Overview

This methodological appendix is divided into two sections, which consider:

• • some consequences of a profoundly historicising approach to the ‘socio’ of sociobiography;

• • some underplayed implications of the constant comparative method beyond Glaser and Strauss’ classic emphasis on grounded theorising (1967).

It emerges from a struggle to understand how Sostris related its research questions and its methodology.

• • Sostris’ sociological and social policy research can be seen as an attempt to improve and change social meta-narratives of societal description and thus of consequent social policy recommendation;

• • Sostris’ research methodology is based on the case narratives of individuals processed in a Grounded Theory (GT) way.

How is the connection to be made between emergent case theory and discussion characteristic of most of the chapters in this volume on the one hand, and the general questions arising from prior theorising about grand historical transformations (for example, from pre-risk to risk society, from the welfare societies of the third quarter of the 20th century to the World Trade Organisation [WTO] society currently emerging from the last decade) on the other?

This appendix starts by arguing that, in the sociobiographical approach that characterises Sostris, ‘socio’ should be profoundly historicised. It identifies the problematic nature of type, as in the notion of searching for ‘typical’ cases in ‘typical’ contexts.

It addresses one particular feature of the ‘classic’ GT methodological programme: the drive towards the higher and more abstract transhistorical generalisations of formal theory, the type of theorisation whose construction is the primary desired output from Glaser and Strauss’ GT research programme (1967). With Burawoy (1991, 2000), we argue that our primary task is not to develop transhistorical generalities but rather to enrich the understanding of the focal cases partly by undertaking the reconstruction of theory.

Another methodological issue that is addressed is the direction of implied causality between the ‘parts’ and the ‘whole’, between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. There exist interactionists and structuralists. Interactionists typically argue for something close to ‘methodological individualism’ – it is the interaction of individuals that sustains and modifies the produced product that appears as a dominant social order. Like Marx in his (1844) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, they find it most productive to start from the micro-realities and derive the macro-order.