ABSTRACT
Underlying, and in fact shaping, the development of the formal discipline are the lives of the people who do sociology and the meanings they attach to their practices. Although actual practices can, of course, only be described on the basis of observation (Knorr-Cetina, 1992; Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Law, 2006/ 2004), the orientations that govern practices can be uncovered in the relatively free conversation that develops between interviewer and interviewee. Interviews are also most appropriate for eliciting information on the highly detailed and necessarily incompletely foreseen research processes that are usually taken for granted and therefore deliberately overlooked in research publications. Moreover, in reflecting on their personal and professional biographies in dialogues, sociologists are likely to shed light on recent history of the field by disclosing the professional directions they have chosen and the logics (cognitive and affective) that underlie their choices. Their ideas and conceptualizations are not only testimony of how the layers of experience are now combining to provide a geology and an archeology of consistent scientific work, they are of immediate interest as signs of the extent to which a “paradigm shift” is taking root.
