Free from Numbers? The Politics of Qualitative Sociology in the U.S. Since 1945

Abstract

In a world that is said to be more and more filled with quantities, this paper focuses on the practices and reasons of people refusing quantities; people who want to purify their world from numbers. It uses the history of qualitative sociology as an example and shows how actors refused the quantitative for political or ethical reasons. But they opposed only a certain set of qualitative methods—especially the statistical survey—, which they associated with certain political “demons” (the State, the Army, Bureaucracy), but not the quantitative in general. On the contrary, even qualitative sociologists who opposed surveys did make room for other ways of using numbers, which are very different, often very original and surprising (including social studies of data, data gleanings, conceptual canvasing).