ABSTRACT
The ideal study in political science today would be the comparative study of health regulation of noodles in one hundred and fifty countries. As a child of liberalism and the Enlightenment, social science has been a major ideological force in the victory of civility over violence, reason and evidence over passion and prejudice, clear communication over cloudy commitment. A generational analysis of academic practices highlights the fact that individuals' professional choices are not made in a vacuum. The range of options from which undergraduate and graduate students choose is not equally available, being, instead, historically and institutionally situated; interpretive, postmodern, and other turns not withstanding, positivist ideas still permeate society and societal understandings of science. From a sociology of knowledge and sociology of the professions perspective, demarcating qualitative methods from interpretive ones begins to move toward regrounding methods in methodologies and methodologies in the philosophies of science and social science.
