Page 180 - Decoding Culture

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THE RISE F THE READER 173
Few audience ethnographers have explicitly adopted such a strict
epistemology, however, although rather more may have fallen into
it by default in as much as they have found themselves focusing
upon the richness of their descriptive material at the expense of
any systematic attempt to relate it to the larger structures which
are putatively involved.
There is a lengthy history of debate over this issue in sociology
where, especially since the 1970s, the impact of phenomenologi­
cally inclined thinking has been considerable. When the
mainstream consensus collapsed in sociology in the late 1960s, it
did so in part for epistemological reasons. The previously well
established commitment to 'scientific sociology' and a hypothetico­
deductive model of scientific inquiry lost credibility, partly because
it had simply not delivered the goods, and partly because it faced a
growing barrage of conventionalist and relativist criticism within
the philosophy of science. The emerging alternatives resisted the
abstraction of traditional sociological theory, along with its con­
cern with macroscopic patterns of structural determination, the
alleged scientism of large-scale quantitative research, and many of
the more structural concepts that had become established in the
course of the discipline's twentieth-century development. Schools
of thought arose that were exclusively focused upon microscopic
aspects of social life, using qualitative methods to interpret
processes of meaningful interaction, and largely disregarding ques­
tions about the effectivity of social structure. To document the
richness and complexity of social interaction became a sufficient
goal in itself.
Any reader of modern audience ethnographies will recognize
that description, and some of the reasons for the equivalent move
in cultural studies are similar to those that gave rise to sociology's
1970s crisis and the 'perspectival wars' that followed. As we have
seen, the main post-structuralist traditions in cultural studies had

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