Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Richard Biernacki, Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 199 pp. $30.00 paper (978-1-137-00727-8). A social methods course is a mandatory degree requirement for college and university students studying sociology; oftentimes, it is a class that students bemoan, temporarily endure, and, upon completion, quickly push from their minds. Biernacki approaches the topic of social inquiry in an interesting, dynamic way while offering a timely, if controversial, rethinking of current sociological methodology. In Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry, Biernacki contends that sociocultural coding does not generate empirical facts; rather, coding is a ritual practice that misguidedly converts regenerating meanings into an isolated token, a datum label (p. 11). Biernacki challenges how sociology has come to think about systematized coding and the generation of facts. Using a positivist perspective to interpret texts measures attributes that cannot leave intact the system-like relations that let us generate meaning from a (p. 137). Throughout the text, Biernacki offers several concrete examples of what he calls the superficiality of social scientific coding processes. Biernacki's problematizes the positivistic, analytical nature of social scientific coding, instead advocating for a more hermeneutical, interpretive approach. Biernacki states that he has mocked the pretensions of a cross-dressing social 'science,' not those of conventional natural science, whose clothing sociologists try to wear as their own by presenting 'large-N' coding results (p. 154). Social scientists should understand that decontextualized fragments of text have no meaning separate from the surrounding text--and that texts have no meaning separate from the cultural milieu in which they were produced. Biernacki emphasizes that interpretive approaches are better suited than analytical techniques to the understanding of textual and cultural evidence. Organized into five chapters, the text begins by problematizing the use of positivist methods in sociocultural inquiry, specifically, the protocols of natural sciences that authorize coders to isolate from their individually meaningful contexts and then throw these bits into an independent diagram that challenges our imagination (p. 3). Biernacki argues that social scientists engage in a ritual process of coding, whereby they misguidedly transform scientifically gathered facts into sociological ultimate meanings. The term ritual is used in a Durkheimian sense, describing a distinct mode of communication and performance that reconfirms timeless models by which people can regenerate their social relations or professional roles (p. 10). In Chapter 1, Biernacki argues that social scientific coding is the incarnation of a ritual, not a systematized, scientific procedure. This ritual is akin to fitting the world to a condensed map rather than examining the world to see if the map represents anything (p. 151). The decontextualization and selective recontextualization of meaning reinforces preexisting ideas under the guise of employing empirical foundations. These sociocultural coding rituals purport to be scientific, but are, in actuality, less rigorous than humanist approaches that acknowledge the limitations of induction. Humanist approaches acknowledge the gift of an acute trial, the insurance of shared documentation, and the transformative power of anomalies (p. …
DOI: 10.29173/cjs19739
Author: Cassandra Elizabeth Kuyvenhoven
Institutions: Queen's University, Queens University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1946926446