Ideology

Background

Historically, ideology has been a pejorative concept, amounting to falsehood and avoided by the astute researcher. It was first studied by French philosopher Destutt de Tracy, who patterned his thoughts after the natural sciences and reacted to metaphysical or idealist constructions of ideas. His study of ideology purported to be a science of ideas. Not long afterward, Karl Marx conceived his own version of ideology with his thesis on false consciousness. To Marx, ideology was falsehood based on the idealist notion that consciousness produced social life, as opposed to the materialist notion that the production of social life gives rise to consciousness. In the Marxist sense, ideology is less a trait that an individual possesses and is more a characteristic of social relations found in capitalism. A qualitative researcher would rather not be implicated with keeping such company, preferring instead a materialist analysis.

Whereas the Marxist perspective regards ideology as a distortion of scientific understanding, textualists consider ideology as an organizing framework necessary for subjectivity. Seen in this second sense, ideology is not something that people need to overcome, as in the Marxist notion of false consciousness, but rather something that is necessary for consciousness itself. As a text, ideology is made known to social subjects through language as a social and regulated practice. Ideology is a way of reading the world and becomes a particular position that people take up through discourse. Compared with the Marxist theory on ideology, a poststructural rendition of it as text suggests that ideology is constructed out of discourse not as a coherent system but rather as one that is characterized by contention among discourses. Here, qualitative research has been transformed through its focus on linguistic statements and cultural themes through interviews and ethnographic studies.

In a third sense, ideology has been used as a positive or enabling concept. Some intellectuals, such as Vladimir Lenin and Georg Lukacs, spoke of a revolution grounded on a socialist or working-class ideology. Likewise, Antonio Gramsci posited the importance of a power bloc with leadership abilities and a counterhegemonic ideology. Seen in this way, ideology is neither negative nor neutral but rather negating. That is, positive ideology negates structures of domination and relations of exploitation. Qualitative researchers accomplish this move partly by building a critique of the social through concepts that demystify commonsensical assertions in civil society such as progress, meritocracy, and objectivity.

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