PLURALISTIC RESEARCH DESIGNS

Professor Judy Brown

Presentation overview

• Rationales for pluralistic research designs

• Key challenges of “taking multiple perspectives seriously”

• Criticisms of pluralist approaches

Rationales for pluralistic research designs • Why do multi-perspectival analysis? Why the

particular interest in competing perspectives?

• Personal motivation/context

• Marsden project: Dialogic Accounting – The Challenge of Taking Multiple Perspectives Seriously

Monologic/dialogic accountings

Fig 1: Comparing traditional and dialogic accountings (Brown & Dillard 2014/Leach et al. 2010)

4

PhD projects • Accounting information systems design in pluralistic

contexts • Social movements and counter-accounting practices • Use of accounting information in interactions between

corporations and Indigenous peoples over contentious environmental issues

• Contestation over the use of CBA in health policy decisions

• Controversies over the “business case” approach to social

and environmental reporting • Microfinance and women’s empowerment – implications of

competing logics for accounting/accountability systems

Identifying, analysing and engaging competing perspectives • Way of “embracing situational complexity” and

developing “critical and reflective understandings” of organisational/accounting practices (Parker 2012: 54).

– exploring actors’ differences and commonalities – critically reflecting on dominant paradigms by juxtaposing

with alternative views – putting the “taken for granted” into question – addressing power dynamics – “turning up the volume” on

alternative perspectives – stimulating thinking about continuity and change

Key challenges of “taking multiple perspectives seriously”

• “If empirical work is to move toward rather than away from difference(s) and complexities… we need tools that enable us to see difference(s), handle them analytically, and rerepresent them in fathomable ways that can travel” (Clarke 2005: 292-93).

– Research topics, sites, questions – Data gathering and analysis – Writing up and wider engagements

No magic recipes…. • Many ways of doing pluralistic research

– “creative adventure” (Willig 2008) rather than mechanical formula

• Draw together tools – theories/concepts and research methods – that most suit your project

• Researchers as bricoleurs – “All my books are little tool boxes. If people want to open

them, to use a particular sentence, a particular idea, a particular analysis, like a screwdriver or a spanner… so much the better!” (Foucault cited in Clarke 2005: 304).

• Theory/methods package (Clarke 2005)

Research topics, sites and questions

• Explore sites of heterogeneity, controversy and/or contestation

• Where you can study divergent perspectives and their impacts on social practices; and

• See “power in action” (Clarke 2005: 38)

• PROBLEMATISATION METHODOLOGIES – INCLUDING SELF-PROBLEMATISATIONS

Farzana Tanima – Microfinance and Women’s Empowerment Initiatives in Bangladesh

• Aim - to provide a critical analysis of accounting and accountability practices in relation to microfinance and women’s empowerment, and to explore the possibilities of new dialogic approaches.

• Competing logics framework:

– identifying overlaps and tensions between the way women’s empowerment is understood in “economic/commercial” and “social” logic frames;

– examining how different logics are implicated in accounting and accountability systems in microfinance organisations (e.g. how accountability is conceptualised, management/financial reporting processes, performance evaluation); and

– exploring the potential of dialogic accounting to address problems and challenges identified in the gender and development studies literature (e.g. by fostering more multi-dimensional accountings, participatory approaches to accountability).

Public Philosophy in a New Key (Tully 2008) • Starts with a controversial set of governance practices

“that are experienced as oppressive in some way” and being “called into question” (p.16). Taken up by researcher and others as a problem becoming the focus of debate, learning and experimentation with new practices.

• Aim is not to develop a normative theory that will

definitively solve the problem but to: – Identify the conditions of possibility of the set of practices

being studied and the range of problems and potential solutions it gives rise to

– “working on ourselves by working on the practices and

problematisations in which we find ourselves” (p.16).

• Survey current literature/views on the practices, the controversies which arise and potential solutions being proposed

• Consider the histories of these practices, controversies and proposed solutions

• Recognise the impossibility of perfect universal social practices – encourages an ongoing cycle of problematisation and experimentation

Contested concepts • “[W]hile we know what sort of thing we are talking

about when we refer to, for example, social justice, we can point to no definitive meaning for it. So while we might agree that social justice is about the fair distribution of benefits and burdens, this only prompts a further array of questions: What does fair mean? What counts as a benefit? What counts as a burden? Just who or what comprises the community of justice?

[To address this we] draw a distinction between concepts and conceptions. So we distinguish between the concept of liberty and different conceptions of liberty, such as positive and negative liberty” (Dobson 2011: 1229).

Data gathering and analysis

• Tools/ideas we have found useful…. – Multi-site research – drawing on multiple types

of data across a range of sites – Situation as key unit of analysis (Clarke 2005)

Multi-site research • Gathering narrative/visual materials from:

– Interviews – Annual reports/sustainability reports etc. – Websites – Legislation/case law/parliamentary debates/

submissions – Organisational/policy documents – Ethnographic field data/participant observation – Best practice guidance – Educational texts – Media reports – newspapers/television – Historical materials – to explore changes over time

Situation as unit of analysis – Clarke (2005) • Situation of inquiry as basic unit of analysis – comprised

of human actors and non-human actants/elements – individuals/groups, technologies, discourses, symbols,

controversies, organisations, institutions etc.

• Goes beyond conventional qualitative methods assertion that “context matters”

• Rather than treating the context that shapes human interactions as outside the situation (e.g. as “background”), key elements that condition the situation are analysed as inside the situation

• Helps in understanding the conditions of possibility and impossibility in the situation

Organisation

Political

Legal

Ecological/environmental

Economic

Socio-cultural

Technological

“External environment”

Historical

• “The conditions of the situation are in the

situation… [They] need to be specified in the analysis of the situation itself as they are constitutive of it… Regardless of whether some might construe them as local or global, internal or external, close-in or far away… the fundamental question is ‘How do these conditions appear—make themselves felt as consequential—inside the empirical situation under examination?’” (Clarke 2005: 71-2).

• Use of maps/discussion groups for data analysis

Non-Human Actant A

Discourse on “N”

Fig 2: Abstract situational map – messy/working version Source: Clarke (2005: 88).

Infrastructural Element #1

Idea/Concept 1

• Base assumptions – “Situatedness” of all knowledge/understanding/action

– At least potentially everything in the situation affects everything else in some way

– Situations are emergent/dynamic/always changing

• Empirical questions: Which elements are present

and important? Where did they come from? How and in what ways do they impact on the situation? Where could things go from here?

Writing up, presentations and wider engagements

• Visual methods e.g. situational maps – form of “infrastructural inversion”

• “Split-text” and “created dialogue” formats – to “give voice” to different research subjects and researchers (e.g. Lather & Smithies 1997; Sullivan 2012)

• “Across the bottom of much of the book is a continuously running commentary by us… regarding our experiences in telling the women’s stories that moves between autobiography and academic ‘Big Talk’ about research methods and theoretical frameworks” (Lather & Smithies 1997: xvii).

Chris (researcher): question CR (research subject): response Robyn (research subject): response Patti (researcher): follow-up question

• “A direct confrontation and discussion between the groups, in reality, may be very difficult because of a felt power imbalance” (Sullivan 2012: 108).

Juxtapose quotes from competing viewpoints to formulate a “created dialogue” e.g. from different focus groups Quote 1 Quote 2 Quote 3

Engaging competing perspectives through PLA activity • Encourage critical reflection

• Important not to essentialise/reify different

perspectives

• Engaging competing perspectives may lead to change of perspective

• Exploring new possibilities

Dialogic interviews and participatory workshops

• Acknowledge ourselves as positioned researchers

• Encourage discussion and debate regarding accounting – ideas about developing pluralistic approaches

• Multi-way learning

I We know

They know

II We don’t know

They know

III We know

They don’t know

IV We don’t know

They don’t know

Four Squares of Knowledge

Source: Anderson & Herr (2005: 39)

Criticisms of pluralist approaches • Worries about “anything goes” relativism

– “Relativism is often misinterpreted to mean that if you represent multiple positions, this equals valuing all such positions equally, or that you yourself value such positions equally. [Interactionists assert] that we always have operant values that lead us individually and collectively to different valuations, and that… representing all positions on their own terms is a democratizing move” (Clarke 2005: 127-28).

• Worries about nihilism – “The core of postmodernism is the doubt that

any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the ‘right’ or the privileged form of authoritative knowledge…. It does not – as some seem to think – automatically reject conventional methods as false or archaic; it simply opens them to critique, as it does the new methods of knowing, as well” (Richardson 2001: 35).

Issues of validity and rigour • Democratic validity – to what extent are

different perspectives given voice in the research? Including those we disagree with? How are contradictory responses addressed or engaged?

• Dialogic validity – does the research encourage researchers and research subjects to critically reflect on different positions?

• Catalytic validity – does the research provide a catalyst for engagement and change?

(Anderson & Herr 2005; Lather 2007)

• Recognize the unfinalizability of social worlds – “we cannot assume… that our research will lead

directly or indirectly to the changes we may envision and desire” (Clarke 2005: xxx).

– Writing/presenting (in)conclusions • “I do not really wish to conclude and sum up, rounding

off the argument so as to dump it in a nutshell on the reader. A lot more could be said about any of the topics I have touched upon… The point is not a set of answers, but making possible a different practice…” (Kappeler cited in Lather 1991: 159).

• And off to Workshop 1…