Critical social research differs from administrative research in questioning subjects’ object status.

Evidence

Adorno, playing off empirical social research against humanistic sociology and defending it against caricature and prejudice, thought he did not need to give any particular emphasis to the fact that he was not using ideology to help transform social science into a mere adjunct of business and public administration. But was he not making precisely this mistake in his attempt to rescue market research on behalf of critical sociology? Was he not blinding himself to the most important point at the empirical level, the point at which critical social research' differed from administrative social research’Adorno cautiously used these terms, which had been introduced by Lazarsfeld in the first issue of SPSSwhen the question of either perpetuating or breaking through the object status of the persons being examined did not even occur to him as a methodological topic? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1939

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lazarsfeld’s critical-versus-administrative distinction as a methodological concept worth defining for reference.
• XREF: connects to: Critical Theory held that researchers are part of the social object they study — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 299; Social knowledge alters its subject, unlike natural-science observation — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 116

Broader Connections

• Critical Theory held that researchers are part of the social object they study #expands (0.95) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 299
• Social knowledge alters its subject, unlike natural-science observation #qualifies (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 116