I wonder, Naoki, if your objection here is not perhaps similar to my own
reasons for wanting to generalize the notion of different scales of
phenomena, and also to see the importance of how these scales mix and
cross-over to one another, especially in their relationship to how we make
meanings about and with them?
Many people have resisted the simpler micro-macro dichotomy because it
seems an unnecessary and artificial obstacle to relating theory and
practice. Social theory, and cultural theory, is usually about large-scale
systems (whole communities, average behavior tendencies in groups, etc.),
while social practice, including research practice, is everywhere
human-scale (dyads, small situated groups, local events). There are some
small-scale theories, like Conversation Analysis and its friends, but they
do not integrate well with larger-scale theories (i.e. theories of
phenomena at characteristically larger-scales of space, time, energy,
numbers of participants both human and nonhuman, etc.), and sometimes deny
the validity of such theories.
Talcott Parsons, in American sociology, analyzed this problem both
theoretically and operationally, noting that there were also different
methodological traditions for macro-sociology (statistics of large groups)
and for micro-sociology (behaviors in small groups), and that very few
studies successfully integrated both methodologies, no matter what their
theoretical framework. He proposed 'theories of the middle rank' or
meso-scale, such as studies of social institutions as the bridge between
macro-social theories such as those of social class and micro-analyses of
events.
I believe that Mike Cole's focus on methodology inherits these concerns.
And we should properly distinguish macro-meso-micro concerns about _theory_
from macro-meso-micro concerns about _phenomena_ from micro-meso-macro
concerns about research _method_ and _methodology_. There is a modernist
tendency to want all these to fit neatly together, but I do not believe
they can, will, or should.
Regarding phenomena, if we recognize that the phenomena are indeed (from
the Greek word phainomenon, an appearance) the way things _seem to us_, and
are relational, involving always observer viewpoint and observing
practices, then the issue is about the _relative scale_ of the phenomenon
(as we imagine it is 'in itself' -- a fiction) compared to that of the
observer (or the observing system, observer-and-apparatus-etc.). Here there
are not simply two or three scales; there are an unlimited number of
scales, and they are ranked by OUR scale (human action, human-scale event)
into smaller, same size, bigger. I believe we do and must look at and model
very differently depending on which of these scales concerns us most. This
is a big issue, having to do with whether we view 'as if from above' 'as if
from below' 'as if from inside' or 'as if from outside' and combinations of
these. Here are issues also of reductionism and holism, etc.
Regarding theory, I think it is a serious mistake to try to set up theories
that are 'about' just one scale in human affairs or for ecosocial systems.
You are quite right that what things MEAN for us, which is part of our
relation to them, and so part of THEM as relational-phenomena, requires
that we mix scales or cross scales (many, many scales, not just two or
three), and that we typically do this and must do it in any system where
events and meanings are inextricable.
Regarding methods and methodology (and I follow Mike's terminology here:
method is what you do, and methodology is how you decide what to do),
however, we often have no choice. Our methods are social practices within
institutions, or as parts of complex networks of humans-and-nonhumans, and
_particular_ methods tend to be useful, and to focus on or foreground,
phenomena at particular scales. In this respect all methods are necessarily
distorting and incomplete, that is why we always need multiple methods.
Here we also need to be very careful to remember an excellent point implied
by your critique: what a method SAYS and what a method IS are always
different in respect of scale. A method may lead to an observation or
formal conclusions about a phenomenon at some scale, but it does so by
means of social practices that span many other scales. Here is where the
term methodology is always ambiguous in English: it means both discourse
about method (how we decide what to do) and also the study of actually used
methods (what it means in 'ethno-methodology', say). When I do a discourse
analysis, I construct an account of what counts as an 'event' on a
human-moment-scale, but what I DO in this construction depends on memories
and networks over much longer times and larger scales.
I am not saying that theory, methods, methodology, and 'phenomena' are not
interdependent in people's actual practices. They are and should be. I am
saying that we cannot draw the same conclusions in each of these areas
regarding the signficance of scale or of the macro-meso-micro division. And
I am saying that no one ever has, can, or should have a single coherent and
consistent integration of theory, method, methodology, and phenomena --
when these involve meaning-making practices as well as other material
processes. It is said that one can and does have such an integration in
physics, but I think this is not really quite true. (It is easier to make
it seem to be true because it is easier to factor out the observer from the
phenomenon, to make relationality seem more tractable; but no one in
physics has ever satisfactorily resolved Bohr's paradoxes about the role of
the observer's macro-scale in results from methods that seem to look only
at the particle's micro-scale.)
Anyway, thank you for stimulating me to try to sort out some of this
complexity! We want things to be simple, and they never are.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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