Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Methodology)

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00002-6
Published date05 December 2007
Date05 December 2007
Pages19-59
AuthorMichael McCann
DR. STRANGELOVE (OR: HOW I
LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING
AND LOVE METHODOLOGY)
$
Michael McCann
ABSTRACT
This chapter derives from the movie Dr. Strangelove cues for exploring
questions about the quest for methodological insularity and purity in
socio-legal research. Steven Lukes’ classic three-dimensional model of
power provides an intellectual focus for the core exploration of relations
between epistemology and data generation, the two key elements that we
usually identify with methodology. The discussion culminates in an
affirmative argument for the value of approaching methodology as jazz,
the creative popular music that grounds reliable, humane sense in
Kubrick’s movie and provides an apt analogy for much of the leading
scholarship in the LSA tradition.
$
I write this chapter for our graduate students at the University of Washington – past, present,
and future. I benefited greatly from commentary on earlier drafts by many scholars, including:
Stuart Scheingold, William Haltom, Gad Barzilai, Katherine Beckett, Rachel Cichowski,
Angelina Godoy, Steve Herbert, George Lovell, Jamie Mayerfeld, Joel Migdal, Arzoo Osanloo,
Mark Weitzenkamp, Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, David Engel, Jeff Dudas, Lisa Miller, Jon
Goldberg-Hiller, Susan Sterett, Helena Silverstein, John Gilliom, and an anonymous reviewer
for this book.
Special Issue: Law and Society Reconsidered
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 41, 19–59
Copyright r2008 by Elsevier Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00002-6
19
Now look boys, I ain’t much of a hand at makin’ speeches. But I got a pretty fair idea
that something doggoned important’s going on back there. And I got a fair idea of the
kind of personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinking. Heck, I reckon you
wouldn’t even be human beings if you didn’t have some pretty strong personal feelings
about y(methodological) combat. But I want you to remember one thing, the folks
back home is a countin’ on ya, and by golly we ain’t about to let ‘em down. Tell you
somethin’ else. This thing turns out to be half as important is I figure it just might be, I’d
say that you’re all in line for some important promotions and personal citations when
this thing’s over with. That goes for every last one of you, regardless of your race, color,
or your creed. Now, let’s get this thing on the hump. We got some flying to do.
1
– Major T.J. ‘‘King’’ Kong, Dr. Strangelove
I am not sure but that methodology is a little like religion. It is something we need
everyday, but something which we are irresistibly impelled to think and talk about, but
regarding which we never seem to reach a definite conclusion. Each one, if he is clever,
works out something adequate for his own use, but the general principles remain
unsettled y
– Thomas Cooley, 1930, cited in McCann, 1996, p. 457
Why should the bomb be approached with reverence? Reverence can be a paralyzing
state of mind.
– Stanley Kubrick, 1964, interview
My breakthrough moments always seemed to come when I left the lesson plans yMy
grandfather didn’t seem to worry that he was making it up as he went along, and I try
not to either.
– Bela Fleck, NPR interview
2
INTRODUCTION
Themes
This chapter addresses two themes that ha ve, in my view, proved foundational
to the rich tradition of interdisciplinary law and society research. The first
theme is the analytical focus on power, and especially on inequalities of power
that law sustains, restrains, contests, and sometimes transforms. This theme is
particularly interesting for me as a political scientist, although in my view law
and society research has devoted rather more explicit and sophisticated
attention to questions of unequal power than does scholarship in my hom e
discipline, and especially in the subfield of public law. Second, I c all attention
to the notable socio-legal tradition of crafting new and original research
questions,designs,and methodologies. Methodological diversity and innova-
tion have been hallmarks of law and society scholarship, and this marks
another one of the reasons why I and many others longago became interested
MICHAEL MCCANN20
in Law and Society Association (LSA). The virtue of the legacy is not just its
openness to different approaches, but its celebration of creativity and
improvisation in imagining the very enterprise of research. The interdisci-
plinary intellectual tradition of law and society research has been as inventive
in the forms of research as in the substantive questions it poses.
The Contentious Context: A Provocative Analogy
This chapter reflects on both of these themes, but my primary point of
departure and focus is the latter topic concerning methodological inclina-
tions. In short, this chapter reconsiders familiar methodological modes for
interrogating power in an effort to deconstruct and challenge the power of
methodological obsession itself in professionalacademic life. I am moved to this
topic for lots of reasons, but at least in part because a palpable rift attributed
largely to methodological differences has developed over recent years among
law and society scholars. In some ways, this schism follows from the very
success of LSA in attracting scholars from so many different academic
disciplines, thus contributing to an ever-proliferating diversity in methodo-
logical orientations. It thus seems ironic that increasing theoretical diversity
and openness in LSA has been attended by the intensifying perception of
schisms drawn along simplistic binary lines of methodological inclination.
Readers of this chapter no doubt are familiar with the usual litany of
imagined clashes, including quantitative vs. qualitative, behavioral vs.
interpretive, experimental vs. ethnographic, rigorous vs. non-rigorous, and
hard science vs. soft science or non-scientific methods.
3
These divisions long
have been deep within the social science disciplines, but such depth of tension
strikes me as relatively new in the interdisciplinary study of law and society.
4
Perhaps the most palpable sign of this division is the recent development
of separate interdisciplinary socio-legal associations defined by methodol-
ogy, each with its own conferences and journals.
5
One group has been
bound by commitments to cultural studies drawing on humanities traditions
and largely eschewing scientific claims; the other has congregated colleagues
who are committed to quantitative social science and mostly undertake
statistical empirical studies of social behavior.
6
Generally, these groups are
differentiated by their separate, specialized conception of ‘‘appropriate
methodologies,’’ although many readers will already note in that claim the
problem of collapsing techniques for generating and analyzing data with
their underlying epistemological and theoretical foundations, a point that is
developed further in the following pages.
7
Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Methodology) 21

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