Against a descriptive turn

Abstract

While description is a valuable aspect of meaningful sociological work, this paper takes issue with Mike Savage’s argument that the social sciences, and sociology in particular, should seek to prioritize description over practices of explanation and analysis, and attention to questions of causality. The aim of this paper is not to take issue with descriptive forms of sociology in themselves, but to argue that the answer to the problems identified by Savage and Burrows in their landmark paper “The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology” is not to follow commercial forms of research by prioritizing practices of description and classification at the cost of asking fundamental questions about the “why?” and the “how?” of social life and politics. Rather, this paper argues that it is imperative that sociology does not simply describe inequalities of different types, but questions, explains, and analyses the structures and mechanisms through which they are created, reproduced, and sustained. The argument will be developed in three stages. First, this paper will restate the main points of Savage’s call for descriptive sociology; second, it will address his critique of “epochalist thinking” and subsequent opposition to the idea of neoliberalism; and third, it will respond to his use of Thomas Piketty’s work as a model for developing sociological descriptions of class and inequality.