i have not, yoshie, ever justified, let alone claimed objectivity, regarding what i type by appealing to what workers think. rather, i asked carrol recently to consider that his question seemed to hold people personally accountable for taking on the jobs that they do. i asked him to consider how such proclamations as you have made about cops--and i personally hate cops more than you will ever know--fail to recognize the actual lives of people who become cops or prison guards or security guards or go into the military. if i have ever appealed to what workers think i have used illustrative examples from social research, mostly critical marxist/feminist and marxist/feminist inspired ethnography, as well as illustrative examples of people i know or whom i actually interview for my own critical ethnographic research. there is some role for that in these debates and discussions.
this list regularly blabbers away about why workers don't do this or that and it regularly posits claims about how racist and sexist workers are [justin most recently, a man who apparently does not know that his claim is flat out wrong and is not in any way shape or form supported by evidence; had he made a similar controversial claim about any other group, characterizing them negatively he would have been met with a flood of protest. but here, on a left list, it just passes as common sense, what everyone just knows]. it is utterly ludicrous that such discussion take place without, or at least rarely, ever considering the vast body of scholarship on the topic [and with, one would hope, a consideration of the methodological drawbacks/etc] with any of the depth that these issues get treated with re wank-o-nomics and econodrones' and competing methodologies [cf., FROPerie thread]
again, no one claims objectivity in any of this. i certainly haven't and i don't believe wojtek ever has. he has, instead, repeatedly been arguing about strategies and tactics, suggesting why left initiative might fail. i think he is wrong to continually do so by maintaining privileged access to opinions, but more than that i think it's a bit of a simplification to continual present them as if these opinions are not rife with contradictions. perhaps that is simply my methodology speaking because i seek out the contradictions, the absences, the fissures, and silences in my research and type out every word, pause, stutter they make in order to actually see and hear them, whereas wojtek tends to present the issues in a more topological fashion. i do not claim objectivity here in any positivist/naive realist fashion, but i do think that research on these issues matters and shouldn't be a stranger to these conversations. indeed, you clearly think so as well since some of the work you cite is based on the very same assumption: there is no difference between _city of quartz_, _hard core_, or _fast food, fast talk_ -- they all examine "traces" or the "imprints" of social structural processes [see your pal Bhaskar as well as your reference to "the sociological imagination" which you once claimed Eric Beck lacked] the traces can be film texts, examination of public records/documents, analysis of written texts, or analyses of interview transcripts and fieldnotes of participant observation
what matters, as you know, is the theoretical framework through which one asks questions about social life and makes methodological choices, as well as the political decisions one makes in analyses of and re-presentations and analyses of what one finds.
kelley