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Historical Methods:

‘Doing Time’ in Social Research

Historical Social Research Methods

● Last week: Visual ‘data’ and visual methods.

● This week: Historical sources and historical methods.

The Roots of Historical Sociology…

In its origins Sociology was an attempt to come to terms with a historical transformation – the emergence of capitalist commercialisation and industrialisation in Europe (i.e. modernity).

Classical sociology was both a product of and a reaction to this dramatic shift.

Therefore classical sociology was thoroughly historical in its aims and scope – it was a historical sociology of modernity.

E.g. ● Marx was centrally concerned with the historical development of industrial capitalism and the class divisions it gave rise to.

● Durkheim ’s sociology focussed on the social consequences of the advanced division of labour and the differences between modern and traditional societies.

● Weber analysed the historical spread of instrumental rationality and the growth of large-scale bureaucratic organisation.

But despite the historical consciousness that informed early

sociology, historical methods are often missing from social

research training courses.

As a result, fewer and fewer emerging researchers are equipped

with the necessary skills to undertake historical research.

Why study Historical Methods?

C. Wright-Mills : “Every social science – or, better, every well

considered social study – requires an historical scope of

conception and a full use of historical materials.”

(The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 145).

The argument: Without some understanding of the past and of historical processes, one can only hope for an impoverished understanding of the present.

Heraclitus – ‘You cannot step into the same river twice’.

i.e. Like a river, social life is never static

or fixed, but is constantly changing, so

everything is always in motion, in flux.

‘Doing Time’: Approaches to history

So time (or the temporal dimension) is key feature of social life.

But there are different ways of ‘doing time’ in social research.

One key division is between:

► Research which attempts to understand societies of the past.

► Research which explores how our notions of the past, and even

our perceptions of time, are socially constructed in the present.

Researching Societies of the Past

Historical social research can be roughly divided into 2 broad approaches:

i) ‘Social’ History (macro)

Focuses upon historical changes in social structure and broad structural

transformations.

ii) ‘Cultural’ History (micro)

A more ethnographic approach focussing upon the details of everyday

lives in past societies and the way that people have created meaning and

viewed their worlds.

► This division broadly corresponds to the structure/agency divide in sociology.

‘Macro’ Social History

According to Theda Skocpol – “Truly historical sociological studies

have some or all of the following characteristics:

1. they ask questions about social structures or processes understood to be concretely situated in time and space. 2. they address processes over time , and take temporal sequences

seriously in accounting for outcomes.

3. they focus on the interplay of meaningful actions and structural contexts in making sense of the unfolding of unintended as well as intended outcomes in individual lives and social transformations. 4. they highlight the particular and varying features of specific kinds of social change.” (Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, 1984, p.1).

‘Second Wave’ Historical Sociology

► The ‘macro’ historical sociology of the 1970’s and 1980’s is sometimes called the ‘Second Wave’ (the first wave was the classical sociologies of Marx and Weber).

► The ‘second wave’ was a reaction against the a-historical approach of the structural-functionalism dominant in the mid-20 th^ century.

Key second-wave figures included:

● Barrington Moore ● The Annales School ● Reinhard Bendix

● Charles Tilly ● E. P. Thompson ● Immanuel Wallerstein

● Theda Skocpol ● Michael Mann ● Perry Anderson

► All these in different ways tried to think about some of the questions raised by Marx and Weber’s approaches which they had not satisfactorily answered.

Central topics of concern for ‘second wave’ historical sociologists were:

● The relationship between social classes and the state.

● The comparative dynamics of state-formation.

● The relative importance of politics and economics in structural

social transformation.

● The comparative dynamics of revolutionary social change.

So the ‘second wave’ was a combination of political-economic analysis, structural (macro) sociology, and comparative historical analysis.

► This approach was called into question by the ‘cultural turn’, with its new understandings of time and its emphasis on non-class-based social identities such as ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

From ‘Social’ to ‘Cultural’ History

■ The 1980’s saw an explosion of ‘macro’ structural history,

which led some to hail ‘the rise of historical sociology’ (Dennis Smith, 1991)

■ The 1990’s saw a shift from ‘macro’ historical sociology to a

new ‘cultural history ’, as part of the ‘cultural turn ’ across the social sciences (also called the ‘linguistic turn’)

■ The cultural turn involved a new emphasis upon the role of

language and meaning-making processes in social life and the relationship of language to social reality.

■ The cultural turn also saw the development of different

approaches to history and different ways of ‘doing time ’ in social research.

The New ‘Cultural History’

The ‘cultural turn’ has had 2 main impacts upon historical

research:

i) New understandings of ‘time’ have emerged.

Rather than an objective force moving forward in a linear process

outside of society, providing a framework in which society is

located, the concept of time has come to be seen as the product

of social and cultural processes, and even as ‘socially constructed’.

ii) New scepticism concerning claims about ‘the past’:

The notion of historical research as a process of discovering ‘how

things really were’ has been widely challenged. Instead ‘the past’

is increasingly seen as a narrative which is constructed through

historical writing.

Taking each of these in turn:

i) New understandings of ‘time’:

● It is important to understand that this new understanding of time does not mean that ‘time’ in the sense of natural processes of change such as the seasons are merely fictional.

● What it means is that our concepts of time, our understandings of time, are socially and culturally specific – in this sense time is socially constructed.

► E.g. Our concepts of time emerge from social practices, rituals and ceremonies marking the passage of time, from habits and traditions of remembering the past, from practices of record-keeping and other ways of ‘storing’ time, from story-telling and from history books themselves.

These things not only construct ‘the past’ as a sequence of meaningful events, they also construct ‘time’ itself, meaning our consciousness of the passage of time and of how the present is located within it.

■ Anthropologists have shown that

the view of ‘time’ as a linear and objective force is a peculiarly Western and modern notion.

■ It may be misleading to view all

social history in terms of this linear model of time.

The argument: Instead we need to understand how past societies have constituted time and how they have interpreted and experienced the passage of time.

■ This shift towards a more cultural view of time has seen traditional approaches challenged by research which addresses the various social practices that ‘construct’ time.

■ But this is not straightforward – there were many early examples of more cultural approaches, and there are still historical sociologists who pursue a broadly structural approach.

ii) New scepticism concerning claims about ‘the past’:

● This have been associated with post-modernism.

● Traditionally historical methodology has been rooted in empiricism (reliance upon ‘the facts’, ‘the evidence’, ‘the sources’).

● Although the role of interpretation was acknowledged, historical research was seen as a process of determining ‘the truth’ about the past through rigorous scrutiny of the available evidence.

● This commonsense view of historical methods has increasingly been called into question.

After the ‘cultural turn’, it has been widely argued that our methods of researching and writing history are not ways of finding ‘the truth’ about the past, but ways to construct a model or ‘version’ of the past, which we then think of as ‘real’ and ‘objective’.

■ “History is not just there, awaiting the researcher’s discovery. Unlike a forgotten poem, the ruins of a cathedral, or a lost law code that might be uncovered, history has no existence before it is written.” (Howell and Preventier, 2001, 1)

■ From this perspective, historical writing is constitutive of history, it actively shapes ‘history’ as an object-of-knowledge (i.e. as something we claim to know).

■ This view has stronger and weaker forms, from the ultra-postmodernist notion that all history is fiction, to the more moderate argument that all historical research is a partial and interpretative exercise rather than an objective representation of the past.

■ But the debate between postmodernists and traditional empiricists has often been divided into two opposing camps.

■ Despite this polarisation however, the post-modern challenge is

less radical than it first seems.

■ Historians have always known that ‘history’ is slippery, hence the

emphasis given to careful interpretation of ‘reliable sources’.

■ So the idea that historical writing ‘constitutes’ or ‘constructs’

history has not led to the meltdown of empirical history, but it

has led to greater awareness of the ‘reflexive dimension’ of

historical research.

■ i.e. how the categories of explanation that we use profoundly

shape our view of the past, and how accounts of the past are

always bound up with the society, culture and politics of the

present.

The Tradition of Source-Criticism

“Differences over the character of history as a discipline for acquiring knowledge of the past are hardly a recent development. Debates over approaches to knowledge, understanding and explanation in the historical and social sciences have been going on for generations, indeed centuries. recent skirmishes over postmodernism have merely added some new

twists to old scepticisms.” (Mary Fulbrook, 2002, p. 3)

Therefore a balanced view would be that there is no case:

► Either for a naïve empiricism, which fails to acknowledge that historical research is unavoidably caught up in reflexive questions of interpretation and representation.

► Nor for a refusal to engage in empirical historical research in the name of philosophical uncertainty.

So the skills of source-criticism are still central to historical research.

Lecture 1: Key Points Summary

■ Classical Sociology thoroughly historical in its approach.

■ Society is always changing, therefore understanding society means taking account of the time (the ‘temporal dimension’).

■ This can mean:

i) Researching past societies

ii) Researching how perceptions of time are shaped by society (or ‘socially constructed’)

■ There are two broad approaches to researching past societies:

a) Social history (macro)

b) Cultural history (micro)

■ Second Wave historical Sociology (1970’s, 80’s) focussed on macro- structural transformations from a Marxist-inspired perspective.

■ This was partly displaced in 1990’s by a new Cultural History, which was part of the wider ‘Cultural Turn’ in social science.

■ New emphasis on influence of language on how we perceive reality (associated with post-modernism).

■ The Cultural Turn had two main impacts on historical research:

1) New understanding of time as socially and culturally constructed.

2) New scepticism concerning the truth-claims of historians.

■ This has led to more critical attention being given to the role of interpretation in history.

■ But the skills of source-criticism remain the core of historical social research.

Historical Methods:

Working with historical sources

The Challenge of Historical Sources

■ Some historical research is ethnographic in nature, such as oral

history, which commonly involves talking to participants about their

memories of the past.

■ But where social research involves studying the past that is beyond

living memory, it is different from ethnography in that there is no

direct access to the phenomena of interest.

■ An ethnographer writes his/her field notes after direct observation

of social interaction. This means they are able to continually mould

their ‘data’ and to select what is relevant during the

observation/interaction itself.

■ It is very different with historical documents or ‘sources’ – you

cannot interact with sources in the same way as living people.

E.g. In an interview, the researcher can ask questions

which relate more or less directly to their research problem, they can steer the interview accordingly, seek clarification or elaboration, etc.

► The ethnographic researcher can draw upon their

interpretative skills to narrow the range of ‘data’ from the beginning, so that a good portion of their field notes are likely to be directly relevant to their research.

It is not possible to do the same with an archive:

► The researcher has to work with the available

sources.

► Often this will mean having to plough through

reams of documents before finding something useful.

► Therefore historical research can be very

labour-intensive compared to other methods of social research.

► Contrary to the view that historical

research is ‘easy’ because it does not involve interacting with people, historical research is extremely challenging, involving long hours of sometimes painstaking work in the isolation of the archive.

► Much of this work will produce nothing that will ever make it into

the final research writing.

► So historical research requires better-than-average reserves

of patience, dedication and perseverance.

Types of Historical Sources

“Historical Sources encompass every kind of evidence which human beings have left of their past activities – the written word and the spoken word, the shape of the landscape and the

material artefact, the fine arts as well as photography and film.”

(John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 1991, 30)

But in practice most sources are written documents. This is because:

● From the high middle-ages (c. 1000-1300) onwards, the written word survives in greater abundance than any other source for Western history.

● The 15 th^ and 16th^ centuries witnessed a marked growth in record keeping by the state and other corporate bodies, as well as the rapid spread of printing

Documents: Types of Written Sources

The main kinds of documents used as historical sources are:

● Newspapers

● ‘Records’:

• State records
• Church records
• Local government records
• The records of private associations and corporations

● Private correspondence (letters, diaries)

● Autobiographies/memoirs

● Novels and creative literature