“Methodology is a system of rules, Principles and procedures, which forms scientific investigation. Comment.” (2020)

The statement offers a definition of methodology that fits comfortably within the positivist tradition founded by Auguste Comte and developed by Emile Durkheim, but treating it as the whole truth about methodology overlooks the interpretive judgement Max Weber showed to be equally indispensable.
Before commenting on the definition, the terms it uses need separating: method, methods, and methodology are not synonyms, and the statement’s force depends on which one is actually being described.
The comment argued here: the framing is accurate for methodology’s procedural, technical dimension, but incomplete because it reduces methodology to rule-following and omits the trained judgement genuine social inquiry also requires.

A method is a single specific technique for gathering or analysing data — a structured questionnaire, an unstructured interview, a statistical test; methods (plural) is the toolkit of such techniques a study draws on.
Methodology is a different order of thing: the underlying logic and philosophy of inquiry — assumptions about the nature of social reality (ontology), how it can be known (epistemology), and the criteria used to judge a finding valid — that determines why a particular method is chosen and how its results are interpreted and defended.
A positivist methodology is what makes a large-sample survey with pre-coded variables the logical choice; an interpretive methodology is what makes an unstructured interview the logical choice for the same broad topic — the methods differ because the underlying methodology differs.

The statement’s language — a system of rules, principles, and procedures — describes methodology as essentially codified and sequential: define the problem, formulate a testable hypothesis, specify the procedure for gathering data, analyse it, and revise theory in light of the result.
This matches positivist social science’s claim to be scientific in Comte’s sense — a unity of method with the natural sciences, where following the correct procedure licenses a finding’s claim to objectivity.
Codified rules of this kind are genuinely valuable: they make research teachable, its steps auditable, and its conclusions defensible against the charge of being merely the researcher’s impression.

Weber‘s methodology of Verstehen — the interpretive understanding of the subjective meaning an actor attaches to conduct — cannot be executed as a mechanical, rule-following procedure in the way a coding scheme or a statistical test can; grasping what an action means to its performer requires trained, disciplined judgement that no fixed algorithm fully specifies.
His ideal type is likewise not produced by a procedure but by a deliberate act of judgement about which features of a phenomenon are sociologically significant enough to accentuate into a one-sided, logically pure construct — its value is assessed by usefulness, not by whether a rule was correctly followed in building it.
Even everyday rule-following is not mechanical: Garfinkel‘s ethnomethodology shows members use rules as resources, interpreting and adapting them to the occasion, rather than obeying them as fixed programmes — if this is true of ordinary social life, it is harder still to insist that the sociologist’s own methodology reduces to rule application, echoing Kuhn‘s point that even natural scientists are trained into a paradigm’s tacit judgement, not just a written rulebook.

Rules and procedures give methodology its systematic, teachable, and defensible character, and without them research risks collapsing into unaccountable impression — this is the genuine truth in the statement.
But treating methodology as purely mechanical carries its own risk, which Aaron Cicourel named measurement by fiat: forcing a phenomenon into a pre-set procedural category in the name of following the rules, at the cost of validity.
The contemporary open-science and pre-registration movement shows both sides of this tension at once: pre-registering hypotheses is an attempt to further codify methodology into an explicit, bias-resisting procedure, yet qualitative researchers have pushed back on Weberian grounds — reflexive, emergent judgement cannot be locked into a pre-specified protocol without losing what makes interpretive inquiry valuable.
Methodology is indeed a system of rules and principles at its procedural level, and this is what makes findings teachable, comparable, and open to scrutiny.
But its deeper character lies in the reasoned justification of why those rules were chosen for this problem — a justification that itself rests on trained judgement, not further rules.
The more accurate comment, following Weber rather than a purely positivist reading, is that methodology is a system of rules and the disciplined judgement needed to apply, adapt, and sometimes suspend them.

Methodology is a system of rules, Principles and procedures, which forms scientific investigation. Comment.

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