Download The influence of social scientists` small bourgeois class

DRAFT OF THE FULL PAPER
- for the virtual discussion purposes before, during and after the ISA 2014 Yokohama Congress
at http://isarc10internetforum.wikispaces.com/Session+12+ISA+14
Vera Vratusa
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Sociology
[email protected]
The influence of social scientists’ small bourgeois class affiliation on the choice of social
inequality research paradigm and policy proposals
The study self-reflectively examines the impact of social scientists’ small bourgeois class
affiliation on our choice of research paradigm starting from which we attempt to explain and
understand social inequality and thereafter propose policies for its conservation, mitigation or
elimination.
The main hypothesis of the study is that social scientists, like other highly educated
professionals, are affiliates of a new small bourgeoisie, owning formal certificate of acquired
specialist knowledge as an incorporated property of small means of production of immaterial
services. The new small bourgeoisie affiliates occupy contradictory place and role in class
division of labor. On the one hand, diploma makes accessible to us employment in privileged
work places with above average salaries for performing intellectual work functions like
producing legitimizing ideologies and mediating values and commands from the top towards
the bottom of social hierarchy. This privilege however, on the other hand, does not relieve us
from permanent worries not to fall into the ranks of wage workers performing less qualified and
unqualified manual and routine executing work functions in times of exacerbation of systemic
economic crises and unemployment. This contradictory position in class division of labor leaves
the new small bourgeoisie affiliates with a greater margin for the choice of a world view and
social standpoint from which we approach the explanation or understanding of social inequality
and propose policies to deal with it, than to the affiliates of the antagonistic classes of exploiters
and exploited, rulers and ruled.
The core finding of the study is that from the time of institutionalization of sociology and other
social sciences as academic disciplines, the majority of social scientist tend to choose the
interested standpoint of the ruling class of exploiters to conserve or only to reform the existing
relations of “civil society” and corresponding consensus or conflict version of the functionalist
positivist research paradigm of allegedly inexorable social inequality. A minority of social
scientists attempt to come over to the interested standpoint of the class of exploited executors of
ruling class commands to overcome class division of labor as historically generated social
mechanism of social inequality reproduction and corresponding dialectical critical research
paradigm and revolutionary practice of constructing relations of self-managed “socialized
humanity”.
Key wards: highly educated “new” small bourgeoisie , theoretical methodological research
paradigm , practical political class standpoint
Introduction
Ever since the historical turning point symbolized by the fall of the Berlin wall, the inequality
between individuals and groups as measured by the concentration at the top of the national
income distributions of economic wealth is on the rise in both the Organization for European
Economic Co-Operation member states (OECD report ,2011), as well as in former East
European member states of The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) (Lakner
& Milanovic, 2013:45). This increase in inequality within both present OECD and former
COMECON states since the last two decades of the XXth century is brought about by a
protracted systemic crisis of both self-proclaimed regimes of “really existing socialism”, on the
one hand, and of self-proclaimed “democratic” regimes of really existing capitalism, on the
other. Common to both is the internal contradiction between potentially unlimited development
of social production forces and limited aims of production for private individual and group profit
within the world hierarchical system of capitalist economy, structured through the fight between
national states of unequal power to defend domestic and occupy foreign markets in the center,
semi periphery and periphery of the system (Wallerstein, 1974/2011). The most striking
manifestation of this hyper accumulation of capital systemic crisis - the escalation of imperialist
wars of recolonization from destruction of SFR Yugoslavia, over Iraq, Afghanistan, to Libya,
Syria and Ukraine - challenge social scientists and sociologists to self-reflectively re-examine
our choice of theoretical and methodological approaches to study of social inequality, as well as
our practical standpoints, interests and values, in order to be able to attempt to control their
influence on our interpretation of research findings and policy suggestions.
The main hypothesis of this study is that social scientists, like other highly educated
professionals, are affiliates of a “new” small bourgeoisie, owning formal certificate of acquired
specialist knowledge as an incorporated property of small means of production of immaterial
services, as a contrast to an “old” small bourgeoisie owning small means of production and
exchange mostly working with them themselves and family members. The new small
bourgeoisie affiliates occupy contradictory place and role in class division of labor. We are
simultaneously hired direct producer of theoretical and ideological systems having no large
private property, as well as mediators of orders and enforcers of ruling class interests. On the one
hand, diploma makes accessible to us employment in privileged work places with above average
salaries for performing intellectual work tasks like producing legitimizing ideologies and
mediating values and commands from the top towards the bottom of social hierarchy. This
privilege however, on the other hand, does not relieve us from permanent worries not to fall into
the ranks of wage workers performing less qualified and unqualified manual and routine
executing work tasks in times of exacerbation of systemic economic crises and unemployment.
This contradictory position in class division of labor leaves the new small bourgeoisie affiliates
with a greater margin for the choice of a world view and social standpoint from which we
approach the explanation or understanding of social inequality and propose policies to deal with
it, than to the affiliates of the antagonistic classes of rulers and ruled, exploiters and exploited.
Bringing to consciousness one's own contradictory class position and role, allows the
(self)critical part of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie to recognize in the basis of our own and
others’ contradictory conservative, reformist and revolutionary social policies concerning social
inequality and hierarchical structuration, ideological representation of one’s own and others'
contradictory particular interests in the form of general interest. This self-reflection can influence
the increase in the degree of conscious decision making as to which basic class a particular
intellectual petty bourgeoisie affiliate will make available his or her expert knowledge, as a
personal private property of the state protected monopoly on the title of a professional expert,
keeping in mind that affiliates of basic classes themselves very rarely theoretically articulate
their own class interests.
This hypothesis is tested on the basis of critical content analysis of the theoretical
methodological paradigms and practical and political policies of social inequality and
hierarchical structuration articulated by the highly educated small bourgeois “classics” of social
sciences, chosen and elaborated by their followers in the international sociology in general and in
Serbian sociology in particular.
Theoretical and methodological research paradigm and practical and political standpoint
preferences of highly educated small bourgeois sociology “classics”
From the time of establishment of sociology as an academic discipline in the last decades of the
nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, sociologists researching social
causes and functions of social hierarchy, as well as social actions of individuals and social
groups oriented by socially structured motives to conserve, reform or eliminate unequal access to
the means of life reproduction and development of human capacities, have been explicitly or
implicitly choosing between three divergent inequality and social hierarchy research paradigms
(Kuhn, 1962/2012; Vratusa(Vratuša), 1983; 1995a: 417-431, 2006, http; 2010a:51-80;;2010c,
http) and policy strategies, originally articulated by three major thinkers - Karl Marx (18181883), Emil Durkheim(1859-1917) and Max Weber (1864-1920). All three major thinkers are
themselves affiliates of the highly educated small bourgeoisie by both achievement (doctorates in
philosophy, social science and law respectively) and ascribed family status (sons of a lawyer,
rabbi and civil servant respectively). The main locus of divergence between social inequality
research paradigms and policy strategies construed by Marx, Durkheim and Weber finds itself in
their conceptualization of the division of labor in human society as the key social factor molding
predominantly hierarchical or egalitarian relationships in a given society.
Karl Marx interprets division of labor in society throughout its “class pre-history” as
antagonistic social or class specific division of work tasks within potentially universal human
creative capacity and life reproducing activity or praxis, into intellectual work operations, on the
one hand, and alienated and alienating manual and routine non-manual work operations, on the
other (Marx, 1845a/1932). The ruling class minority monopolizes the “pleasant” intellectual,
planning and commanding work functions, on the basis of exclusive control of access to main
means and objects of life reproduction activity. This exclusive control enables the ruling class to
exploit labor of a dispossessed and subjected class majority, forcing it to perform exclusively
“unpleasant”, commands’ executing manual or routine non-manual work functions, deprived of
intellectual content and educational potentiality. Private property of the ruling class over the
products of the human activity of the dispossessed subjected class sanctioned by law, protected
by physical force of the state and legitimized by ideological apparatuses of the state as natural,
normal, necessary and possible (Althusser, 1970, http), presents therefore just the consequence
and legal expression of the primordial class divided human activity itself or alienated labor
(Marx, 1845a/1932). In the first volume of Capital (1867l2008), Marx defined capitalist
exploitation more precisely as capital’s appropriation of the unpaid surplus labor of combined
live work force of doubly “free” wage workers mediated by the economic necessity of exchange
of their only possession, labor force, on the commodity market, instead of the appropriation of
the unpaid surplus labor of personally dependent direct producers through the use or the threat of
use of direct physical force in feudal and slave-owning economic formations of society.
Historical “new” materialist and “inverted” dialectical (Vratusa, 2006) social inequality and
hierarchy research paradigm articulated by Marx is characterized primarily by an understanding
of class division of labor as historically generated and therefore transient and transformable
antagonistic form of life production relation. This transitory form will disappear like it has
temporarily emerged on the appropriate level of development of human social production forces
and self-organization capabilities. In his letter to Weydemeyer of 5 March 1852, Marx explicitly
stresses that the disclosure of the existence of classes in modern society and their struggle is not
his merit: the bourgeois historians have long time ago presented the historical development of
this struggle, while bourgeois economists have presented their economic anatomy. Marx
considers that his innovation and contribution consists in the following three aspects: 1) first,
demonstration that the existence of classes is associated only with certain historical
developmental phases of production; 2. Second, that the class fight necessarily leads to the
dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) and third, that this dictatorship of the great majority over a
small minority for the first time in history present only the transition towards the elimination of
all classes and to a classless society (Marx, 1852/1983:58).
Marx recognized the first dictatorship of the proletariat - "essentially working class
government, the product of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at
last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of man" from wage slavery
(Marx, 1871/2009, http) in the self-governing and cooperative organization forms of 1871 Paris
commune: democratically elected Commune Council members who are easily revocable if they
breach the imperative mandate received from their electors and who are getting for their work in
the Council the average workers’ salary; handing over of factories, shops and public utilities
abandoned and closed by private owners and state bureaucracy, to the associations of the
producers and consumers to plan and execute production and distribution; substitution of the
professional army by the armed people.
Concentration and centralization of capital through market competition and imperialist wars,
intensifies exploitation during systemic crisis cyclical repetitions and rising unemployment. This
creates revolutionary situations in which one part of the old bourgeoisie (artisans, shopkeepers,
peasants) and new highly educated small bourgeoisie (the physicians, the lawyers, the priests, the
poets, the scientists), in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat as paid wage
laborers, desert their own standpoint and interest to conserve or improve their role and place in
class division of labor subservient to the interests of big bourgeoisie. They place themselves at
the standpoint and interest of the proletariat to eliminate the class division of labor and ensuing
exploitation and oppression of one human being by another (Marx, 1848/1969:http). Marx
personally chose just this practical political option opened to highly educated affiliates of the
new small bourgeoisie at a considerable cost in terms of material hardship and stressful living
conditions of the revolutionary thinker and activist persecuted by the police.
Through common fight against unemployment and low wages and salaries, rebelling workers
and highly educated small bourgeoisie affiliates become increasingly conscious that qualitative
change in the life reproduction rationality from production for individual and group private profit
toward production for satisfaction of human needs is necessary and possible. Using concepts
from the “Theses on Feuerbach” and the “Manifest of the communist party” we could say that in
the course of revolutionary, new-materialistic and dialectical social practice, the usual object of
both “old materialistic” and “idealistic” positivist social science inequality research – modern
wage slave majority of population – become social subjects, historically produced producers,
revolutionary destructors of bourgeois society and constructors of socialized humanity.
Development of class self- conscience and self-organization presents subjective prerequisites for
abolition of hierarchical and exploitative relationships of production of commodities for
individual and group private profit within bourgeois society organized into bourgeois national
states, and of establishment of socialized humanity or communism. Construction of classless
society presupposes reintegration of managing and executing work tasks within each selfmanaging freely associated producer and consumer of use values necessary for the emancipation
and balanced development of variegated human potentials of each individual (Marx,
1845b/1969:13-15; Marx, 1848/1969).
The popularity of this critical social inequality and hierarchy research paradigm, grows among
highly educated small bourgeoisie affiliates in periods of cyclical sharpening of class fight and
systemic crisis of accumulation of capital on the worldwide scale, as it was the case in the first
decades of the twentieths century (Korsch, 1919/1975; Lukács, 1919-1923/1967). Actual deep
systemic crisis of capital accumulation that explosively manifested itself in 2007/2008, was
theoretically explained and announced in the works of authors who opted for the critical research
paradigm during the stag-flation crisis since the end of the sixties and beginning of seventies
(Amin, 1970; Gouldner, 1970).
Emil Durkheim interprets division of labor in society as the technical specialization of
individuals and social groups for performance of specific intellectual or manual work tasks
within social production process. This technical division of labor presents according to
Durkheim the natural outgrowth of organic evolution of human societies through differentiation
of originally multifunctional work roles performed by mutually similar affiliates of primitive
communities. Tribes and clans are closely knit together by ties of mechanical solidarity based in
sharing of common religious value and norm contents of collective conscience
(Durkheim:1893/1967). Collective conscience is according to Durkheim basic objectively
existing spiritual “social fact”, comprised of collective ways of thinking, acting and feeling
external to and independent from individual conscience, coercive power determining individual
ways of thinking, acting and feeling, securing thus the reproduction of the society as a whole
(Durkheim, 1894/1988). The social causes of technical division of labor Durkheim found in
morphological and moral factors like increased population density, development of trade and
communication in the process of industrialization and urbanization, which stimulated
specialization of individuals for performance of functionally specific work roles and
corresponding differentiation of the value and norm content of collective conscience. Emergence
of ties of organic solidarity between individuals performing increasingly differentiated but
interdependent specialized work functions prevents disintegration of society due to development
of competition, inequality and increasingly egotistic individual interests.
Social cohesiveness of differentiated society is secured through the process of primary
socialization in the family and secondary socialization in the formal educational system.
Socialization process safeguards the interiorization by each individual member of society the
socially required minimum of homogenous collective values and socially required minimum of
specialized skills and knowledge for performance of specific mutually complementary
intellectual and manual work functions (Durkheim, 1922: http). Organic solidarity provides
necessary trust in contractual and allegedly reciprocally beneficial exchange or trade
relationships on the market.
Durkheim could not help but notice the incidence of anomic and forced division of labor due to
over-specialization of work functions, lack of coordination and their unequal allocation to
specific individuals on the basis of ascription and inheritance, irrespective of individual talents
and achieved merits. Durkheim proposed mitigation of these dysfunctional effects of technical
specialization through the regulatory system of moral codes of fair and just conduct of
individuals performing specialized work functions. Specialized individuals should be organized
in occupation based secondary groups like associations (corporations) and trade unions for
protection and advancement of respective professional group interests of individual members in
competitive relationships with other occupation based groups. The relationships between
particular corporations should be conducted in the spirit of contractual solidarity and
harmonization of interests (Durkheim, 1893/1967: Préface de la seconde édition “Quelques
remarques sur les groupements professionnels”).
Durkheim personally chose a radical republican political orientation sympathizing with reformist
socialist ideas of the Saint Simon type. He advocated progressive taxing of inherited personal
property and greater regulatory role of the state as the alleged representative of the general
interest of the entire society, which should be organized as the all-encompassing system of
national corporations (Durkheim, 1921-1924/2011).
Researchers tend to choose the Durkheimian consensual variant of functionalist positivist social
inequality and hierarchy research paradigm in the periods of the stabilization of capitalist mode
of production. They conceptualize the basic element of social hierarchy, social strata, as
aggregates of individuals performing similar specialized work roles or professions in technical
division of labor, who unequally contribute to the functioning of a society as a whole, according
to an allegedly general value consensus in a given society. Affiliates of respective strata
therefore gradually differentiate themselves according to the possession of quantitatively unequal
amount of economic wealth and income, political power or cultural esteem, understood as
continuous and mutually independent dimensions of social inequality. These quantitative gradual
differences in rewards are merited for the performance of respective, for the social reproduction
unequally important, specialized work roles (Parsons, 1939/1954; Davis and Moore, 1961).
Max Weber interprets division of labor in capitalist society as permanent generator of
containable conflict, tension and distributive struggle between social subjects, individuals
engaged in meaningful and value oriented social interaction and affiliated to distinct economic
classes, political parties and cultural strata, competing to achieve individually and organized as a
group (for ex. professional associations), the exclusionary control over the best possible market
and work-place position and gain, on the basis of making rational choices between available
opportunities open to them (Weber, 1921/1976: 927). Weber contrasts conflict generating
division of labor in capitalist society with the division of labor in feudal society in the following
way: clear separation of the household activities from the activities within the capitalist
enterprise, substitutes undefined separation between work and leisure activities in pre-capitalist
society; instrumentally rational work ethics originally inspired by the protestant inner-worldly
ascetics and oriented on the ever greater material success in one’s worldly specialized work role
or calling as the sign of individual’s predestination for salvation, substitutes a traditional work
ethics oriented on the satisfaction just of the accustomed level of basic needs and postponement
of salvation from worldly oppression to the afterlife (!Weber, 1958). These characteristics of
division of labor and work ethics in capitalist society relax and open up oppressive and closed
social hierarchy in pre-capitalist society rooted in inheritance of the attributed, immutable status
in social hierarchy, enabling individuals to achieve better market and work-place position
through their own work effort and a peaceful pursuit of gain through competition on the market.
Weber was keenly aware of the often violent conflict over distribution of economic wealth,
political power and social cultural status in “adventurous” or “political” varieties of capitalist
society, of the universal rise of rationalization and materialistic value systems and of a tendency
toward bureaucratization of big industrial companies and the state. All these adverse effects of
capitalist division of labor, however, do not necessarily lead to the breakdown of capitalist
system of market competition and to the revolutionary transformation of existing social power
relations. According to Weber there is no intrinsic tendency towards the class polarization of
society, but on the contrary, there is the tendency of growth of the middle class composed of
intellectuals and professionals employed by the state or capitalists – engineers, lawyers,
professors, clerks. Weber argued that there are several prerequisites for the rebellion of the
working class against the managers and capitalists. First of all, workers must become conscious
of the extent, social causes and consequences of the differentiation and inequality between the
property owners and the property-less workers. Than they must organize collective common
belonging based communal action or common interests based societal action to eliminate or
reduce these inequalities. Finally, in the organized class action workers must be guided by the
clear aims, defined as a rule by affiliates of the radically oriented middle class intellectuals
(Weber, 1921/1976:ch.IV). If the contrast between different class situations is presented by
conservatively oriented intellectuals and accepted by de privileged classes as an absolute fact, no
action will be taken to change the class situation.
Weber saw himself as a ‘class conscious bourgeois’, critical of the renegades of the bourgeoisie
who were attempting to stop being excluded from participation in state power dominated by
conservative landholding Junkers through buying ownership of entailed knightly property and
titles of nobility (Mommsen, 1990). Weber was ‘class conscious bourgeois’ of liberal
orientation, convinced that market allocation of resources guaranteed efficiency and rationality in
contrast to inefficiency of bureaucratized state allocation planning voluntarism, advocating
simultaneously German national state imperial power policy before the defeat of that policy in
the World War I (Kieran, 2004). Weber chose his simultaneously liberal and conservative value
system within the sphere of politics. He wrongly believed that this choice did not affect his
subsequent engagement in an allegedly value free or neutral rationalistic scientific quest to
interpretatively understand ideal typical relationships between means and ends of social action of
individuals and groups and in this way causally explain the course and effects of social action
(Weber, 1919/1946: 129-156).
Researchers tend to choose the Weberian conflict variant of functionalist positivist social
inequality and hierarchical structuration research paradigm in the periods of the sharpened class
conflicts. Neo-Weberians conceptualize basic elements of social hierarchical structuration,
social classes, as relational categories which emerge as qualitatively differentiated from each
other through the fight of their affiliates having opposed economic interests in the possession of
goods and opportunities for better position and income in commodity or labor markets. NeoWeberians namely underline like Weber that the ownership of material production goods enable
their owners to monopolize the chances to use them as capital for earning the income under the
conditions of commodity market through direct or indirect participation in the profit which stems
from the function of the organization and management of economic businesses. Those who own
nothing are able to offer only their personal services (either in a natural form, or in the form of
the product of their labor) and they are obliged to cede them for any price just in order to be able
to preserve their naked life (Weber, 1921/1976: 631-633).
The most influential “neo-Weberians” include Louis Coser (1957), Ralph Dahrendorf (1959,
1967), Goldthorpe (1987; 1992), but also “neo-marxists” like Pierre Bourdieu (1986) and Eric
Olin Wright (Wright, 1997). According to these authors, the conflict of private owners of
different sorts of merchandises, from the production means to labor power of different levels of
formal qualification and accordingly different level of market competitiveness, are
institutionalized through the elements of state regulation, so that the free market competition so
far did not lead to disintegration of contemporary capitalist society, but on the contrary, market
competition led to its global spreading and reproduction.
Common theoretical denominator of both Durkhemian consensual gradualist and
Weberian conflict relational versions of the positivist-functionalist social inequality and
hierarchy research paradigm, presents unhistorical interpretation of class division of labor as
eternal hierarchical distribution of work functions in a specialized technical division of labor on
those who “think” and on those who “act”. Social hierarchy and inequality of bourgeois society
renamed as modern, industrial, service, based on knowledge, informatic, globalized… society, is
presented in the contemporary mainstream social science as inescapable “functional prerequisite”
of complex social systems and as the only efficacious and therefore desirable form of
organization of relationships between people concerning their access to conditions and means of
life reproduction. Common denominator on the level of practical policy proposals presents
acceptance of inevitable social inequality and hierarchy and at the best attempts at partial reforms
to mitigate some of their most dysfunctional effects. Durkheim resumed this common
denominator by declaring that “society needs” such hierarchical distribution of specialized work
functions, regardless of the fact that such specialization implies the stunting of unpracticed
human potentials (Durkheim, 1922:38-9), while Weber compared the rationally calculated and
bureaucratically controlled work in a specialized calling with an unbreakable “iron cage”
(Weber, 1958:123-124).
Propagators of both consensual gradualist and conflict relational functionalist-positivist social
inequality and hierarchy research paradigm, start their research from the practical political
standpoint/interest of exploiting class of rulers affiliates, to preserve or only reform of the
oligopolistically controlled market mediated commodity production of primarily exchange
values for private individual and group appropriation of profit. They do not pose the Marxian
dialectical-critical question/project of overcoming the antagonistic social relations of exploitation
and oppression between antagonistic social classes historically rooted in the class division of
labor of potentially universal human practice between the planning and order-giving ruling class
and exploited and oppressed class reduced to executing and routine work tasks. The most
conservative propagators of the functionalist-positivist research approach to study of social
inequality and hierarchy, tend to ideologically qualify and disqualify the very attempt to question
alleged universality and eternality of the division of labor between those who “think” and “act”,
as potentially “totalitarian” utopian ideology. They claim that this ideology disregards
unchangeable laws of nature and “facts” on naturally unequally distributed physical and mental
capacities among individuals in both animal and human society discovered by socio-biology
(Sanderson, 2001).
Conclusion
The main finding of the content analysis of the theoretical methodological research paradigms
and practical political policies concerning social inequality and hierarchical structuration
articulated by the highly educated small bourgeois “classics” of social sciences, chosen and
elaborated by their followers in international sociology, can be resumed in the form of the
hypothesis for further research: the affiliates of highly educated new small bourgeoisie are by
their commands mediating and legitimizing ideology producing place and role in the class
division of labor inclined to choose the consensual or conflict variant of positivist functionalist ahistorically and contemplatively materialist or objectively and subjectively idealist theoretical
methodological approach to study of social inequality and hierarchy, starting from the class
standpoint/interest of the conservation or only reform of existing dominant relations of life
reproduction of “bourgeois society” of allegedly inexorable social inequality which stimulates
progressive social change through capitalist market competition. They are only exceptionally
inclined to choose the critical, historical and dialectical “new” materialist research paradigm,
starting from the class standpoint/interest of the exploited and oppressed class to construct
classless “socialized humanity”.
As Marx observed already in 1848, minority of small bourgeoisie affiliates attempt to come
over to the interested standpoint of the class of exploited executors of ruling class commands to
overcome class division of labor as historically generated social mechanism of social inequality
reproduction and corresponding dialectical critical research paradigm and revolutionary practice
of constructing relations of self-managed “socialized humanity”. In such revolutionary situations
the main aim of the research is not the stabilization of capitalism, but the raising (instead of
blurring) of consciousness about the extent, social causes, consequences and desirable policies
concerning inequality between the ruling exploiting and ruled exploited class (Vratuša, 2012b).
The primary intent of this author is not to argue about the merits and demerits of the choice
between positivist functionalist and critical dialectical social inequality and hierarchical
structuration research paradigms, but to draw the attention of readers to the fact that this choice
presents the unavoidable part of the research process fundamentally determining its entire
course. We researchers often do not explicitly state that we have made this choice, either because
we are even not aware that we have made it, or we are attempting to impress upon our audience
the wrong conclusion that the standpoint which we have chosen to approach our research
subject/object, presents the scientifically objective standpoint.