Migracijske i etničke teme (Dec 2011)
Methodological Nationalism in the Social Sciences: Consequences for Social Science Research
Abstract
Social scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that human society cannot and should not be equated with the “national society”, an imagined aggregate of social relations within the boundaries of nation-states. The first decade of the 21st century was marked by the discussion on methodological nationalism, i.e. the biased idea that the society and the nation-state overlap, which is embedded in the assumptions of numerous studies. Despite the far-reaching consequences of this discussion, there are only a few articles which try to give directions to the researchers for studying social phenomena without the bias of methodological nationalism. The goal of this article is to extrapolate main conclusions from the discussions on methodological nationalism and to formulate clear outcomes of these discussions for the conceptualization and for the conducting contemporary research in the social sciences, particularly in the field of migration research.
