Current Table of Contents

• Introduction: Rethinking Qualitative and Quantitative Methods
  

  This article introduces the symposium issue on `Narrative, Numbers and Socio-Cultural Change'.The articles were all papers presented initially at the conference `Narrative, Numbers and Social Change' at the University of Manchester, UK in November 2007.The conference was organized through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). Methodological issues have been central to CRESC since its inception, and the Centre has an ongoing commitment to nurturing methodological expertise and innovation in the study of socio-cultural change. This particular event marked an interest in rethinking the boundaries of qualitative and quantitative research and in developing methods adequate to the challenges posed by socio-cultural complexity, in ways which involve reworking some of the conventional understandings of the relationships between the empirical, the theoretical and methodology. The introduction reviews the articles and reflects on their significance in the context of understandings of methods in cultural sociology and the sociology of culture, in the UK and beyond.

• Against Epochalism: An Analysis of Conceptions of Change in British Sociology
  

  The article conducts a historical sociological analysis of the appeal of epochalist modes of social thought, especially as manifested in contemporary British sociology. It lays out key features of contemporary epochalist thinking, showing how it breaks from older evolutionary models of social change which root future events in past conditions.The article argues that one important reason for the power of epochalist thinking is due to the emergence of a distinctive social science research infrastructure based around the sample survey and the interview. I argue that these provide mechanisms for deriving measures of change internally to the research process itself, rather than through the external comparison of separate sources as practised by historians. The article further pulls out the way that the rapid rise of British sociology in the period 1950—70 entailed its championing of the `new' as a means of claiming intellectual legitimacy over the `traditional' social sciences, and seeks to encourage debate about the peculiarities of British sociology.

• Seeing Like a Survey
  

  This article explores a performative understanding of social science method. First, it draws on STS to consider the plausibility of the claim that research methods generate not only representations of reality, but also the realities those representations depict. Second, it undertakes an archaeology of a major survey — a Eurobarometer investigation of European citizens' attitudes to farm animal welfare — in order to explore the character of its performativity. Finally, it considers some of the implications of the performativity of research tools for the future of methods in social science.

• Between Narrative and Number: The Case of ARUP's 3D Digital City Model
  

  This article explores the ways in which contemporary digital visualization technologies offer grounds for a reappraisal of the relationship between qualitative and quantitative data. Using the example of a 3D digital model of the city of Manchester, the question of descriptive adequacy in the social sciences is addressed.The model is an interesting descriptive device oriented simultaneously to providing an accurate account of what is present in the world and a persuasive image of what that world could become. The analysis asks what kind of descriptive device the 3D model is, and looks at how it exercises its persuasive effects. While attending to how diverse knowledge forms are rendered compatible in the model, the concept of `discontinuous data' is introduced to draw attention to incompatible knowledges that do not appear in the model.The article explores the potential of such models to reconfigure discontinuous data forms and to produce provocative counter-maps.

• Counting and Seeing the Social Action of Literary Form: Franco Moretti and the Sociology of Literature
  

  This paper reviews Franco Moretti's use of statistics and techniques for visualizing the action of literary forms, and assesses their implications for the development of cultural sociology. It compares Moretti's use of such methods with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, contrasting the principles of sociological analysis developed by Bourdieu with Moretti's preoccupation with the analysis of literary form as illustrated by his accounts of the development of the English novel and the role of clues in the organization of detective stories. His attempt to use evolutionary principles of explanation to account for the development of literary forms is probed by considering its similarities to earlier evolutionary accounts of the development of design traits. While welcoming the methodological challenge posed by Moretti's work, its lack of an adequate account of the role of literary institutions is criticized, as are the effects of the forms of abstraction that his analyses rest upon.

• Using Mixed Methods for Analysing Culture: The Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project
  

  This article discusses the use of material generated in a mixed method investigation into cultural tastes and practices, conducted in Britain from 2003 to 2006, which employed a survey, focus groups and household interviews. The study analysed the patterning of cultural life across a number of fields, enhancing the empirical and methodological template provided by Bourdieu's Distinction. Here we discuss criticisms of Bourdieu emerging from subsequent studies of class, culture and taste, outline the arguments related to the use of mixed methods and present illustrative results from the analysis of these different types of data.We discuss how the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods informed our analysis of cultural life in contemporary Britain. No single method was able to shed light on all aspects of our inquiry, lending support to the view that mixing methods is the most productive strategy for the investigation of complex social phenomena.

• Narratives of Disability and the Movement from Deficiency to Difference
  

  In this article, I argue that the study of disability would be thoroughly enriched if the insights offered by cultural sociology as well as recent work on civil society were applied to it. I illustrate this point by offering my own interpretation of contrasting discourses of disability and their relationship to major narrative frameworks of disability. I describe how these narrative frameworks are dependent on a symbolic code that distinguishes between the abilities and inabilities of the physical body.

• Book Review: Eamonn Carrabine Crime, Culture and the Media Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008, {pound}15.99 pbk, {pound}55 hbk, 300 pp. ISBN: 139780745634661
  
• Book Review: Emma Casey Women, Pleasure and the Gambling Experience Ashgate, Aldershot, 2008, {pound}55 hbk, 156 pp. ISBN: 9780754646174
  
• Book Review: Alistair Gordon Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, $17 pbk, 305 pp. ISBN: 139780226304564
  
• Book Review: Sophie Woodward Why Women Wear What They Wear Berg, Oxford, 2007, {pound}19.99 pbk, {pound}55 hbk, 224 pp. ISBN: 9781845206994
  
• Erratum