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Fabian Muniesa (Ecole des Mines de Paris) |
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“The divide between qualitative and quantitative approaches: A stopgap for the social sciences”
Why do you think, from your very personal involvement with cultural thinking, that a topological approach can help understand contemporary cultural dynamics?
Cultural trends or public controversies are commonly mediated by or expressed through communication technologies, which foster their quantitative aspect. This quantitative aspect is already a visible aspect of the qualities of ongoing controversies that take place in the public web space.
What might your involvement in this project be, and what do you expect from it? The CSI, the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris, has been working recently in the area of quantitative methods for the social sciences (including network analysis software), especially adapted to the study (and teaching) of scientific controversies. The project can be used as a hub to exchange on the use and experiences with such methods.
Which crossdisciplinary combinations do you expect to profit particularly from the topological approach? The divide between qualitative and quantitative approaches is perhaps one stopgap for the advancement of the social sciences. So any attempt at overcoming this gap is most welcome. One instance of this is to consider network analysis as an ethnographic tool and, conversely, large datasets as materials for ethnographic inquiry.
If change is one main feature of culture today, why is this approach helpful in conceptualizing or unerstanding cultural change? Change is always something that happens in and through a concrete territory or site. Being able to spot this spatial dimension of change is a prerequisite for its proper understanding. This holds true even in the case of virtual territories such as the internet.
Can everything in culture really be measured in numbers? Numbers and metrics are already cultural expressions, not something opposed to culture. And so are research and quantification too. (We can talk about specific cultures of quantification.) So any attempt at quantifying culture must be attentive to its own cultural implication, asking which new relations this quantitative intervention are operating, and so forth.
One idea of the approach is that it avoids normative judgements. Is that not risky, or might it lead to a "neutral" and ultimately empty understanding of culture? One thing is to critically examine the scientific categories that one is meant to impose upon its object of inquiry (and there is nothing wrong with this attempt at neutrality). And another one is to try to de-politise the understanding of something that is intrisically political, which can incidentally be difficult and harmful.
CV: Fabian Muniesa is a researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI) at the Ecole des Mines de Paris. He was trained as a sociologist at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. In 1999, he joined France Telecom R&D's social science laboratory where he worked on a PhD on the computerization of financial markets, completed in 2003. He then joined the London School of Economics for a one year post-doctorate. His current areas of interest and research projects include the sociology of finance, economic experiments, the anthropology of calculation, experimental methods in social science, and the sociology of architecture.
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