SP Seminar Series -- Roger Burrows

SPSS: From a Social Science to a Surveillance Technology?

Tuesday, January 27th
2:30pm to 3:30pm
Mackintosh-Corry, Room D-411
Queen's University

For those familiar with SPSS, but who have not paid much attention to the changing context of its development and dissemination, a visit to www.spss.com might come as a surprise. The site functions to interpellate not 'social scientists', but those seeking 'business solutions'. One quickly feels naïve to have imagined that in an era of 'knowing capitalism' some of the core tools of the social sciences would not have been fully 'commercialised' and 'globally branded' in this way. Naïve or not, the profound and stark transformation of SPSS from a tool for empirical social research to a corporate behemoth primarily concerned with something called 'predictive analytics' has been fast and dramatic and, as such, demand analysis.

Professor Burrows suggests that this transformation is emblematic of a new methodological ethos in quantitative methods. This is certainly being driven by the increasing ubiquity of digitization processes but, relatedly, also by changes in domain assumptions about contemporary social ontology. For the business sector, this new methodological ethos is driven, primarily, by the cold logic of the profit motive; in sociology, it comes via the recent 'complexity turn', which involves a quite fundamental reappraisal of a number of domain assumptions that, potentially, involve nothing less than another 'paradigm shift' in our discipline.

Everyone welcome!