Objectivity, Reflexivity, and Fiction: Humanity, Inhumanity, and the Science of the Social

Abstract

Problems of perspective, proximity and distance, objectivity, and self-interest perpetuate tensions in the social sciences. In positivistic research, still dominant in the organizational sciences, attention has been concentrated on the eradication of bias in the researcher. The effects of this approach have extended into areas where it is implicit and remains unrecognized, particularly in the tradition of “reflexive sociology.” The focal problem here is one of self-knowing and declaration. Focusing on distanciation, the problem of stepping outside one's data, is an alternative perspective. Esthetic approaches to this issue demonstrate that the processes of fictionalization are endemic to the interpretation of data and the production of research accounts. Language is the central element in creating accounts which are constitutive of the world rather than revelatory of its essence, and hence are partial and persuasive versions of reality. This is discussed with reference to the work of organizational and occupational ethnographers. It is argued that research accounts are inescapably an order of fiction, representations of a world which is unknowable in any “objective” sense. However, the process and products of social science have a dehumanizing effect on social research in failing to recognize this. This cannot be countered by humanist strategies (e.g. self-declaration, confessional, etc.) which preserve misconceptions of authenticity but by exploration of what Lyotard calls the inhuman, those subliminal aspects of experience which are at or beyond the boundaries of articulation. This needs to be done by a greater incorporation of other forms of investigation of the human condition-literature, poetry, art, music-which habitually work at or on these boundaries into the form and processes of “normal” social science.