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The purpose of the exercise is to help you work out your ontological positioning. The reason I have done it this way is to provokes reflection which is easier when faced with a distinct proposition.
Say if you agree/disagree with the following statements, and why. Show what the implications of adopting one stance or its opposite would be.
Human beings possess measurable, stable, persistent, consequential personality traits that are largely independent of upbringing or other contextual factors.
People can act against their own interests.
There is a fundamental difference between mathematical calculations performed by the human mind and those done by an electronic computer.
It is possible to label certain cultural forms ‘maladaptive’.
The fundamental characteristics of entities are best explained by examining their environment
When I was putting these exercises together I changed the wording a lot, away from wording that implied ethical and political consequences and to wording that implied possibilities. Ontology in my writing became about the possibilities of things rather than their meaning or what would be done with them. Ontological positions open and close off possibilities. For instance rejecting number 4 means you cannot then entertain ideas of toxic masculinity, or of white racial resentment. If you do accept ideas like toxic masculinity you cannot then reject outright positions like the culture of poverty thesis. You can still criticise it, you just cannot rule it out of bounds as such. Each decision excludes some positions. Recognising that takes discipline and means rejecting easy-outs like ‘strategic essentialism’ used by some post-colonial theories, which means ‘I only reject essentialisms I happen not to like’. You cannot have it all.
Students taking sociology courses are can be very successful at absorbing empirical data and understanding the dynamics of everyday life in relation to topics of gender, class, ethnicity and so on. As my colleague Ralph Fevre and myself noticed, students often understood theoretical frameworks well but have difficulty moving between the concrete and the abstract or deploying theories in their own discussions. Theory then appears to students not as something they ought to care much about or do much with. Neither does it give students a grounding in applicable intellectual methods which they can apply to other areas of study and later years of their degree. They were uncertain in how to inhabit theoretical discourse and often found themselves relying on brittle, black and white constructs which did not match the suppleness of their understandings. Some would beautifully describe the theoretical frame they were relying on and then give a magical account of the empirical situation they were examining, but the two apparently existed in separate spheres. Others take refuge in safe and known positions which they intuited would flatter their teachers’ points of view. Sometimes it is students who produce less polished work who are being more honest about their stance.
Sociological theory can be taught in ways which give students the confidence to articulate theoretical concepts and work through their real world consequences. To take two examples of where this often does work as intended, courses in feminist theory and postcolonialism often do this very effectively. A combination of the commitment of the authors, teachers and students to a joint enterprise is borne through involved and engaging teaching methods. The classroom becomes a fruitful, productive space, and teachers in these topics are often comfortable recognising and incorporating conflict into their work, recognising the multiplicity of social life and the multivariant nature of social phenomena without losing sight of the big picture issues at play. Observing my colleagues teaching these courses and speaking to their students shows what can be gained where the classroom is a lively place where things happen. Ideas are crystallised, differences aired, and provocations are permitted and encouraged.
How might this be done more widely? Giving students permission to disagree and the tools to articulate their disagreements is key. These qualities can be incorporated into texts and classroom environments using a dialogic approach that draws on the classical tradition of disputation and productive conflict. As students will come to the classroom with a variety of capacities they are likely to find leaping into something in the style of Plato’s Symposium intimidating or alienating. In any case these classical dialogues are themselves rather contrived. Instead I like to draw on concepts students will be familiar with for creating dialogue and giving students the tools to interact with the material and each other. These are world building, simulation and augmentation. World building and simulation may be familiar from the Minecraft video game and many other apps, and augmentation from augmented reality capabilities built into social media apps such as Instagram. Problem based learning approaches align with these experiences, where students are given information and asked to simulate a problem solving team or another scenario. Students may be asked to write the thoughts of Georg Simmel attending a 21st century rave, advise a drug gang or the FBI on the philosophy of money, or rewrite Marx’s Communist Manifesto as if he had been a driver in the gig economy. The challenge in these approaches is that students are sometimes unsure of what is being asked of them, and often do not have experience of creative methods and being asked to think in a creative way, it is demanding of both teachers and students, and it does not remotely fit with the evaluation bureaucracy beloved of the modern British higher education system. However if we can make a space for recovering the ideal of the Enlightenment university – a public place that exists beyond the rule bound bricks and stone of the institution – then we will have done some good.
The researcher stance should be one of polite but informed puzzlement and a willingness to learn from the world.
A few of the posts I have been writing are about different ways to spark your curiosity. It is that willingness to push beyond face value answers and assumptions that is the fuel for a fun research career. Great questions to ask are simple ones. ‘And then … and then …’ or ‘You mentioned x?’ They invite research subjects to elaborate and give themselves voice. Curiosity should also be ethical. We hope to gain a complete picture of the lifeworld and experience of the topic: enough and no more. Finding out what it is means discovering what matters, and the latter is what everyone really wants and will benefit from knowing. Discover lives as lived, not as described.
One angle on that is repeated injunctions about what it is you really are studying. Just discussing the cryptomarkets recently and the question came up of why we talk about them as a unitary phenomenon. If you were talking about the illicit drug street market the first question would be, ‘well which one do you mean’? There are millons of drug exchanges every day in pubs, parks, streets, workplaces, homes, underpasses. To throw that all together as ‘the street market’ or ‘the face to face market’ or ‘the digital market’ is letting the phrase do a lot of work. So far, so typical of my inherent research laziness.
Likewise recent research into the cryptomarkets shows how we should not treat it as all one thing. Even the term ‘market’ flattens our analysis in ways that might be limiting. I would presume a market has several features such as commodification, standardisation rationalisation and so on but these appear very differently in different market spaces. One drug market I study resists commodification due to the cultural commitment that market participants have to the product, psychedelics. I prefer the term community of exchange for that one since it does not seek to explicitly conform to typical market precepts. You still have operators who make the market identity part of their approach and seek to defend it but it is not predominant within that particular place.
You can gain a lot in the attempt to answer that question: well, what is it? What is it not? Howard Becker (1993) has a lovely illustration of his attempts to understand with medical students what made a patient a ‘crock’. A crock was a patient they did not like to deal with. The puzzle was what put a patient into that category. At first it seemed someone who had vague and ill defined psychosomatic symptoms. That was only half the story though. Becker sought to understand the issue theoretically: why did a ‘crock’ patient violate the medical students’ interests? The medical students had a good sense of what a crock was but found it hard to articulate as a category. You just know them when you see them.
Through repeated discussion with the students, they came to understand that a crock was a patient whom the students could learn nothing from. Dealing with many such patients did not add to their sum of knowledge about human pathology. A crock would also be worthless in the informal economy of experience working at medical school. If I have several patients with ovarian cysts and you have several with an ectopic pregnancy, it benefits us both to ‘trade’ so we can each learn about a class of pathology we have no experience with. A crock was worthless to trade with. The crock also illustrated a crucial element of medical status operating at the time: true medicine is powerful and dangerous, where you can kill or cure. With no physical pathology, there is no opportunity to act out the doctor as god role. The main lesson from this is to use and elaborate your bafflement. When you ask a question and the people around you scoff at your ignorance, it means you are onto something. Don’t be embarrassed to be ignorant and hold onto your polite puzzlement like drunk ex clings onto their self-pity.
Becker, Howard S. “How I learned what a crock was.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22.1 (1993): 28-35.
Childs A, Coomber R, Bull M, et al. (2020) Evolving and Diversifying Selling Practices on Drug Cryptomarkets: An Exploration of Off-Platform “Direct Dealing.” Journal of Drug Issues: 0022042619897425. DOI: 10.1177/0022042619897425.
