Manuel Boutet

Debating with Jack Katz on Methodology

Jack Katz, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of several works on field work that have left a mark on the study of work (Katz 1982), deviance (Katz 1988), and research on emotions (Katz 1999). His work falls at the intersection of interactionism, inherited from the Chicago tradition, and phenomenological influences (Katz 2013). As he is certainly one of the most original theoreticians of ethnography, it seemed important to add the publication in Method(e)s of “A Theory of Qualitative Methodology: The Social System of Analytical Fieldwork” to the rare French translations of J. Katz. This article initially appeared in the book based on his dissertation (1982), and then in a reference manual on field research edited by Robert M. Emerson (1983). The commentaries included in this issue highlight the objective of this text, where the author proposes to jointly define a method of production and an assessment of field research based on a revised version of analytic induction. As commentators have noted in various ways, his systematic conception of ethnography as based on analytic induction may seem excessively proselyte, if not exclusive from other ways of working (Becker 2002). But we should bear in mind the programmatic scope of his article, which tackles some of the thorniest issues of ethnography. When R. M. Emerson’s reader was published in 1983, ethnography still occupied a marginal place in the world of academia (Emerson 2001:vii). “A Theory of Qualitative Methodology...” proposes to devise qualitative research according to criteria of scientism, adjusted to its own logic and not defined in an exogenous way. This approach sets itself apart from numerous defenses of field research, including certain canonical contributions aimed at legitimizing qualitative research that are too often set in reactions against the objections from survey research, responding point by point but lacking its own specific unity. At first glance, J. Katz may seem to take the same path and refine a “positive” version of field research, patterned on the experimental methods model (Burawoy 2003). But this critique misses the particularity of Katz’s position. He in no way suggests changing the relationship on the ground to bring it closer to experimentation, as analytic induction is a theory of the study process and not a theory on the examination technique. It rationalizes the way in which the ethnographer passes from one site to another, without prejudice to the exercise of field observation and comprehension. In this text, J. Katz examines the classic objections voiced against qualitative research, that is, the representativeness, reactivity, reliability and replicability of observations (the famous 4Rs). Of course he does not give up qualitative research’s claim to correctly represent its subject and to produce analyses that are both reliable and debatable, based on valid empirical observations. But by adopting a realistic position, J. Katz considers the impossibility of qualitative research to respond to the 4Rs in terms coming from quantitative research, where these demands are usually made. That brings him to establish the uselessness of ad hoc probative measures, which are scarcely Méthod(e)s, Volume 1, Nos 1 & 2, 2015, pp 125-129