Research Methods in International Relations Week 6 26/03/2013 Today, we will talk about Normativism.

. Norm and rule are used in the place of one another. We oftenly refer to social norms meaning the rules of society. Ethimologically mainly in terms of historical kinship, ethimology can be a found subject. Ethimologically the word norm is related, there was a kinship relations between words historically that we can trace one word to another. Norm is ethimologically related with the Latin word norma. Norma meant a carpenters instrument, carpenters tool. The carpenter as a craftsman attempt to use this tool norma in order to make sure that measurements were standard. The measurements were in keeping with the established standards that ever no deviations. These are important in answering the norms. Some of these sense historically has been smuggled in norms. Normal behaviors are behaviors that is in keeping with the established standards of the society that there is no deviasion. When we see a person in his/her pijamas at the shopping centre, is this keeping in the established standards of the society. Probably not. It is not wrong but at the same time we see that normacy is like an habbit. Normacy is not a social habbit. Dressing pijama in these places is not normal not because you broke some rule but because we have a habbit, a social habbit, social custom and you are breaking a custom. Normal see in this sense is a convention which is socially constructed. It is not like simply out there or part of natural life. It is a creation of society itself. It is not independent from society. Also, normal see is not really fixed, it may change. What is normal today may not be normal tomorrow. As a normal see, the norm, the concept of norm that is applicable to social sciences also refers to conventions, customs, habits and collective perceptions. When we decide whether or not something is normal, we are not really referring to the individual opinion of one person, we are referring to a collective perception. Society d oesnt base on simple one person, it is a social habit. Custom is that is something repeated. We are
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referring again and again to the society and culture. When we decide what is normal according to custom, culture, it is something similar with the concept of norm in the normativism as used in social sciences. Norms are custom, habit, convention and collective perceptions. In technical term on this course, we have values. Norms are values and we virtually footrest the values with facts. This is our dichotomy: fact versus values. The fact supposed to be the object as it is, the object with its intransic it innates qualities. Value is a quality that we project on the fact either socially or culturally. The qualities on the project we attributed to fact are in the formal custom, habit, collective perception so on and so forth. Before the eyes of hundreds of people being dress the pijamas is a fact. Whether or not it is normal is a value. According to normativism in epistemelogy, in the production of knowledge in social sciences the researcher needs to take into account values as well as facts. To be more exact, under normativism it is not really possible to distinguish between facts and values. They are not really quite seperable. Imagine an extraterrestrial, someone out of space, visiting the Earth and this person has an assignment of another planet. In some point, this person comes across a football match. He thinks he has to make a report, thus he has to observe everything. These extraterrestrials are machines they have no humor. He take whatever he observe. He is taking notes like it is a two side game, but it is not possible for the allien to make sense of football, understand it only on the basis of facts alone. According to normativism, there will be not possible for the allien to have an idea of what football is about because according to normativists, there are values and values behind the football. Unless you have values, you would not able to make the sense of football. He has all facts but values seems to be invisible. They come from the culture. There is also a team spirit. It is something about solidairty but solidarity is not really a fact. To understand all that and to have a good reliable report set back home you need to really understand it. Without underrstanding of

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it, you dont have any sense of football, the allien thinks that Earth people are stupid. In this case, with the allien there is a distance. We have a physical distance. It is a value or competition. For example, fun. What is fun? This is value. In normativism whatever you are doing without value, it means you are Sheldon therefore, facts and values shuld not be seperated. Cem Ylmaz in AROG, he went to the pre-history time and he mentioned about human rights. It is laughable not because of human rights but because he mentioned about human rights in pre history times. Thucydides is the father of international relations but which one? We distinguish between international relations with capital first letter as IR versus international relations all in small letters as ir. These are two different things. IR refers to the discipline and ir is the affairs of states. Two words as nation and state are center for the understanding of international relations. Sovereignty came later. We have the roots of these words. Nation comes from nasci which means to be born. Nature and nation are related. State comes from stare which means to stand. Before 16.cc we did not have the concept of state or nation. We are going to discuss normativism in two important figures. One of them is known as Max Weber, he was a German, he was born in 1864 and died in 1920. The other figure is Parsons that he was a professor of sociology. Weber is known as the founder of sociology. But his words produced a lot of impact in various other social sciences such as political science, economics, history even the study of religion and of course international relations. His concept of power has central modern state has been incorporated in the early world of international relations. The early world or realism considered as the classical realism. Weber also have some inroads, created some waves within the area as known as international relations. The greatest contribution of Weber is to political science: the concept of modern state. The modern state is the entity that has monopoly of the use of violance. Within an established state if society has been politically
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organized when there is violance, violance only comes from a state. Another contribution of W eber is to bureaucracy like elimination of friction, like subordination. It is argued that his great contribution is about the origin of capitalism which is also illustrative of belove motion of normativism. Capitalism is an economic system and it relies on private ownership. There is a capital owner as a capitalist and capitalist owns the means of production. The capitalists also hires the labor and it produces commodities. They are motivated only by profit. Profit is the difference between cost and the selling price of a commodity. When there is profit, the profit rechannel to the business and form of investment and business grows larger and larger. Intrestingly, we didnt have this before 16.cc. almost at the same time we have in 16.cc protestantism. Protestantism is a reform movement within the Christianity led at the time by figures such as Martin Luther and Jean Calvin. According to them, the established church had been really corrupt. People at Christianity had to return through message, through teachings of God. Max Weber claimed that if you want to understand what happened in the 16.cc under capitalism it is not enough to observe the facts. We also need to have an idea about the values behind the actions of those people. The values of through capitalists. There is a link between them. He has the book named as The Protestan Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. It gives simple statistical information even almost in the front page. This information says that Anywhere in Europe, business leaders, capital owners or higher grades of labor are overwhelmingly protested. It is not only a contemporary fact, it is also a historical fact. According to Marx, Protectionism is an ideological reflection of the economic changes that took place with a developments in the early capitalism. According to Weber, this may not be the case, according to him Protectionism may have developed seperately and on the contrary Protestanism may have either created or facilitated capitalism. Foolowing the work ethic, you work hard, you

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dont spend your money on luxury items. There is very limited enjoyment. There should be no luxury items in the hpusehold. This is known as ascetic life which is contend with very minimum banks, assettings. In this life, you give a way to all those unnecessary items in the household. Imagine these people, they are working hard, they dont waste time because they think working is worshipping. They dont spend money and rechannel money through investment. According to Weber, protestanism emerged as a new version of Christianity, as a define of Catholics, Protestanism simply fired, created capitalism. This is an example that how normativist take into account values besides the facts. According to Weber, we need to radically distinguish between social and natural sciences. He claims natural sciences are descriptive, objective, universal and they always seek law like regularities. In natural sciences, whatever area it is, we should expect to receive certain law like regularities, laws of nature. The second law of dynamics as the facts of heat .. works. According to this law, when the Earth heats, things getting worse and worse. Things when they left on their own, a system will be a cave. Things are never going to get better. This known as entropy which is inevitable in a close system. You can come up with a norm like that because in natural sciences you are dealing with the facts of nature, you dont have to get involve with values. Because facts of nature are inanimate, they are observable,controlable and they are generalizable. We can have experiments with them. When it comes to social sciences, in social sciences we have human action. We either try to understand a situation or a particular object. When it is a situation, we know that behind the situation there is an human action, there is an human mind. The objects which we deal for instance when we try to understand painting, a form of architecture, literature. All these objects are mind objectify. It means these are objects but behind these objects there are minds. Mind is transformed into these objects. If you want to understand something, you have to understand the mind behind it. The difference exists because

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the facts of nature is inanimate, it means they dont have cultural life, they dont talk, think, they dont have relations. We may take the relations into the account as a fact and observe them. Observation will be sufficient. We dont need beyond that. When it comes to social sciences it is a difficult area. We have to deal with intention, mind, culture. The example of E.T. watching football match, he wants know what is going on. This person have to have values, have to spend a lot of time with those who play football, watch football. In natural sciences we can be objective, in social sciences we are condemned to the subjectivity. We cant be objective, we cant possibly produce norms, that is not possible. This is the first principle. The second that the ordinary principle of causality is not reaaly applicable to social sciences. The principle of casuality or causation is not as same in natural sciences as in social sciences. If there is a result, it has to be effect, behind the effect there must be a cause. You cant treat any fact, result, situation, event as an efffect. Weber claims that we dont really have much use for this principle in the area of human actions. Because he says that in the first place in social sciences it is difficult to identify the cause, in natural sciences with an experiment whatever and you find the cause. For centuries it has been discussing that what causes a war, conflict. According to some the answer is people, for some it is state, for some it is system. We have some nominees but we dont really have an idea about the cause. According to Weber sometimes it is not possible in social sciences to distinguish between cause and effect. We dont know which one is cause and which one is effect. Do we have uncertainty in the international system because of anarchy? In social sciences Weber says the same cause may not always produce the same effect. Discomfit with someone should normally cause pain but with some people it may become a sort of joke, pleasure. For example in ascetic tradition, a person who wants to have purity and perfection has to tame his/her innercepts. To tame innercepts, this person deny himself fool. This person will confine

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himself to a narrow area. There is a third principle. According to the third principle, for the reasons mentioned before in the first and the second principle, for the social sciences we need to have an interpretive and open ended methods. Social sciences can best be researched through interpretive methods. These methods sometimes known as hermeneutics. This term based on Greek guy Hermes, he is believed to have created language and speech. In turkish hermeneutics means a deep and penatrating understanding. In order to communicate the deep and penatrating understanding people in English use German understanding Verstehen. Why it is penatrating and deep because when you have this understanding it is one mind engaging in another mind. The assumption is that whatever it is you are researching as a researcher, because there is a human mind behind it, there is a value system behind it, you are going to link to some values and the researcher himself or herself the mind engage in another mind. In so doing, the researcher will seek to understand the reciprocal bond between the part and the whole. The part is what we need to understand, the object. The whole is where the object is situated like a value system. There must be link between them. The researcher is expecting to understand this bond, this reciprocal bond. It emerged before Max Weber. In Germany from the early 19.cc, in order to understand the Bible the scholars of Bible develop this method.

D n o t e J

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