Someone raises a hand in a room. Is she voting, asking to speak, or signalling to a friend? The movement alone will not settle the matter. To describe what happened, an observer needs to know something about the occasion and about the rules the people in the room are already using. Anthony Giddens starts from this problem in New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies, first published in 1976.
What interpretive sociology gets right
Giddens reviews approaches that take seriously the work people do to make social life intelligible. Phenomenological sociology asks how an apparently ordinary world becomes available to people as shared knowledge. Ethnomethodology looks at the methods people use in practice to make their actions recognizable to one another. The question for Giddens is how far a social science can go if it begins with that knowledge.
An outsider learning to observe a meeting has to learn what counts as taking a turn, what a vote settles and what an interruption signifies. This requires some of the same competence as participating in the meeting. People may be able to follow the rules with little difficulty even when they would struggle to state them in an interview. Social inquiry therefore begins with attention to how an activity is carried on as well as to what participants say about it.
How social life gets reproduced
The people in the meeting use existing rules and resources. A chair may recognize speakers, a secretary may record decisions, and a person with a particular role may be able to put an issue on the agenda. These arrangements have histories. They also depend on people taking them up again in what they do. If participants repeatedly decline to recognize the chair’s authority, the meeting may start to work differently.
This is one of the book’s steps toward structuration theory. Structure is implicated in action as both its medium and its outcome. Rules and resources make a practice possible, and that practice can reproduce or alter them. Giddens leaves room for unequal power, conditions people do not know about, and consequences they did not intend. Understanding what a participant meant to do gives the researcher a starting point for explaining the wider result.
Why the method is a double hermeneutic
Sociologists give technical descriptions of a world already organized by the concepts and understandings of its participants. Those technical descriptions can circulate back into ordinary life. A researcher might describe a pattern in meetings as informal gatekeeping. If participants adopt the term, they may start noticing who gets interrupted or whose proposals reach the agenda. They might even change the way meetings are run. Giddens calls this relation the double hermeneutic.
That relation places a distinctive demand on sociological explanation. A researcher needs enough familiarity with a practice to recognize it, and enough analytical distance to examine conditions and consequences that are harder to see from inside it. The findings can then become part of what people in the practice know and do.
The title recalls Émile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method. Where Durkheim asks how sociology can establish social facts as objects of inquiry, Giddens asks what is involved in studying a world whose members are already competent interpreters. It is a useful difference to keep in mind when reading the two books together.
Further reading: Examples of the double hermeneutic
