JULIA A D A M S

Feminist Theory as Fifth

Columnist or Discursive
Vanguard? Some Contested
Uses of Gender Analysis in
Historical Sociology

Abstract
The relationship between feminist theory and historical sociology
is contentious, especially in the area of state formation and macropol-
itics. By means of a survey of recent work on early modern European
state-building and the contemporary politics of social welfare, I
argue that developing fruitful approaches to these topics depends
on our forging a tactical alliance between historical sociology and
feminist theory: one that acknowledges, even preserves, the tensions
within and between each diverse intellectual formation but insists
that each can learn from the other.

Over a decade has elapsed since Judith Stacey and Barrie

Thome wrote their influential article "The Missing Feminist Revolu-
tion in Sociology." Recently Perspectives, the newsletter of the Ameri-
can Sociological Association Theory Section, reexamined the topic,
in an exchange kicked off by the authors' comment on their original
piece. Stacey and Thorne now disavow the very concept of a feminist

Social Politics Spring 1998

© 1998 by Oxford University Press
2 • Adams

revolution in sociology. Feminist ideas, they note, have been a "trans-

disciplinary force" in the academy, with the potential to transform
knowledge and to redraw and erode disciplinary boundaries, rather
than "simply inserting new enclaves within each province of the 19th
century intellectual universe" (1996, 1). Plenty of examples come to
mind of the solvent effect of feminist theory on disciplinary bound-
aries—in this particular case, between sociology and history. Take,
for instance, the role of constructions of femininity and masculinity
in shaping labor and work (Baron 1991), or the gendered relationships
between family household and economy in class formation (Creighton
1996). Certainly feminist theory in the academy has advanced the
transdisciplinary intellectual projects of both social history and com-
parative historical sociology.
Yet in a reply to Stacey and Thorne, Michael Burawoy argues that
feminist contestation within the disciplines is ongoing and important.
"Feminism moves forward on two legs," he says, "the glamorous and
public transdisciplinary discourses and the less visible and arduous
androcentric everyday world of the disciplines" (1996, 5). Resistance
to feminism and feminist theory increases with a discipline's proximity
to state power, Burawoy thinks (6). No doubt. This holds, it seems
to me, of sub-and trans-disciplines too, and historical sociology aspires
to be both. So, taking the hardest case for feminist theoretical influence
in the field (and pursuing Burawoy's and Stacey and Thome's insistent
military metaphors), let's reconnoitre the rocky terrain on which femi-
nist theory struggles with the study of state formation. The most
fruitful approach to the topic, I will argue, depends on forging a
tactical alliance between historical sociology and feminist theory: one
that acknowledges, even preserves, the engrained tensions within and
between each diverse intellectual formation, but insists that each can
learn from the other. This is a value-laden agenda that should be
made clear at the outset. It reflects the genesis of this article in an
American Sociological Association panel that considered aspects of
the relationship between feminist theory and historical sociology, and
the fact that I took my brief not as an assignment to write a systematic
and coldly considered academic review, but as an incitement to de-
velop arguments embedded in various literatures in the service of a
few modest proposals for rapprochement.1
The welfare state is the research area on which feminist theory has
made the most impact, and it serves as both a template for discussion
and a model for those of us (like myself) who are working in areas
that have proved to be less pervious. At first glance at the literature
on social provision, two streams of feminist analysis emerge. One
might be dubbed "modernist," to borrow Stacey and Thome's term,
for which gender figures as a central analytical category or structural
 Some Contested Uses of Gender Analysis in Historical Sociology • 3

principle. This perspective presents women and men as sexed political

subjects, with interests in particular gender arrangements. Debates
among representatives may be inflected by conflict over the analytical
place of sexuality or race and racism in, for example, the ideologies
of maternalism that have shaped welfare states; but overall, this form
of work sets itself the consistent intellectual task of sorting out the
gendered character of welfare state institutions, programs, and poli-
cies.2 There is a cohesive politics here, too, as modernists inquire into
the conditions under which feminist intervention into state institutions
and politics is possible. Many of these writers trace past and present
openings for more "woman-friendly" polities (Jones 1990), and also
promote an incorporative politics of the academy.
Debates over method and methodology do divide modernist femi-
nists, of course. An important example is the recent conversation
about Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992) be-
tween Skocpol and Linda Gordon in the journal Contention (Gordon
1993; Skocpol 1993). At issue in this exchange is Skocpol's use of
comparative method and (a somewhat different issue) quantitatively
oriented hypothesis testing applied to certain historical questions that
Gordon believes are "better answered by qualitative and even narra-
tive information" (1993, 188). This is a general problem and a debate
that I'll return to below. Still, these differences seem small in the face
of the continued disciplinary resistance to any sort of feminist theory,
evident both in canonical ways of seeing welfare states as gender-
neutral structures, and in the related tendency to treat gender, when
it is included in the analysis, as a causal variable with only two values,
corresponding to bipartite notions of biological sex.3 Feminist work
continues to show that these mainstream approaches are inadequate.
As Ann Orloff (1993) emphasizes in her challenge to Gosta Esping-
Andersen (1990) and the "power-resource" school, gender plays a
tacit role in constituting the institutional dimensions and the variables
that power-resource analysts habitually rely on.4 Inexplicit, misspeci-
fied variables produce biased estimates—a cardinal sin within their
own empiricist methodological canon.
These criticisms and revisions simply do not go far enough for the
second strand of feminist work, influenced by discourse theory and
various brands of poststructuralism. As analysts of the welfare state,
these "postmodernists" (for lack of a better word) share some concep-
tual affinities. For them, gender is neither analytically privileged nor
assumed to structure actors' political identities (or possible identities)
in any foundational fashion, although it's a potentially important
element or node in a more expansive, culturally constructed political
field of play. Furthermore, the nature and boundaries of that field
have been thrown into renewed question, in part by analysts like
4 • Adams

Philip Abrams (1988) who have underlined the cultural construction

of "the state" as object and idea, but also by state policies themselves,
which have created a wide new sphere, "the social," the object of
George Steinmetz's recent book, Regulating the Social (1993), on the
making of the German welfare state. The study of states per se is
therefore shifting toward the broader study of the relationship between
domination and cultural classification—particularly, in the Foucaul-
dian mode, via sexuality, that "dense transfer point of power" and
social discipline (Foucault 1980). For example, Ann Stoler (1991 and
1992) argues that basic welfarist categories and disciplinary practices
were worked out by European imperialists in the laboratory of the
colonies and the context of colonial domination, and that social wel-
fare in the European metropole bears the traces of that dubious legacy.
Postmodern authors tend toward a less celebratory and more jaun-
diced view of welfare states, whether they are tracing the social exclu-
sions that compose the foundation of liberal inclusions, as Stoler
does and Bellingham and Mathis (1994) do in their analysis of the
biopolitics of American maternalism, or the continuities between fas-
cist and postfascist welfare states, in the manner of David Horn's
(1994) analysis of Italian family policy.
An ideal-typical postmodernist approach would refuse causal attri-
butions in favor of tracing the configuration of discursive fields: that is,
shifting relationships among politico-ideological elements, themselves
contextually and contingently defined. Mapping the field's boundaries
and extension is one task; another is excavating layers of sedimented
articulations, to use the Foucauldian archeological metaphor. Since
these articulations, and the structures of articulations themselves, are
assumed to be fluid and unfixed, this poses conceptual problems for
the analyst, whose theoretical categories must "attempt to apprehend
a type of relation that never manages to be identical to itself" (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985, 86). This strategy is virtually impossible to carry
out root-and-branch, so postmodernist analyses often devolve into
individualizing historicist, single-case narratives, linking elements
when they refer (or defer) to one another, in kaleidoscopic, contin-
gently constructed formations. Whether this mode of analysis is meth-
odologically viable is not the issue just yet. It is distinctive and impor-
tant and has powerful elective affinities with contemporary feminist
theory, where it echoes the substantive "decentering" of gender also
present in the standpoint theories that privilege particular experiences
as bases of epistemological authority (Collins 1990; Hartsock 1987;
Smith 1987). But as postmodernist feminist theory questions the ap-
parently fundamental analytical categories of "woman," "man,"
"gender," "femininities," and "masculinities," wonder Stacey and
Thome (1996), is it losing its distinctive identity? More harshly, one
 Some Contested Uses of Gender Analysis in Historical Sociology • 5

might ask, will feminist theory become another version of pluralism,

echoing the quantitative "gender as a variable" school of thought in
a qualitative, discursive methodological key?
It seems to me that a more interesting outcome is in the works, at
least in studies of welfare state social provision. There, despite evident
tensions, subterranean connections are emerging between the major
schools of feminist work. At the macrolevel, the focus is on varying
forms of social redistribution, as they are categorially defined, politi-
cally regulated, and contested. A wealth of books and articles have
tracked the changing, gender-specific definitions and valuations of
"dependence" and "independence," as "keywords of the welfare
state" (Fraser and Gordon 1994), detailing how specific concepts are
struggled over and embedded in social arrangements that assume at
least a provisional fixity, and that vary over time and across institu-
tional settings. Those arrangements, which embrace racialized class,
community, and family forms as well as state structures, in turn set
limits on the reproduction of gender ideologies and relations and leave
a deep imprint on the politics surrounding state redistribution. The
evolving feminist angle on welfare states incorporates a complex of
social factors and relations, not just gender, and increasingly tries to
combine discursive and institutional analyses.5 In the United States,
this work plays a special political role. It opposes, at the same time
that it helps explain, the dominant tradition in mainstream social
science (and, alas, in American politics) that defines the dependent
body as quintessentially female, black, and pathological and, in the
tradition of the 1963 Moynihan Report, proposes welfare "reform"
on the basis of that pernicious ideological understanding. It also prom-
ises to be instrumental in reconstructing and appropriating important
arguments about welfare states that have been executed within more
responsible mainstream sociological and nonfeminist comparative his-
torical traditions.
This is part of feminism's subversive academic mission, it seems to
me. One potential area of intervention is the European tradition in
figurationist sociology inspired by Norbert Elias, which has produced
some excellent comparative historical studies of welfare state struc-
tures and politics: Abram de Swaan (1988), for instance, spells out
some of the conditions under which concepts of mterdependence have
constituted state structures and have become common political par-
lance, at least in Europe. This optic broadens the American discourse
about welfare, which polarizes too starkly into discussions of depen-
dence versus independence. De Swaan's concepts are framed within
a set of masculinist assumptions, however, and tend to assume that
interdependence spells mutualism and collectivization, as well as a
higher stage of political development. A restructured approach that
6 • Adams

incorporates historically specific concepts of gender, expunging the

last vestiges of modernization theory along the way, would make it
possible to interpret the empirical patterns of erosion of European
welfare states and the gendered conflicts that are accompanying that
erosion.6
The new feminist work on welfare states is methodologically under-
developed; most authors seem uncomfortable stating any explicit
stance on issues of causality or interpretation, although (to my mind,
unfortunately) there seems to be increasing unease about comparative
and especially quantitative comparative methods. This aside is not
meant to undermine the achievement of sociologists studying welfare
states, and particularly systems of social provision, for they have used
feminist theory successfully to recast the substance of their field. In
my own area of research, the sociology of European state formation,
feminism has made a much more modest impact. It's not that it has
nothing to offer. Feminist theorists are rereading classical commentar-
ies by theorists of state power and political authority in brilliantly
subversive ways, drawing on the insights of the "discursive vanguard"
in their reconstruction of texts that are not simply mainstream, but
bases of the modernist theoretical canon. Texts by Rousseau (Landes
1988), Machiavelli (Pitkin 1984), the English contract theorists such
as Hobbes and Locke, their opponents (Pateman 1988; Jones 1993),
and others have been scoured to reveal the limits of political discourse,
as well as the patriarchal nature of monarchical power, a fount of
legitimacy and a precarious claim contingent on perceptions of order
and appropriate gender hierarchy in royal families.
Pateman (1988) exemplifies this two-track approach. She contrasts
theories of classical paternal patriarchy with explanations of the
emerging public civil sphere; she argues that the latter analyses con-
tinue to rest on sexual subjection, partly sustained through contracts
of marriage that are ostensibly free of political domination. This is
fraternal or "modern" patriarchy, in her terms. As a body of belief,
it reflects and justifies the passage of power from father-rulers, whose
dominance is legitimated within a framework of explicit hierarchical
dependency, to the male citizenry, who claim to be sovereign over a
supposedly egalitarian order in which remaining inequalities are
deemed "natural." These arguments may not have made much of a
splash in the sociology of state formation, but they converge with
and have been eagerly expanded in some superb feminist historical
scholarship, particularly associated with France. For example, Joan
Landes (1988) maps the vicissitudes of the eighteenth-century French
salon, a privileged site for women's political utterances under absolut-
ism. Sara Maza (1993) explores the ommpresent discursive analogy
between the marriage contract and social contract, a rallying point "at
 Some Contested Uses of Gender Analysis in Historical Sociology • 7

the ultimate point of transition from absolute monarchy to contractual

government" (264). Lynn Hunt (1992, 202) cites Pateman's insights
into the gulf between paternal patriarchy and the emergent.liberal
order although, like Kathleen Jones (1993), she argues that Pateman
has underestimated the enormous social and cultural upheaval by
which it was traversed. Hunt's own analysis of the "family romances"
that characterized the process of the French Revolution is an important
attempt to understand the epochal scale of that disruption and then
subsequent rebuilding of social life. In a happy eclecticism, these
historians mix discourse analysis with empirical claims about events,
processes, and institutions.
For all their virtues, however, analyses in which feminist theory
and early modern European history meet have several problematic
tendencies. First, they often reduce states to writings about states,
collapsing theory and metatheory and building broad claims about
politics per se on that rickety foundation.7 Second, concepts of states
and politics are habitually folded into the categories of civil society
and political culture. This may initially have been a useful corrective
to the Marxist assumption that civil society was absorbed by the state,
but it bends the stick too far in the opposite direction.8 Finally, states
tend to be treated as a single father or at most royal family. By
mistaking the monarch (or at most the court) for the sum total of
early modern European high politics, they substitute one node for an
entire network of patrimonial governance.9 If anything, these meto-
nymical moves actually underplay the gendered, familial character of
ancien regime states. They miss, in my view, the potential political
importance of coalitions of, and struggles among, male officeholders
lineally implanted in wider state apparatuses in their capacity as family
representatives (see Adams 1994). These sites included offshoots like
sovereign colonial companies and other patrimonial corporate bodies,
all negotiating or stumbling into contingent relationships with each
other. This tendency toward dispersed sovereign power, and the con-
flicts and alliances it made possible, formed the shifting political con-
text for early modern European development and state formation. By
ignoring this complexity, we blur important distinctions and conver-
gences among states, fail to grapple with the specificity of intra-
and interstate relations and, ironically, minimize the contribution of
gendered family practices to ancien regime collapse and transforma-
tion in Europe. None of this may matter if feminist theorists simply
want to emphasize a single discursive dimension (gender) of one insti-
tutional space (the court) of states-in-the-making. But if the goal is
also to make sense of patterns of state formation and large-scale
historical change, insofar as we can, existing feminist accounts need
to be expanded and reworked.
8 • Adams

We might begin by taking a leaf from the new feminist work on

welfare state social provision, by recognizing the institutional com-
plexity of the social body and the discursive construction and resource-
laden character of its lineaments. Of course the early modern European
world had specific structural characteristics as well; it was composed
of segmented corporate bodies with substantial sovereign powers,
and traversed by their overlapping, shifting relationships. Positions
of corporate privilege and command over these bodies endowed the
lucky incumbents at the top with political power, social prestige, and
economic resources, the claims to which hinged on a man's—or rather,
a family's—pedigree, sanctified by lineal "blood" and patriarchal
patrilineal status. As family practices and strategies embedded succes-
sive male representatives of elite family lineages in positions of corpo-
rate privilege and political power, embracing the monarch, of course,
but extending beyond and below to the multiple heads of patrimonial
bodies, elites came to identify themselves with intergenerational "of-
fice genealogies," as part and parcel of the state. No wonder interfam-
ily competition for scarce political position sometimes reached levels
that endangered the reproduction of the system. In other circum-
stances, when there was enough to go around or when collective family
property in authority was sensibly distributed, dynastic loyalties and
connections could link rulers in stable structures of patriarchal defer-
ence and support (Adams 1994).
What is wanted is some approach that will be adequate to the
demands of plural institutional analysis and the peculiarities of the
early modern European world. Now it may be, someday, that we
unearth a parsimonious set of deductive propositions that cover the
full range of "large processes" (Tilly 1984) without overusing Occam's
razor and omitting relevant lines of causation. I won't hold my breath.
It seems more likely that macroanalyses will continue to be constrained
by small numbers of comparable cases, limited diversity and interde-
pendence among them, and that intractable causal complexity will
sometimes deliver undecidable arguments. Given these constraints,
can we find middle ways between insisting on untenable universal
lawlike generalizations on the one hand, and surrendering causal
analysis in favor of conversation on the other? Promising paths are
being explored by historical sociologists and merit the attention of
feminist theorists interested in social change.
First are approaches that take seriously the role of temporality as
a feature of all historical processes (Aminzade 1992). Macroprocesses
may be broken down into narrative elements, including significant
events, and recomposed in organized analytical sequences that are
historically contextualized (see among others Abbott 1992; Sewell
1996; Somers 1992; Steinmetz 1992). The intersections of processes
 Some Contested Uses of Gender Analysis in Historical Sociology • 9

with one another partly depend, narrative analysts stress, on historical

contingency. Equally important is the synchronic side of the equation,
for these processes inhabit bounded institutional sites. To the extent
that their elements and relations are provisionally fixed, and relatively
or completely autonomous of one another, they can be grasped by
means of system-specific mechanisms: pieces of theoretical reasoning
that are independently verifiable and help us understand a part of
other, higher-level theories (Steinmetz 1993, 15-18; Stinchcombe
1991). In these mechanisms is inscribed the possibility of complex
causality and spatially separate or interlocking rhythms of uneven
development. In early modern Europe, for instance, we need to be
able to grapple with transitional states, in which some mechanisms
of corporate appropriation were defined in terms of rational-legal
bureaucracy, and others according to patriarchal, patrimonial princi-
ples extending over generations.10
Contra Pringle and Watson, and other postmodern analysts, there-
fore, a state or interstate system should be approached with method-
ological tools adequate to its evolving character as a variably coherent,
variably contradictory formation, not simply "as a diverse set of
discursive arenas which play a crucial role in organizing relations of
power" (Pringle and Watson 1992, 70). This is particularly important,
if I may be permitted a last Euro-American example, not only for the
early modern states in which the very concepts of sovereignty and
rule were being hammered out, but also for the contemporary political
situation, now moving away from central statist structures of rule
and redistribution. Theorists of the post-Keynesian welfare state are
beginning to analyze the displacement of the organizing role of "mod-
ern" state apparatuses in favor of an emphasis on multilevel regulatory
networks of governmental, para-statal, and nongovernmental organi-
zations (see Campbell, Hollingsworth, and Lindberg 1991; Jessop
1994; Leibfried and Pierson 1995). In this unstable moment, the
ongoing restructuring of social provision and social identity is inter-
woven with tendencies toward the internationalization and regional-
ization of sovereignty, power, and coercion on the one hand, and
with frankly experimental relations among modes of governance on
the other—including the Foucauldian relationship between governing
states and selves. The impact of feminism is actually receding in this
new intellectual and political context, in spite of the fact that it's
never been more appropriate. As new work leaves terrain that has
been laboriously gendered, it continuously revives the need for feminist
"fifth columnist" intervention, as well as generating knowledge and
approaches to research that are essential to gender analysis. Feminist
scholars should grasp this opportunity. It will involve connecting
new, "ungendered" work to rich traditions of feminist analysis, and
10 • Adams

expanding the substantive and methodological reach of feminist con-

cerns.""
This is not to say that feminist theory should relinquish its vanguard
position in the forefront of historical sociology or even that it is about
to lose it. Sociologists have just begun to attend to the epistemological
admonitions of feminist metatheorists, for example, and to reflect on
both the gendered character of their subjective position (including
their own changing relationship to the state) and the impact of that
position on knowledge.12 In that vein, it will be interesting to see what
historical sociologists make of one of the newest genres of postmodern-
ist feminism, in which a Bildungsroman, a narrative of the self, serves
as a base for theorizing the development of gendered political subjec-
tivity formed within statist categories in family, school, community,
and nation. Steedman (1986) and Kuhn (1995), to name two exam-
ples, ground their stories in their own childhood experiences as state
scholarship girls in England. (Whether this counts as sociology, his-
tory, autobiography, cultural studies, or all of the above, I can't judge,
and that, of course, is part of the point.) Nevertheless, this and other
pioneering feminist work would be immeasurably strengthened by
greater openness to the genuine substantive and methodological ad-
vances in more "gender-blind" forms of historical sociology. It would
also be strengthened by expanding its tolerance of the whole gamut
of research styles. In their welfare state debate, for example, Gordon
(1993) and Skocpol (1993) were too hasty in labeling and rejecting
each other's approach, especially in assuming a necessary link between
narrative and qualitative analyses, and in effect insisting on polarized
methodological choices. Quantitative and qualitative work on socio-
historical narrative and on the articulation of midrange explanatory
mechanisms is in its infancy, and therefore I share Sprague and Zim-
merman's (1993) view that methodological openness is best, for now.
It is crystal clear that historical sociology needs feminist theory,
and more of it—the bodies of work on contemporary political systems
of social provision and early modern European state formation are
excellent illustrations—but I hope that I have shown that the converse
is also the case.

NOTES
1. I have tried to preserve something of the talk's informality and its
intellectual style. In that spirit, thanks to Jeff Jordan for the title.
2. Several excellent reviews of recent feminist scholarship on the gendered
character of welfare state policies and programs are Brush (1996), Gordon
(1990), and Orloff (1996). For recent discussions of the contested place of
race and racism in maternalist projects, family policy, and the welfare state,
 Some Contested Uses of Gender Analysis in Historical Sociology • 11

see among others Mink (1990), Piven (1984), Roberts (1995), and Quadagno
(1994).
3. Kessler (1990) and Laqueur (1990) problematize the bipartite division
of biological sex.
4. Esping-Andersen replies to the feminist challenge, although obliquely
and inadequately, in his recent book (1996); see also Huber and Stephens
(1996) for a welcome power-resource approach that begins to incorporate
gender.
5. "Gender regimes" and "gender orders" are promising conceptual vehi-
cles for identifying, preparatory to explaining, definitions of masculinity
and femininity embedded in political institutions and embodied in political
experiences. See, for example, Connell (1987); Hobson (1994) and the other
essays in Sainsbury (1994); Jenson (1987); Koven and Michel (1993); Lake
(1996); Lewis (1992); O'Connor (1996), and Orloff (1996). Also pertinent
is Haney (1996), published when this article was already in press.
6. Hernes (1988) discusses patterns of erosion and gendered contestation
in Sweden. See also Bussemaker and van Kersbergen (1994) and Knijn (1994)
regarding the Dutch welfare state.
7. Pateman herself vacillates on this point, at times stressing that she is
analyzing theoretical narratives and conjectural histories, at other mo-
ments arguing that these narratives reveal the origins of the private sphere
as a social institution (1988, 112). But it is important to stress that the texts
of contemporary commentators can in no way be taken to "reflect" social
life.
8. For example, Landes (1988, 22) contrasts the "modern nation-state"
(p. 22) with the absolutist state, and takes the latter to be coterminous with
the absolutist public sphere, organized around the court (18, 21-3). This
tendency may have as much to do with recent trends in French history as
with those in feminist theory. A recent text that distinguishes state from civil
society and discusses their emergent relationship, is Hull's (1996) study of
sexuality and politics in eighteenth-century Germany.
9. See Pateman (1988) and Hunt (1992). Maza (1993) and Hanley (1989)
tell a slightly broader story, institutionally: Maza emphasizes the importance
of parlement as one corporation with crucial relations with the crown,
whereas Hanley's narrative includes high officeholders in the judiciary. Their
work helps open the way for a dialogue between feminist historians and
sociologists.
10. There is no one appropriate method to analyze the cultural definition
of fatherhood that was institutionalized in various early modern European
states, and that formed an important basis for elite political identities. Several
distinctive approaches to gender as a category of historical analysis are re-
viewed in Scott (1986). What I am stressing here is the importance of embed-
ding any of these approaches in a wider, system-specific, comparative histori-
cal frame.
11. Those rich traditions of feminism include analyses of legal form (see,
for example, MacKinnon 1989; Harris 1991); the public/private division (e.g.
Davidoff 1995); the regulation of social reproduction (e.g., Abramowitz
1988; Glenn 1992; Jenson 1986), and war (e.g., Elshtain 1985). Equally
12 • Adams

important will be a widening of feminist welfare state research to include

relationships between social provision and other, less benign, forms of politi-
cal regulation and rule.
12. Smith's (1987) work has been particularly influential in this regard.
For an eloquent meditation on how epistemology and research can transform
each other, and a reflection on research as an autobiographical event, see
Hart (1996,1-27). For more on this particular problem, see Ewa Morawska's
article, also in this issue of Social Politics.

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