Comment on Conflict Methodology: a Protagonist Position

In response to Lundman and McFarlane's assessment of what they understand to be conflict methodology, several points of exception and clarification are offered. Conflict methodology is neither a new data collection technology nor an abandonment of professional ethics by sociologists. It is an emerging movement away from the orthodoxy of consensus methodology by sociologists who recognize the ethical and epistemological weaknesses inherent in the dogmas of positivistic science. It proposes an evolutionary epistemology in opposition to the reductionism, operationalism, objectivism, and technocracy of consensus methodology Conflict methodology affirms the unity of science and the social discourse, the centrality of subjectivity in science, and the emancipatory interest in knowledge, while recognizing the threat to the scientific standing of sociology posed by institutional domination of social research.