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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2015
Foucauldian analyses and studies in the sociology of knowledge have provided vibrant accounts of the effects and lives of knowledge practices, yet they have been less attuned to their unexpected consequences upon reception in disparate settings. This article examines the employment of survey methodology as a means to enact modernization theory in non-Western areas during the early phases of the Cold War. An examination of the original questionnaires employed in sociologist Daniel Lerner's seminal text, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, reveals an alignment between the ideal subject of modernization theory and the expectations placed upon the respondent. These expectations included familiarity with the conditions of the survey setting, impersonal relationships, the promise of anonymity, and the capacity for having and voicing opinions regarding otherwise improbable situations. Lerner's work and the studies it spawned did not merely measure and describe the attitudes of peasants, students, and administrators; they were intended to be performative: the interviews were designed to occasion the forms of subjectivity and interpersonal relations articulated and idealized by modernization theory. However, the researchers’ interest in the very activity of survey-taking as a modernizing edifice was undercut by skeptical respondents, disorderly interviewer behavior, and the relentless remaking of coding procedures. In this reading, the questionnaires and their specific stipulations surface as artifacts of knowledge practices that nonetheless overflow the intentions of their coders, sponsors, and creators.
1 Herbert Hyman, “The Sample Survey: Its Nature, History, Utilization and Effects. A Preliminary Report to the National Science Board, February 1979,” Herbert H. Hyman Papers (hereafter “Hyman Papers”), box 9, fol. 16, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, City of New York.
2 Frederick Frey, George Angell, and Abdurrahman Sanay, Lise Seviyesindeki Őğrencilerin Değer Sistemleri: Őğrencilerin Meslek Gruplarına Bağladıkları Değerler (The value systems of high school students: the values students ascribe to occupational groups) (Ankara: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı Talim ve Terbiye Dairesi Eğitim Araştırmaları ve Değerlendirme Merkezi, 1962).
3 Nermin Abadan, Üniversite Öğrencilerinin Serbest Zaman Faaliyetleri: Ankara Yüksek Öğrenim Gençliği Üzerinde Bir Araştırma (The spare-time activities of university students: a study of Ankara higher education youth) (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi SBF Yayınları, 1962).
4 See, among others, A.T.J. Matthews, Emergent Turkish Administrators: A Study of the Vocational and Social Attitudes of Junior and Potential Administrators (Ankara: Ankara Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1955); Fahir H. Armaoğlu and Guthrie G. Birkhead, Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi 1946–55 Mezunları Hakkında bir Araştırma (A study of the 1946–1955 graduates of the political science faculty) (Ankara 1956: TODAIE); Committee of the Ankara University Faculty of Political Science, Economic and Social Aspects of Farm Mechanization in Turkey (Ankara: SBF Yayınları, 1953); Committee of the Ankara University Faculty of Political Science and New York University Graduate School of Public Administration and Social Service, Kaza ve Vilayet İdaresi Űzerinde bir Araştırma (A study of the administration of provinces and districts) (Ankara: SBF Yayınları, 1957).
5 Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow, eds., Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); Daniel Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958). For an overview, see Citino, Nathan, “The Ottoman Legacy in Cold War Modernization,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, 4 (2008): 579–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Pierre Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does not Exist,” in Sociology in Question, Richard Nice, trans. (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Frederick Schaffer, “Thin Descriptions: The Limits of Survey Research on the Meaning of Democracy,” Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series 45 (2010). For a preliminary account of social scientific technologies, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
7 Sanders, Lynn, “Democratic Politics and Survey Research,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29, 248 (1999): 248–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 225.
8 Osborne, Thomas and Rose, Nikolas, “Do the Social Sciences Create Phenomena? The Example of Public Opinion Research,” British Journal of Sociology 50, 3 (1999): 367–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Law, John, “Seeing Like a Survey,” Cultural Sociology 3, 2 (2009): 239–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Michael Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
9 Savage, Identities, ix. Also see Igo, Averaged American; Hull, Matthew, “Democratic Technologies of Speech: From World War II America to Postcolonial Delhi,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, 2 (2010): 257–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
10 On social, material, and literary technologies employed in the construction and dissemination of knowledge practices, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Airpump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
11 On performative speech acts, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
12 Michael Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description,” in Keith Basso and Henry Selby, eds., Meaning in Anthropology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976); and John Lucy, ed., Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1993).
13 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 85. On documents as knowledge practices, see Annelise Rise, ed., Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
14 Herbert Hyman, Taking Society's Measure: A Personal History of Survey Research (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 157–58. Though survey methodology consolidated its status as an intellectually rigorous endeavor in social scientific circles after the war, its ties with governmental and commercial research did not quite dissolve. The editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly, for instance, was expanded to include figures from each industry. Jean Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 228.
15 Lucian Pye, “The Developing Areas: Field Research in the Developing Areas,” in Robert Ward, ed., Studying Politics Abroad (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964), 5, 11.
16 Engerman, David, “Social Science in the Cold War,” Isis 101, 2 (2010): 393–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 397.
17 Michael Latham, “Modernization,” in Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds., The Cambridge History of Social Science, Vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 727.
18 The practice of survey methodology in political science was not just a postwar phenomenon: “pioneering survey work” was conducted in Charles Merriam's program at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. Its applications in the form of attitudinal studies in the “non-West,” however, appear to have benefited from cross-disciplinary dialogue. On such collaborative work, see Lucian Pye, ed., Communications and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
19 Kahin, George Mct., Pauker, Guy, and Pye, Lucian, “Comparative Politics of Non-Western Countries,” American Political Science Review 49, 4 (1955): 1022–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1035.
20 Hyman, Herbert, “Studying Expert Informants by Survey Methods: A Cross-National Inquiry,” Public Opinion Quarterly 31, 1 (1967): 9–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 9. The publication of two seminal texts in comparative politics, for instance, one spearheading the study of political systems in the “underdeveloped world” and the other undertaking a cross-national comparative survey on political attitudes, was set apart by three years. See Gabriel Almond and James Coleman, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
21 Converse, Survey Research; and Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
22 Hyman, “Sample Survey.”
23 Herbert Hyman, “Research Design,” in Robert Ward, ed., Studying Politics Abroad (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964), 182.
24 Frederick Frey, “Cross-Cultural Survey Research in Political Science,” in Robert Holt and John Turner, eds., The Methodology of Comparative Research (New York: The Free Press, 1970), 179 (his emphasis).
25 Payaslıoğlu, Arif and Frey, Frederick, “Babalarının Mensup Olduğu Meslekler Bakımından Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Őğrencileri Űzerinde Bir İnceleme” (A study of political science students in terms of their fathers’ occupations), Ankara Üniversitesi SBF Dergisi 13, 3 (1958): 225–43Google Scholar, 229; Herbert McClosky, Political Inquiry: The Nature and Uses of Survey Research (New York: MacMillan, 1969), 2.
26 Stein Rokkan et al., eds., Comparative Survey Analysis (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); Stein Rokkan, ed., Comparative Research across Cultures and Nations (The Hague: Mouton, 1968); Ward, Studying Politics Abroad; Holt and Turner, Methodology; Frederick Frey, Survey Research on Comparative Social Change: A Bibliography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).
27 Stein Rokkan, “Comparative Survey Analysis: Trends, Issues, Strategies,” in Stein Rokkan et al., eds., Comparative Survey Analysis (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 15.
28 Frey, Frederick, “Surveying Peasant Attitudes in Turkey,” Public Opinion Quarterly 27, 3 (1963): 335–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 335–36.
29 Hyman, Herbert, Payaslıoğlu, Arif, and Frey, Frederick, “The Values of Turkish College Youth,” Public Opinion Quarterly 22, 3 (1958): 275–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 276.
30 Rokkan, “Comparative Survey Analysis,” 5–6, 19.
31 Verba, Sidney, “The Uses of Survey Research in the Study of Comparative Politics: Issues and Strategies,” Historical Social Research 18, 2 (1966): 55–103 Google Scholar; Myron Weiner, “Political Interviewing,” in Robert Ward, ed., Studying Politics Abroad (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964), 127–28; Robert E. Mitchell, “Survey Materials Collected in the Developing Countries,” in Stein Rokkan, ed., Comparative Research across Cultures and Nations (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 224.
32 Lerner, Daniel, Introduction, “Attitude Research in Modernizing Areas,” Public Opinion Quarterly 22, 3 (1958): 217–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 221.
33 Rudolph, Lloyd and Rudolph, Susanne H., “Surveys in India: Field Experience in Madras State,” Public Opinion Quarterly 22, 3: 235–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 235.
34 Ibid.
35 Verba, “Uses of Survey Research,” 67–68.
36 Frank Bonilla, “Survey Techniques,” in Robert Ward, ed., Studying Politics Abroad (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964), 140.
37 William Goode and Paul Hatt, Methods in Social Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), 191.
38 Bonilla, “Survey Techniques,” 140.
39 Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005), 4.
40 Verba, “Uses of Survey Research,” 81.
41 Daniel Lerner, Survey Research on Political Modernization, Center for International Studies, MIT, C 163-40A, 1963, Daniel Lerner Papers 1949–1976, Manuscript Collection-MC 336, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, box 13, fol. 1 (hereafter “Lerner Papers”).
42 Ibid.
43 Lerner, Passing.
44 Lerner, Daniel and Riesman, David, “Self and Society: Reflections on Some Turks in Transition,” Explorations 5 (1955): 67–80 Google Scholar, 68.
45 Hemant Shah, The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 101.
46 Lerner, Passing, 45.
47 Lerner's dissertation, Sykewar, chronicles his military research. Between the war and his tenure at BASR Lerner worked with the Revolution and the Development of International Relations project at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University in the late 1940s. See Lerner Papers, box 1, fols. 3 and 5, “Biographical Material.” It was Joseph Stycos, the Chief of the BASR project, who described the rationale of the project as psychological warfare. See American Association for Public Opinion Research Conference Proceedings, “Contributions of Opinion Research to Psychological Warfare,” cited in Simpson, Science of Coercion, 66.
48 Other rapporteurs included Elihu Katz, Siegfried Kracauer, and Mayone Stycos.
49 See Shah, Production, chs. 4 and 5. Shah suggests that Lazarsfeld himself had reservations as to whether his two-step flow model of communication was transportable to non-Western settings.
50 Lerner and Riesman, “Self and Society,” 74. On link between the Center for International Studies and the CIA, see Bruce Cummings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War,” in Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: New Press, 1998).
51 Lerner, Daniel, “A Scale Pattern of Opinion Correlates: Communication Networks, Media Exposure, and Concomitant Response,” Sociometry 16, 3 (1953): 266–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 266.
52 Lerner, Passing, 54.
53 For Lerner's empathy index, see Table 8 in Passing, 144. For a list of the projective questions, see 69–70.
54 Passing, 147.
55 Lerner and Riesman, “Self and Society,” 78.
56 Daniel Lerner and Suzanne Keller, “Empathy in Cross-National and Occupational Perspective,” July 1957, Center for International Studies, MIT (Lerner Papers, box 11, fol. 42), my emphasis.
57 Lerner, “Interviewing Frenchmen,” American Journal of Sociology 62, 2 (1956): 187–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 191–92.
58 Lerner, Passing, 148.
59 Lerner and Riesman, “Self and Society,” 70.
60 Ibid., 77.
61 See Schatzman, Leonard and Strauss, Anselm, “Social Class and Modes of Communication,” American Journal of Sociology 60 (1955): 329–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 Lerner and Riesman, “Self and Society,” 70.
63 Ibid.
64 The questionnaires retained in the MIT archives include less than a third of the three hundred interviews conducted in Turkey. In this article I draw on a range of the qualitative responses that were left out of Lerner's book, as well as the two questions that bookend the 117 comprising the questionnaire. These questions prompt the interviewers’ “psychological description of the respondent,” and the respondent's assessment of the survey.
65 Lerner Papers, box 9, fol. 7, Ist-35-City. The same respondent refused to quantify and rank his newspaper reading experience: “I am not accustomed to make reckonings by figures even in material matters. I leave it to you to derive the answers of these questions, from the [descriptive] answers I gave concerning movies, newspapers, and radios.” Asked about his opinion of the interview as a whole, he deplored, “Human nature is not to be treated, in my opinion, as a calculating machine which is the case with regards the majority of the questions involved in this questionnaire.”
66 Lerner Papers, box 9, fol. 2, Ist-13-City.
67 Ibid., box 12, fol. 13, Ank-71-City.
68 Ibid., box 9, fol. 2, Ist-13-City.
69 Ibid., box 9, fol. 3, Izmir-47-cit.
70 Lerner, Passing, 19.
71 Ibid., 41, 23, 72.
72 Ibid., 27–28.
73 Ibid., 24.
74 Ibid., 25.
75 Lerner, “A Scale Pattern,” 269–70.
76 Lerner, Passing, 22.
77 Lerner and Riesman, “Self and Society,” 72.
78 Lerner, Passing, 77, 43.
79 Lerner also provides descriptions of two additional interviewers who accompanied him on his follow-up visit to Balgat. One was Tahir S., who received an accolade from Lerner for his composed deportment in the question and answer setting: “Always the American trained interviewer.” The other was Zilla K., who fits the profile of the female interviewer Lerner had “ordered ‘by the numbers’: in her thirties, semi-trained, alert, compliant with instructions, not sexy enough to impede our relations with the men of Balgat but chic enough to provoke the women” (Passing, 34 and 29). Lerner's meticulous instructions suggest the amount of work that went into obtaining the kind of interlocutor who would occasion the interview process emblematic of the stage for modernity itself.
80 Lerner Papers, box 9, fol. 8, Ist-40-city; fol. 13, Ank-70-city.
81 Ibid., box 9, fol. 2, Istanbul-18-rural. Also see box 8, fol. 15, Ank-110-city; fol. 13, Izmir-51-rural, Izmir-49-city.
82 Ibid., box 9, fol. 5, Izmir-31-city.
83 Ibid., box 8, fol. 12, Ist-27-city.
84 Ibid., box 9, fol. 3, Ist-42-rural; fol. 7, Ist-35-city.
85 Lerner, Passing, 76.
86 Ibid., 47, 79.
87 Frey, Angell, and Sanay, Lise Seviyesi, 3.
88 Frederick Frey, “Education,” in Political Modernization in Turkey and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 224, 225, 230.
89 On the commitment to democratic forms, Frey's questionnaire repeated verbatim the questions from a previous, cross-national survey: “Democracy is often defined in the words of Abraham Lincoln as ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ If you were forced to do so, would you personally give greater emphasis to the conception ‘by the people’ or ‘for the people’?” James Gillespie and Gordon Allport, Youth's Outlook on the Future (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), 51. On Frey's recoding of the questionnaire, see “Democratic Potential/Values Study (Turkey),” Hyman Papers, box 2, fol. 5.
90 Abadan, Üniversite Öğrencileri, 6, 44, 124. See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
91 Abadan, Üniversite Öğrencileri, 87. Abadan's hypothetical questions drew from Lerner's: “What do you dream about becoming?” The options ranged from excelling at one's job, to becoming a millionaire or a great artist, to acting as the president or the prime minister, and living as the citizen of another state (p. 147).
92 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 43.
93 Abadan, Üniversite Öğrencileri, 8–10. For Abadan's work on West Germany, where she also relied on Lerner-esque formulations of “rising expectations and frustrations,” see Batı Almanya'daki Türk İşçileri ve Sorunları (Ankara: Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı, 1964).
94 Hyman, “Sosyal Bilimler Metodolojisine Giriş Ders Notları” (Introduction to the methodology of the social sciences), Hyman Papers, box 1, fol. 2.
95 Hyman, Taking Society's Measure, 128–29.
96 Ibid., 157–58; and Hyman, “Sosyal” (his emphasis).
97 Hyman, Payaslıoğlu, and Frey, “Values,” 278–79.
98 Ibid., 280.
99 Ibid., 281. The basis for comparison with European students was once again the Gillespie and Allport questionnaire. Elsewhere, Hyman was critical of the pitfalls of “pseudo-cross national research” and faulted Lerner's empathy index with leading the reader to “somehow contrast [the empathy index] mentally with a Western, modern society, of which we have no empirical example.” Hyman continued: “Wouldn't it be ironic if he subsequently found a lot of immobile personalities, non-participant types in the United States or Great Britain?” The irony seems to have eluded Hyman and his collaborators when they presumed Arabic-speaking youth to be imbued with a traditional mindset. “Strategies in Comparative Survey Research,” presented at the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, 1963, Hyman Papers, box 1, fol. 11.
100 Hyman, Payaslıoğlu, and Frey, “Values,” 275.
101 Matthews, Emergent Turkish Administrators; Armaoğlu and Birkhead, Siyasal Bilgiler.
102 The novelty of the method was overstated: throughout the 1940s, a group of faculty working on rural sociology and social psychology at Ankara University also employed small-scale surveys targeting villages and towns in the vicinity of Ankara. See Niyazi Berkes, Bazı Ankara Köyleri Üzerinde Bir Araştırma (A study of some Ankara villages) (Ankara: Uzluk, 1942); Muzaffer Şerif, An Outline of Social Psychology (New York: Harper, 1956 [1944]); Behice Boran, Toplumsal Yapı Araştırmaları: İki Köy Çeşidinin Mukayeseli Tetkiki (Studies in social structure: a comparative analysis of two village types) (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1945); İbrahim Yasa, Hasanoğlan: Socio-Economic Structure of a Turkish Village (Ankara: Yeni Matbaa, 1957 [1945]).
103 Payaslıoğlu and Frey, “Babalarının Mensup,” 229.
104 Ibid., 241–43.
105 Frey “Surveying Peasant Attitudes,” 338–39.
106 Ibid., 350. Also see Herbert Hyman, “Checks on the Accuracy of the Survey Findings,” in Frederick Frey and Herbert Hyman, Rural Development Research Project Report 1: General Description and Evaluation (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, MIT, 1967).
107 Frey, “Surveying Peasant Attitudes,” 348.
108 Ibid., 353.
109 Frederick Frey and Leslie Roos, Report No. 7: The Propensity to Innovate among Turkish Peasants (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, MIT, 1967), 5.
110 Frederick Frey, Allan Kessler, and Joan Rothchild. Report No. 2: Index Construction and Validation (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, MIT, 1967).
111 Ibid., 8, 16.
112 Tsing, Friction, 3.
113 Şefik Uysal, “Metodoloji Açısından Türkiye'de Yapılan Sosyolojik Araştırmalar” (Sociological research in Turkey in terms of methodology), in Türkiye'de Sosyal Araştırmaların Gelişmesi (The development of social research in Turkey) (Ankara: Hacettepe Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1971), 151.
114 The researchers refrained from inquiring directly after the ownership of land and radios, for instance. Türk Köyünde Modernleşme Eğilimleri Araştırması (Research on the propensity to modernize in the Turkish village) (Ankara: T. C. Başbakanlık Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı, 1970), 8.
115 On the report's different coding of peasant innovation, see 209–10, 253.
116 Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı, “Sosyal İlim Metodolojisi: Köy ve Nüfus Araştırmaları” (Social science methodology: rural and demographic studies), in Türkiye'de Sosyal Araştırmaların Gelişmesi (The development of social research in Turkey) (Ankara: Hacettepe Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1971), 178.
117 Cohn, Edwin J., “The Climate for Research in the Social Sciences in Turkey,” Middle East Journal 22, 2 (1968): 203–12Google Scholar, 205.
118 Lerner Papers, box 13, fol. 27, untitled, n.d.
119 Herbst, Numbered Voices; Osborne and Rose, “Do the Social Sciences Create Phenomena?” Also see “Special Issue on the Social Life of Methods,” Evelyn Ruppert, John Law, and Mike Savage, eds., Theory, Culture and Society 30, 4 (2013).
120 Lerner Papers, box 9, fol. 7, Ist-35-City.
