Abstract
Quickly skimming, one could mistake this book as Collins rearranging the social to align with Forms of Life, mirroring Latour’s Rearranging the Social as a prelude to align with Modes of Existence. Both may use similar words, but their different characterisation of the ‘social’ extends into a radically different role for the critic. With a focus on that role, Forms of Life is a hybrid between a sociological manifesto, methodological instruction, autobiography, and unique defence of interpretative sociology as a science. Collins attempts nothing less than to save sociology, but his view on what sociology is and should be, how it ought to be done and ought to be thought about and how it can fortify itself to face up to the challenges the social sciences currently face, all exist in stark contrast to what have become increasingly more mainstream attempts to ‘reform’ social science.
Forms of Life offers 11 short chapters, none filled with instructions, protocols or guidelines in the traditional sense. One consequence of this is that they cannot be read in isolation. They all form pieces of a puzzle that only displays a coherent picture when read as a whole. Collins suggesting that the analyst may edit quotes, or may even move to inventing them (under certain conditions), could be mistaken as allowing or promoting data falsification or even fabrication that way. The same goes for his argument that studies displaying low statistical confidence can be more trustworthy and credible than those displaying high confidence, or that it need not matter whether respondents lie. What is much more interesting is Collins’ argument why such liberties fall within proper sociological scientific method.
He organised the book, for the most part, to overlap with the practical trajectory of doing research. To him, sociology is about immersion into new and unknown forms of life to the point that one becomes an embodiment of it, only to forcefully estrange oneself from it thereafter. The notion of forms of life, and how they exist in multiple dimensions, overlapping on various levels, is central to this. In the short chapters that follow the introduction, Collins weaves together his past experience and past work on tacit knowledge, the experimenter’s regress, Imitation Games, and his work on physics and artificial intelligence, into a deliberate analysis of the social. The deliberateness is denied and dismissed as luck, yet remains an obviously favourable reconstruction of past events. However, as an argumentative and narrative heuristic, it serves its purpose.
Collins’ ambition to demonstrate that interpretivist sociology is a science and that its claims can acquire, at times, more certainty and credibility than some in physics, cannot ignore existing discussions and disagreement around the boundaries between the objective and subjective, and the explanatory power and credit attributed to qualitative and quantitative methods. He targets the replication crisis directly, only to argue that more paranoid, strict and standardised statistics are unlikely to offer relief. Where possible, a focus on the tangible in practices is to be preferred over relying on the inferential. Forms of Life is by no means anti-quantitative, but it does present a radically different evaluation of how to handle the limits of quantification.
One of Collins’ requirements for the science of sociology is its ability to generalise. Quite explicitly he generalises his personal methodological choices into advice for (novice) scholars. He attempts to estrange himself from his own unique blend of forms of life, to reach beyond the immediate social situation (the life of Harry Collins). Yet, how far does he reach? Collins insists on not asking interviewees for formal consent, refrains from any formal data management commitment and more. It is consistent with his approach to sociology, but while this ‘civil disobedience’ may come at little risk to someone with Collins’ status, it is likely to harm others.
Similarly, his generalised autobiographical methodological reflections (which he calls RRoMM: Retrospective Reconstruction of Method Method) will quickly encounter alternative, competing ‘reform’ methods, equally aiming to improve social science, even if radically different. The recent call to preregister social scientific studies clashes on every level with Collins’ RRoMM and Collins’ insistence that data does not require notes, but exists as an embodied manifestation of immersion, clashes with open data and data sharing norms. While Collins insists that the science of sociology needs to be replicable, the actual replication would require similar immersion (in Collins’ case, five decades worth in physics), meaning that Collins’ replicability rarely extends beyond ‘conceptually replicable in theory only’. The reformers with whom Collins is competing in the fight to improve sociology have managed to solidify their views in national and international research policies and codes of conduct, giving them a significant head start. Some of them are likely to grant Collins’ argument the same treatment he grants the ‘magical scientism’ of economics in his book.
This given, Collins’ Forms of Life is a respectful, coherent, strong and constructive response to these reforms, which is, for the most part, positively argued, demonstrating, step-by-step, case-by-case, layer-by-layer, how Collins’ science of sociology fits together and what it aims to achieve. Chapters 10 and 11, however, are more overtly political, with chapter 10 describing the politics of epistemic self-positioning and chapter 11 arguing that democracy may be lost if we do not pursue and practice the right sociology (for those in doubt, that would of course be Collins’ science of sociology). This would include keeping SSK, however valuable in the past and present, on a short leash, considering the risk relativism poses when released from its habitat – methodological relativism and symmetry.
Regardless of whether one is willing to follow Collins all the way there, Forms of Life offers immensely valuable insight in the ways in which (qualitative) method and theory shape one another and how we can all (not just the novice researchers Collins wrote this for) conduct ourselves scientifically, constructively, and with integrity on our own professional journeys. Collins can be overly confident at some points in the book (e.g. ‘we inadvertently built the science of sociology’), but he is always clear and never loses sight of the many layers of meaning, when discussing method.
