Sociocultural sport studies and the scientific paradigm: a response to John Smith

Abstract

John K. Smith (2009) offers a useful overview of the shift away from foundationalist, empiricist inquiry in the social sciences over the latter part of the twentieth century and some provocative insights about the futility of seeking to adjudicate competing knowledge claims through appeals to reality and truth. He notes that he has found it helpful to engage in debates about research validity by starting at a personal level and considering how knowledge disputes are resolved – or not – among his family and friends. Private contentions, he has learned from this exercise, are rarely, if ever, resolved because the truth of what happened was discovered; instead, like academic debates, conflicts with loved ones tend to fade away as people move on to other things. In response to his own suggestion that researchers should consider why they do not share their supposedly professional objectivity with lay friends and family, Smith writes: ‘There is no sharing or no final arbiter state because there are no special methods that result in objectivity and researchers are no more adept at finding what-reallyhappened in their personal lives than are lay people’ (p. 98). Smith does not conclude from this that research is pointless or that professional knowledges are equivalent to lay knowledges, but rather that a science of the social can never be achieved and that the ‘closest allies’ of social and educational researchers are located in the humanities (p. 99). They are ‘storytellers and tattlers, novelists and poets, artists and composers’ and their role, and ours, is to enlarge the social conversation and to present new and different ways to think about the world (Smith 2009, p. 99). In my initial reading of Smith’s essay, I found myself wondering if he was preaching to the choir. I do not mean to suggest that I thought his essay redundant or old hat; to the contrary, I thought his case for the potential of giving preference to the personal over the professional in making judgements about research was useful and compelling. Instead, it struck me that his general argument about the impossibility of a science of the social operates as a guiding assumption of most research in the sociocultural study of sport today and is perhaps not something of which most readers of this journal would need to be convinced. If there is a minority research paradigm in the sociocultural field, my thinking went, it is surely occupied by those who practice positivist and quantitative methods, and not by the Gramscians, feminists, critical race theorists, cultural studies scholars and poststructuralists whose work dominates the