Postmodern horizons

Elspeth Graham

Joe Doherty

pp. 196-220

in: Joe Doherty, Elspeth Graham, Mo Malek (eds), Postmodernism and the social sciences, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992

Abstract

If there is a common message emanating from the contributions to this book, it is that there is, at present at least, no overall assessment or conclusion (in the sense of "judgement", "inference" or "decision") that can usefully be made about postmodernism and the social sciences. Indeed, given the fact that the relationship between postmodernism and the social sciences is still under negotiation, that postmodernism's position is still fluid and unresolved, any attempt to come to such judgemental conclusions would appear to be foolhardy. Most of the social sciences still retain a modernist mainstream which is likely to prove more or less resistant to the encroachment of postmodernism. As we suggest in the introduction, the debate — or, more properly, debates — has hardly begun. The challenges of postmodernism are being interpreted differently in the different modernist disciplines according to the perceived advantages or novelties of particular postmodernist ideas. Perhaps the greatest challenge of postmodernism is that it threatens to redefine well-entrenched boundaries within the social sciences and thus to change the landscape of the modernist disciplines and undermine established interest groups within institutions of higher education. For this reason there is a danger of the postmodern challenge being rejected out of hand. Further, because the difficulties of grasping the nature of this challenge, especially in relation to doing social science, there must be a constant temptation amongst social scientists to leave the debate to others.