Meaning & Measurement Mini-Conference

Lynette Spillman —Notre Dame University Lynette.P.Spillman.1@nd.edu My interest in meaning and measurement is fundamentally a rather basic one: improving ways to reconcile "ideographic" and "nomothetic" understanding with epistemological selfawareness and methodological openness. I've found comparative historical methodologies most sophisticated about this, and my work on national identity, --Nation and Commemoration-- uses them to help guide my attempts to make valid generalizations about meaning-making. I've also investigated causal logic, and argued that the party-line understanding of causality taught in methods classes is way too restricted, and that a better understanding of causality encompasses different logics of inquiry. (Is anyone else irritated when you hear people say ethnography and so on are "exploratory" "insightful" preliminaries to the real stuff?) That argument is forthcoming as "Causal Reasoning, Historical Logic, and Sociological Explanation" in Jeff Alexander, Gary Marx, and Christine Williams, eds. --Self, Social Structure and Beliefs: Explorations in the Sociological Thought of Neil J. Smelser-- (University of California Press); there's an extended version of the argument in Working Papers 2002 at www.nd.edu/~soc But lately I've been more preoccupied with nitty-gritty questions coming out of my work on economic culture. For instance, I'm thinking about how much of the "content" I'm coding from association directories is driven by the format of the genre, and how much it's actually saying something about associations. I avoided this problem in my earlier work because I was interested in the discourse, not how much people actually acted on it or believed it. I'll ultimately get to that sort of question in this project too, but at the moment I just want to know what these directory entries are leaving out. I think I can only infer from variation within the existing range of standardized entries. I'd be interested to have a talk to others who've faced this problem.