Diego Thompson
An invitation to Reflexive Sociology-The Practice of Reflexive Sociology
Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu´s why question: How social scientists should apply their knowledge based on the reflection of its construction and the construction of the object?
Answer: It is necessary to constantly reflect about the idea of social phenomenon and importance such as both subjective and objective result of the social researcher perception of reality and academic context.
Bourdieu’s motivational mechanism: The deconstruction and analysis of the epistemological, theoretical, and empirical work of social scientist. The base of his motivational mechanism is the reflection of subjectivity/objectivity and the epistemological paradigms.
Key concepts:
Handing down a trade - (…) “to apprehend research as a rational endeavor”- (p. 218)
The translation of abstract problems into thoroughly practical scientific operations is carried out by the exposition of the investigator. Practicing the theoretical knowledge is “kind of guide or coach who provides assurance and reassurance, who sets an example and who corrects you by putting forth, in situation, precepts applied directly to the particular case at hand” (p. 221). The scientific habitus is a rule “mad man,” an embodied rule or, better, a scientific modus operandi that functions in a practical state and within the academic game (p. 223).
Thinking Relationally (between theory and methodology). The division between theory and methodology establishes as an epistemological opposition of scientific labor at a certain time so that division into two separate instances must be completely rejected (p. 225). Substance and function must think relationally in order to interrupt the rupture between them. Some “common” indicated steps operated upon the “fields”:
· Building a model (within the epistemological rules but not taken for granted the fact)
· The construction of the object may be based on the reasoned intuition of homologies.
· Generalization (which science itself) through a comparative method.
· Transmission practically.
A Radical Doubt is based on the argument that “the preconstructed is everywhere.” The scholarship notions and their self-evident character arise from the fit between objective structures and subjective structures which shield them from questioning (p. 235). “The scientific practice that fails to question itself doesn’t know itself” (p. 236). “For a sociologist more than any other thinker, to leave one’s thought in a state of unthought (impense) is to condemn oneself to be nothing more than the instrument of that which one claims to think” (p. 238).
Double Bind and Conversion: it is the whole scholarly tradition of sociology that we must constantly question and methodological distrust that creates the double blind in which every sociologist seems to be a “little more than an amateur” (p. 248). Sociologists have “to break within the instruments of rupture which negate the very experience against which they have been constructed” (p. 251). The epistemological rupture of ordinary pre-constructions and of the ordinarily at work in the elaboration of these constructions, often presupposes a rupture of mode of thinking, concepts, methods that usually appears as common sense, of ordinary sense, or good scientific sense. Social scientists must apply the conversion of thought, breaking the scientific or epistemological order and creating: the sociology of sociology (pp. 251-253).
Participation objectivation: “is the most difficult but also the most necessary exercise” (p. 253). It is the double truth constituted by the objective and subjective in the creation of the social objects of study that constitutes the whole truth of the social world (p. 255). Sociologists play the game of academic neutralization of the enunciates and the resultant of all these objective relations are relations of symbolic power which express themselves in the interaction and in the form of rhetorical strategies (pp. 258-259) “Only the sociology of sociology- and of the sociologist-can give us a definite mastery of the social aims that can be pursued via the scientific goals we immediately seek” (p. 259).