Students(and others)often, as I said earlier, talk about "using" this or that approach—"I think I’ll use Durkheim"—as though the

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问题 Students(and others)often, as I said earlier, talk about "using" this or that approach—"I think I’ll use Durkheim"—as though they had a free choice of theories. In fact, by the time they begin to write about their research, they have made many seemingly unimportant choices of details that have foreclosed their choice of a theoretical approach. They decided what questions to investigate. They picked a way of gathering information. They chose between a variety of minor technical and procedural alternatives: who to interview, how to code their data, when to stop. As they made these choices from day to day, they increasingly committed themselves to one way of thinking, more or less firmly answering the theoretical questions they thought were still up for grabs.
But sociologists, and especially students, fuss about choosing a theory for a practical reason. They have to—at least they think they do—deal with the "literature" on their topic. Scholars learn to fear the literature in graduate school. I remember Professor Louis Wirth, one of the distinguished members of the Chicago school, putting Erving Goffman, then a fellow graduate student of mine, in his place with the literature gambit. It was just what we all feared. Believing Wirth had not given sufficiently serious attention to some influential ideas about operationalism, Goffman challenged him in class with quotations from Percy Bridgeman’s book on the subject. Wirth smiled and asked sadistically, "Which edition is that, Mr. Goffman?" Maybe there was an important difference between editions, though none of us believed that. We thought, instead, that we’d better be careful about the literature or They Could Get You. "They" included not only teachers but peers, who might welcome an opportunity to show how well they knew the literature at your expenses.
-------Excerpts of Chapter 8 "Terrorized by the Literature", from Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article

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答案 学生们(以及其他人)经常就像我之前说的,会谈到要“引用”这个或那个理论——“我想引用涂尔干的理论”——貌似他们可以在各种理论之间自由选择。实际上,到了他们开始写研究报告的时候,他们已经太过于纠结种种细节,从而妨碍了对理论的选择。他们决定要调查的问题,选择收集信息的方式,他们在许多细小的技术和程序问题上要做选择,比如采访的对象、给数据编码的方式以及研究截止的时间。他们天天都要做出一些选择,慢慢地就投入到了一种思维方式,而这种思维方式或多或少回答了他们原先争先使用某些理论来解决的那些问题。 但是许多社会学家,特别是学社会学的学生为解决实际问题选择理论而手足无措。他们不得不——至少他们这么认为的——应付研究主题涉及的“文献”问题。研究生院的学者们对参考文献唯恐避之不及。我想起了路易斯?维尔斯教授,他是芝加哥学院一个杰出的老师,他在谈论文献话题的时候,提到一个和我同级的研究生,叫欧文-高夫曼。说的正是我们担心的事情。高夫曼认为维尔斯没有足够注意到操作理论一些有影响的观点,于是就在课上引用珀西?布里奇曼关于这个理论的书籍,向维尔斯发难。维尔斯面带微笑,施虐式地问道:“高夫曼,你说的是哪个版本的书?”虽然没有人这么想,但两个不同版本之间可能会有很重要的差别。相反,我们最好对文献还是要审慎些,否则他们可能会把你占为己有。“他们”不仅包括老师也包括同辈的人,他们可能会以牺牲你为代价,抓住机会来展示自己对文献很了解。 ——摘自第八章“文献的威胁”,选自《写给社会科学家的文章:怎样开始以及完成你的论文、书籍或者文章?》

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