Abstract
AbstractIn a world that is said to be more and more filled with quantities, this paper focuses on the practices and reasons of people refusing quantities; people who want to purify their world from numbers. It uses the history of qualitative sociology as an example and shows how actors refused the quantitative for political or ethical reasons. But they opposed only a certain set of qualitative methods—especially the statistical survey—, which they associated with certain political “demons” (the State, the Army, Bureaucracy), but not the quantitative in general. On the contrary, even qualitative sociologists who opposed surveys did make room for other ways of using numbers, which are very different, often very original and surprising (including social studies of data, data gleanings, conceptual canvasing).
Funder
London School of Economics and Political Science
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Reference82 articles.
1. Abbott, A. (1999). Department and discipline: Chicago sociology at one hundred. Chicago University Press.
2. Adorno, T. W. (1998). Critical models: Interventions and catchwords. Columbia University Press.
3. Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper and Row.
4. Austrian, G. (1982). Herman Hollerith: Forgotten giant of information processing. Columbia University Press.
5. Becker, H. S. (1958). Problems of inference and proof in participant observation. American Sociological Review, 23(6), 652–660.
Cited by
1 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献