Postmodern methods (and techniques)

Lila Leontidou

Chapter 28 in Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Research Methods in the Social Sciences, 2026, pp 197-203 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The emergence of postmodernism after poststructuralism in the 1990s has brought forward new methodological approaches to social and cultural change and is still relevant today in several respects. The conception of scientific research, which is at the core of postmodern methods, is different from Newtonian science and closer to theories of the performative. The basic innovations in methods and techniques include the shift from generalization and nomothetic science to variation and idiographic approaches, from determinism to nondeterminism, from the pursuit of order and consensus to the search for instabilities. There is a mistrust or even aversion from grand narratives (metanarratives) of rationality, progress, totality and legitimation, and a pursuit of local narratives and eclecticism. Postmodernism tends to become metascientific and postparadigmatic, with its pursuit of instabilities rather than certainties, closed systems of thought, positivist and political economy approaches, the notion of totality (as in Marxism and structuralism), and “deeper” structures (as in critical realism). In this entry, we opted for a presentation of postmodern methodological innovations under six notions or headings, some of which blur the distinction between methods and techniques and are all closely related: deconstruction; discourse analysis and narratives; the dilution of dichotomies with in-between spaces; hybrid spaces and heterotopia; and de-colonization.

Keywords: Poststructuralism; Idiographic; Deconstruction; Discourse Analysis; In-between Spaces; Hybrid Spaces; Heterotopia; De-colonization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803921297
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