2.1. Discipline / fields

Chapter 2. Methodology

This dissertation is based on qualitative analysis of various types of data. While the specific method(ologie)s of each empirical chapter will be elaborated there, this section will briefly delineate five general methodological considerations:

• Which disciplines and fields I situate this work in and how (cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, media studies);

• what this dissertation is not (theological, deductive, quantitative, representative, effects research, nuanced);

• which approach was taken as a consequence (to formulate a grounded theory,

‘sensitized’ by an encoding/decoding framework);

• what methods were used concretely and why (interviews, content analyses, some ethnography);

• what data those resulted in.

2.1. Discipline / fields

This dissertation is positioned on the cross-section of three disciplines: cultural sociology, the sociology of religion, and media studies. This matters only as a starting point to make sense of what I am trying to do in the dissertation. Readers from across the communication sciences, religious studies, game studies and other related fields should hopefully be able to make sense of and engage with it.

By calling this dissertation cultural-sociological, I mean that I study culture as collective meaning: as a socially shared system of meaning-making between individuals. In this project, I try to bring what Jeffrey Alexander calls the “cultural structures that regulate society into the light of the mind” (2003; p. 3-4), by understanding them from the individual level up. Cultural sociologists usually refer to Weber’s Verstehen as a

specific method of ‘understanding’ such structures and individuals, by which they mean “the understanding of subjective meaning of social action” (Herva, 1988, p. 151). David Inglis, referring directly to Herva, adds that there is

“a need for us [cultural sociologists] to avoid misconceiving of what the famous Verstehen method of studying action involves. It seeks to reconstruct not the empirical motives of particular individuals; it is not an empirical psychology of action – but rather the interpretation of the broader meaning of actions that happened among particular types of people at particular times and places. It concerns less what a particular Puritan thought and did and more the cultural universe within which such a person’s thinking and activities took place and made sense. It therefore involves idealtypical reconstructions of particular worldviews, common to certain types of individuals, including cultural producers.” (Inglis, 2016, p. 33)

To clarify, an ‘Ideal-typical reconstruction’ for Weber is “not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description” (Weber, 1904, p. 90), such as, say, the idea of a ‘Ph.D. candidate’ as someone who writes a dissertation, when in reality that person is more complex: they may have (once had) hobbies, sleep, and friends beside their writing a dissertation, but the ideal-type nonetheless serves analytically to delineate, categorize and distinguish parts of empirical reality; even though individual people will be more ambiguous and complex combinations of ideal-typical ‘Ph.D. candidates’ and other categories (such as ‘teachers,’ ‘gamers,’ ‘readers,’ or ‘people with healthy relationships’). An ideal-type, consequently, to Weber

“is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct (Gedankenbild). In its conceptual purity, this mental construct (Gedankenbild) cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.” (Weber, 1904, p. 90-91)

In the broadest theoretical sense, I approach cultural and social meaning as a social constructivist and a symbolic interactionist. Although there are surely differences between the two positions (such as individuals’ amount of agency to create meaning), for this dissertation it means roughly that I take knowledge to be socially constructed rather than individually: people, in other words, create shared symbolic worlds through social interactions and their resulting actions (Blumer, 1969; Denzin, 2008; Mead, 1934). These shared symbolic worlds are nonetheless taken for granted as commonsensical and objective (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Eberle, 2016).

Finally, the reason I start my methodology with cultural sociology is because I do not treat it as a sub-discipline of the social sciences, and more generally following Dick Houtman and Peter Achterberg, not as just another

“specialization (besides political sociology, sociology of religion, sociology of work and organization, sociology of crime and deviance, (etc.) in an already overly fragmented discipline, but rather as a general and substantially non-specialized sociology. Its principal ambition should be to demonstrate to non-cultural sociologists, and indeed to researchers in disciplines beyond sociology and the social sciences, that taking culture more seriously yields increases in explanatory potential.” (2016, p. 226)

As a consequence, I position this cultural-sociological dissertation within the specialization of the sociology of religion.

By calling this dissertation a sociology of religion, I mean that it specializes in, and follows up on the literature on religion as studied in the social sciences – which has been a central specialization from the social sciences’ inception. For more on what that entails and how this dissertation’s research design results from that, see the literature overview. Generally, the sociology of religion researches and theorizes how human societies and/or individuals experience and practice religion. As such, I have defined religion in the introduction as beliefs in a supernatural substance mediated by objects and actions, given meaning to collectively.