism entails and how it relates to ethnography.
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At the basis of critical realism is an acceptance of the crucial importance of what Kant (1896) termed the transcendental question, which asks what must be the case, a priori, in order for events to occur as they do. Thus, in relation to society, it asks what factors lead to the patterning of human understand-ings and actions. The a priori answer to the question is that, because actions are patterned, rather than random, they must be structured in some way.
Already, we have got to the stage where a number of possible objections need to be answered. From a postmodernist point of view, it might be argued that this transcendental conjuring up of structures is just another example of the arrogance of modernist meta-narration. In response it is important to underline the limits of this transcendental move. The assertion that structures exist is as far as critical realist a priori reasoning goes – identification of