Methodological Challenges

Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes University of Technology, Sydney

PhD CourseUniversity of Aalberg

Perspectives on Identity in Learning and Education Research14 – 17 November 2006

Finding voice after the crisis…Finding voice after the crisis…

‘Fuck’ I mumbled as I drove to work. I was alone. My frustration and anger had no obvious referent, but I’m telling you, they were there. They were real. They existed all by themselves.

It was a cold Sydney day. Colder than you’d expect in Spring. I had the heater on in the car. Rain was falling. The grey asphalt roads had turned to black and the windscreen wipers on my car weren’t doing too well. They rearranged the water on the glass into different formations of opacity. What I could see kept changing but it never got clear. There was tension too; tension without any identifiable reason. I could feel the muscles in my back tightening. My breakfastless stomach burning. My eyes were tight in my face. My fists were clenched onto the steering wheel. My hands trembled slightly as I took off from the traffic lights to turn the corner into the car park of the World Services Corporation. The building loomed. As I got closer it became all that I could see.

As I turned, a new song started up out of the radio. The beat was slow and rhythmic and the melody was subdued as the singer’s gruff voice tumbled across the words – just articulate enough so that you could make out what he was singing. The chorus repeated...

What a wonderful world this could beIf everyone else were just like meWhat a wonderful world this would beA fabulous world for you and me

Excerpt From: Rhodes, C. (2001) Writing Organization: (Re)presentation and Control in

Narratives at Work, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

The Crisis…• In the 1980s and 1990s many researchers became concerned with research in relation

to what became known as the ‘crisis of representation’ – this crisis deeply questioned research practice – especially in ethnographic, anthropological, feminist, and postcolonial writing

• The issue related to a radical questioning of the assumption that researchers could write in an ‘representational’ manner where the text was understood naively as a mirror of the world

• As Patti Lather describes it, the crisis reflected a “profound uncertainty about what constitutes an adequate description of social ‘reality”’ (Lather, 1991: 21) and […] resulted in an “erosion of confidence in the prevailing concepts of knowledge and truth [where] whatever the ‘real’ is, it is discursive” (ibid: 25)

• This crisis challenged the belief that a person present in the world can represent his or her own experiences (Clegg and Hardy, 1996) or the experience of others unequivocally.

• This is a situation where ‘there is no perfectly transparent or neutral way to represent the natural or social world’ (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1994: 255)

• Writing achieves the status of truth, not because it is representational, but because in Michel Foucault’s terms, it conforms to a “system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution circulation, and operation of statements” (Foucault, 1980: 132).

… The (my) problem

• My 2001 book, Writing Organization, was based on an autoethnographic account of my research into a TQM based change and learning program in a major bank

• My interest was in understanding how globally mandated learning programs were made sense of at a local level and how people creatively interpreted

• But .. I encountered what Laurel Richardson calls “horrid postmodern writing dilemmas” – “no matter how we stage the text, we – the authors – are doing the staging. As we speak about the people we study, we also speak for them. As we inscribe their lives, we bestow meaning and promulgate values” (Richardson, 1992: 131)

• My problem was how to respond to the call to write in a manner where “people are less likely to be press ganged into forced roles or confined in straight jacket identities” (Clegg and Hardy, 1996: 696)

…and…the experimental solution• I sought to write in a manner where:

a number of quite different writing positions (or voices) are at play, working through and across one another [...and where…] a single position or narratorial voice is destabilized, such that readers cannot clearly tell which of the often contradictory positions is supposed to represent the text’s own truth or self-understanding (Hodge and McHoul, 1992: 207)

• I used Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of heteroglossia (from the Russian raznorecie, usually translated as ‘variegated speech’, or ‘different speech-ness’) in the novel as a metaphor and inspiration for research writing – the result was a monograph that enacted a struggle over meaning by juxtaposing a range of genres in the single text: scholarly theoretical writing, writing letters to the reader, ghost-written autobiography, ethnography and short story

• My research/writing method was to produce texts which “interrupt themselves and foreground their own constructedness” (Lather, 1991: 124).

• The resulting work was intended to be what Roland Barthes (1974) calls a ‘writerly text’ – one that foregrounds its nature as a textual and cultural product and highlights its incorporation of voices and generic conventions, rather than attempting to keep its production transparent – such a text “pays tribute to the power of signs by seeking to unravel the machinery of a text” (Silverman and Torode, 1980: 297)

• In such a text methodology and theory collapse into each other through a politics of writing that always keeps its own knowledge in question

“Eating the other”

“Whilst we can reflexively question the research practices we employ, my research was a struggle since the project did not seem to care who it was talking to, when I did care about the ‘respondents’; a project which did not seem to care who I was or was becoming when I did care; and which said that incorporating such care for the other and care of the self into a research project was illegitimate and not scholarly” (August 12th 1999: diary notes).

Don’t “Eat the Other”, they come back to bite you…

Spivak (1988: 104) states that:• “the desire to explain (through research is)… a symptom of the

desire to have a self (the researcher) that can control knowledge and a world that can be known (i.e. converted to the same)”.

• Spivak (1988: 105) argues that by “explaining (through valid research), we exclude the possibility of the radically heterogenous (the Other)”.

Benjamin comments: • ‘If I completely control the (O)ther, then the (O)ther ceases to exist’

(1988: 53 cited in Scheurich 1997: 86).

“I” as textually constructed

1. The empirical “Eye”: the experiencing subject who is situated within the data, collecting and inevitably sifting information and emotions and having those emotions themselves.

2. The analytical “I”: the way in which this experiencing subject is distanced from the data, often historically in time and space, in the “etic” moment of constructing categories, analysing features, and thinking itself in a different relation to the data, as outside rather than part.

3. The authorial “I”, the voice which emerges as either silently or explicitly organising the text, selecting which of the experiences of “Eye”, or the constructions of “I” to weave into the account.

4. The “shifter” I (Roman Jakobson; 1980): the reflexive “me” that reads its own text, that is always outside of its own creation neither fully inscribed nor free of inscription, changing with time and every reading.