The Nature of Research

Inquiry in Academic Contexts

Angela Brew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134612048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Increasingly, new academics are entering higher education without conventional research training and without a clear idea of what research actually involves. This is particularly true of academics who enter from having spent time in a profession including many in the newer disciplines. In addition, institutions of higher education which do not have a tradition of research are increasingly competing for research funding.
The Nature of Research looks at this background and discusses what is wrong with academic research and discusses what is wrong with academic research today, what needs to change for it to survive, how to allow new kinds of research to flourish, directions for future action and how academic research can teach us to live in today's complex and uncertain society.
The aim of the book, then, is to provide a stimulus to thinking about the nature and role of research with a view to considering what might be appropriate in the next century. Since research is so central to university life, looking at research will tell us much about what the university of the future might be like.

Chapter 1
Introduction

What you participate in, that you become.

(Henryk Skolimowski)

This was no ordinary city. It had become a place of pilgrimage for those who were looking for what was of value in their lives. While all of the buildings had an air of tranquillity about them, there was one which was particularly striking. Dominating the side of the hill on which it was situated, here was a palace of no mean proportions. Designed to reflect the heights of human endeavours and to personify all that was beautiful, the architect had become renowned for the process of inquiry which had characterized its design and building. So as she entered, her spirit was lifted and she experienced a sense of joy that infused the light, airy walls and galleries. Standing in the central hall, she had a sense of her own special place in the universe.

There were a few people milling about, quietly taking in the lofty space. Others sat in silence on low benches or cross-legged on the white marble floor deep in contemplation and meditation. Her urge was to continue, yet it was apparent that for some, this entrance space was enough. At the far end, a wide staircase, its red carpet contrasting with all the white and glass of the walls, floors and ceilings, seemed to draw her in. And so she advanced, going slowly up, then wandering here and there, wherever it seemed she had to go. This was her quest, her journey. She passed through halls and galleries. Some were like the art galleries of the past with pictures on the walls and sound and light installations. Some halls had exhibits in cases. She had heard tell of places called museums. She thought they might have been like that. At times there were collections of objects in cases together with a series of questions: what might these objects mean, how does she make sense of them? She wandered into a dark space where there were holographic people from the past asking questions about aspects of their lives as they saw them. And then into a space that looked like a quaint old shopping mall. Yet here, there was no inducement to buy anything. That era was over. Here there were opportunities for self-fulfilment, great teachers to talk to and ideas for consideration.

At length, she entered a long wide corridor resplendent with ancient gilded wall-paintings and tapestries and adorned with a ceiling of lofty frescoes reaching to an imaginary sky. She lingered, marvelling at the wonder of the paintings. At the end of this splendid place was a large window. It looked out towards the city with its backcloth of mountains. She sat on a low bench and contemplated its beauty.

So deeply was she immersed in the tranquillity of the view and her own thoughts that she did not see the young man approach and stand in front of her. She looked up. The man said: ‘We are waiting for you, if you would like to come with me.’ Still in her state of reverie, she rose and followed him. They seemed to be going from one building to the next, through corridors, across courtyards, down grassy slopes, through archways and round corners. She had no idea who the young man was nor where he was taking her. No matter. There was something she had to learn and the only way to learn it was to walk into the unknown.

At last, the young man stopped in front of a large, studded wooden door. He knocked. A small door within the great one opened and they stepped inside. ‘Here you are,’ he said. A dog bounded up to her and she backed away. ‘Don’t be afraid. Come,’ her companion said, ‘I will take you to see the Professor.’ More walking through more corridors, yet in comparison these were narrow and claustrophobic. There were glass cases here and there with exhibits that terrified the once tranquil visitor: a case with spiders, another with ancient weapons. Never mind the Professor; she wanted to escape. The places they passed didn’t give her any more comfort either: the Haunted House Room, the Nightmare Room, the Dangerous Microbes Centre, the Experiential Space and Aeronautics building, the Family and Children Centre and an arrow to the Tower of Terror. She was glad when her guide stopped. ‘Here we are,’ he said, opening a door. They entered a bright, spacious room where the Professor was waiting. ‘Welcome,’ she said.

‘Thank you, but could you please explain to me where this is?’

‘Yes,’ the Professor kindly replied. ‘This is the Department of Fear. You are here to help us with our inquiries, I understand, because you have things you wish to learn and we are working on the same issues.’ It wasn’t until the Professor had spoken that she realized that freedom from fear was precisely what she desperately sought. She said:

‘So does that mean you study the causes of fear and seek to eliminate them?’

‘Not necessarily,’ replied her host. ‘We study many things. Fear can have beneficial as well as harmful effects. The important thing is to understand the world so that we can find the right balance. Since that balance is different for different individuals we are particularly interested in exploring with them what is right for them in different circumstances. I would like to invite you to meet our team of researchers and hopefully you will join them.’

‘I am happy to meet with them and find out what they are working on, but I do not know anything about the subject you are studying so I would not be a very good team member.’

‘But you are an expert. It is a subject you have had a great deal of experience in. Here in the Department we study all kinds of experiences so that the quality of life can be improved. Shall we go and meet the others?’

As he stands on the banks of the river seeing his own reflection in the water, Hermann Hesse’s character Siddhartha is reminded of something he had forgotten; the person he once was. He has been searching for truth from great teachers, from worldly pleasures and riches, from family relationships and from an old ferryman. The river flows and laughs at him as he sees within it that answers do not lie in any of the places he has searched and that wisdom grows only by coming face to face with oneself (Hesse 1973). This is a powerful metaphor for academic research today. For while academic research is a systematic process for understanding aspects of our experience, we too have found that truth is problematic. We too have found we have to look elsewhere to develop wisdom, including within ourselves.

Anyone coming into the research arena or wanting to understand more about the nature of research faces a number of puzzles. There is a crisis in the academy causing universities to critically question their role, status and function in society. There is growing interference from outside the academy in the setting of research agendas. An educated public is increasingly interested in research findings. Huge changes in higher education are affecting the amount of time available for research. Increased speed and global access to information makes heavy demands of academics who are trying to keep pace and is changing the character of research. At the same time there are intellectual crises which have thrown ideas about knowledge and methods of investigation right into the melting pot. Academic research occupies contested space. Some of the contests are such that their outcome may prove a matter of life or death for the world as a whole and all its species, including our own. Suggesting that the world the modern university has to face is a world which is ‘not just unknowable; it is radically unknowable’, Barnett (1997b: 4) argues that a university is ‘a site of organized inquiry for generating and managing uncertainty’ (Barnett 1997b: 18). In this context, he suggests, the pursuit of tradi- tional disciplinary research has to give way to new forms of inquiry, requiring self-knowledge on the part of the researchers and the ability to engage with policymakers and bureaucrats as well as to communicate with the world outside the academy. We have to learn how to live in what Barnett calls a super-complex world where there are no certainties and, he argues, academic research has to teach us how to do it. This may mean looking differently at aspects of the world and at our experiences of it, in ways we have not yet seriously engaged with.

My concern in this book is to illuminate more fully some of the taken-for-granted aspects of the nature of research, those which tend often not even to be talked about. I am concerned to break down some of the mystique surrounding research, to question its taboos and to lay bare some of its secrets. Throughout the book these are graphically illustrated using analogies with different kinds of pictures. At times, research is viewed as if it were a rich, complex and colourful painting. Sometimes we will look closely and examine its texture – the brush strokes, how it feels. At other times we look from a number of different angles and notice the way the painting changes as we perceive perhaps unusual aspects. At times I look as if from the other side of the room or I look at the room in which the research picture is placed and notice how it is arranged. A picture appears different when it is viewed from close up from when it is viewed from afar. Sometimes we are so close to the research agenda it is difficult to see how its picture could be different. So at times I look at research as if from very far away indeed. But the picture changes too. Sometimes what we see is more like a tapestry and I examine the warp and the weft. At other times the research picture resembles one of those computer-generated pictures which look at first sight like a pattern. A crowd stands round and one person says: ‘Dinosaurs? Don’t be daft!’ and another says: ‘Oh yes, yes, I can see them now!’ I look through the picture to see the hidden one which initially was not immediately visible. Sometimes the picture is like a giant television screen made up of a matrix of separate screens, each of which contributes part of the picture; I contrast looking at one screen with views of research seen by looking at the whole.

As we explore that rich tapestry which is academics’ attempts to come to know the world, so we have to ask ourselves whether the ways research is doing this and the areas research is investigating are the right ones, or whether, like Siddhartha, researches are looking in the wrong way and in the wrong places. This book specifically addresses those who are new to the world of academic research: new academics, postgraduate research students and research assistants who have their research careers before them. It challenges them not only to understand the nature of inquiry in academic contexts as it currently is, but also to take up the important task of changing it.

CONTESTED SPACE

Every research act takes place within a social and intellectual context. So to understand the nature of academic research we have to see it in relation to its various contexts. On one level this is the department, the research team, the laboratory or the library in which researchers work. On another level the research context is the intellectual tradition which defines not only the methods used and the kinds of questions considered appropriate but also the ways in which ideas, universities, research teams, communities and libraries are organized. On another level again, the context is the subject discipline, department or institution to which researchers are attached, and on yet another, it is the social and political context of country and world. But the contexts and the activities of research intermingle. There are no clear-cut boundaries between them and they often compete or pull in different directions. Different contexts make competing demands.

Academic research is increasingly being judged on the basis of whether or not it is funded; money from one source even being seen as more valuable than money from other sources. Yet sources of funding are becoming difficult to find, particularly for the inexperienced researcher. Governments are now driving the research agenda. Their funding formulas have implications for the ways in which research is pursued. Collegial collaboration is inevitably compromised by increased competition for research funds. Freedom of choice of the individual academic to pursue or not to pursue research and choice of subjects and issues to research are increasingly being curtailed. Curiosity-driven, passionate commitment to scholarship which is not bounded by project objectives and deadlines appears to be becoming a thing of the past. So what are the longer-term consequences of these trends? In the contested space which research now must occupy, there are winners and losers. Yet who the winners and losers are depends on the perspective of the viewer, and whether we are taking a shorter- or a longer-term perspective. Not all research carried out in universities requires huge amounts of funding. The larger share of research activity takes place not in the academy but in industry; research in universities is the pauper in comparison with industrial research. Nevertheless, research, particularly scientific and medical research, does require relatively large expenditure from the public purse, and there is concern in society about getting value for money and whether current funding priorities are appropriate. Indeed, if we look at the social context in which universities and academic research are located, we see that research is frequently viewed with suspicion. Some even question why people in universities should conduct research at all. After all, it is only in the relatively recent history of universities that research has been undertaken. Academic research is tied to national strategy and planning and research has a relationship with how the country is viewed vis-à-vis other countries. So research is important. Yet society is still imbued with outdated and erroneous images of academics who spend all day reading, taking tea, drinking sherry and going on long vacations. Although this is now changing, the term academic is still used derogatively, as if it had nothing to do with the so-called real world.

Research funding committees have set up punitive regimes requiring researchers to demonstrate sustained performance. But what is the effect of pressure to publish brought about by the measurement of research output? Is this also stifling open exploratory inquiry and placing impossible demands on academic life? Meanwhile for the public at large, research is increasingly treated as a curiosity and used as entertainment. In other words, both for society and for the governmental funding agencies, it has become focused on public performance of different kinds. In a consumer-oriented society, time and opportunity for reading and reflection are considered mere luxuries. Products become more important than processes. Economic benefit becomes a major, if not the major, criterion for judging whether an activity should be engaged in at all, particularly if it is, as research is, one which requires public funding. All of these factors influence the research agenda. Academics no longer control it. The research domain has become contested space within the wider public arena.

Added to this have been the huge changes in universities in recent years. These include the move towards a mass higher education system, with increased numbers of students; changes in university funding regimes involving devolution of budgetary responsibility; external quality assessment regimes; changes in the academic year including moving to semesterized course structures; amalgamations of institutions bringing into universities a number of professional areas formerly outside the academy; and changes in the status of non-university tertiary institutions (e.g. polytechnics). In addition, higher education has become global. This includes increased international competition, with students migrating across the globe as well as the challenges of designing curricula that are inclusive and take account of diversity. All of these changes have an effect on attitudes towards research and on the research being carried out. Academics in some institutions are questioning whether research can be sustained. Is research in conflict with other activities, such as teaching for example? In some countries, whole institutions are just starting to develop a research culture and are questioning what in practice that should mean. Should institutional managers encourage academics to put research at the top of their priorities? How are tensions between teaching and research to be resolved? Should some people do research and others concentrate on teaching? Again research occupies contested space.

Global access to information via the Internet presents a further range of challenges. This too is having both positive and negative effects on research. On the one hand, access to information from a wide range of sources, communication with colleagues across the globe through email and the speed of document and data transfer from one site to another, all contribute to the new world in which research operates. On the other hand, the amount of information which is readily available places heavy demands on academics. Add to this increased publication as a consequence of the funding regimes mentioned above, and the question that needs to be asked is: what are the longer-term effects of the use of information technologies for the research of the future? There is simply too much information in any given area for researchers to access. So what are the consequences of information overload? Moreover, since global networks make research findings available to a wider audience, what are the effects of the work of researchers being open to anyone, whether in academia or not, who is able to access it?

But that is not all. Academic research is carried out according to conventions which define what counts as knowledge, what counts as an appropriate method for looking and what counts as evidence. So every research act is located in a tradition of coming to know. This is not a static process. During the course of the twentieth century, ideas about knowledge radically shifted. For example, the philosophy of science together with developments in science throughout the century challenged traditional assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of reality, and the relationship between knowledge and reality. From another direction came critiques from, for example, feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism which also drew attention to the social context in which traditional assumptions about knowledge are situated. None of these trends is self-contained or clearly bounded. However, what this critical questioning adds up to is a fundamental challenge to many basic beliefs about research. For example, the idea of research as increasing our knowledge was questioned. This has implications for any ideas about progress we might have had. The idea that there are no grand theories which explain everything is having a serious impact in many academic areas. Postmodernism and post-positivism, for example, caused researchers to rethink the status of theories as truths about the universe. Feminist, gay and postcolonial research established the gendered nature of much academic research and highlighted the implications of its locatedness in the dominant, Western, heterosexual culture. Whether or not they agree with such ideas, academics have to take account of the debates which are causing many to question what they are doing as research. After all, if research is conventionally conceived as the pursuit of knowledge and is based on the idea that it increases our knowledge, when that idea is challenged we are in deep trouble.

University research has traditionally defined for society what knowledge is while of course also being a major contributor to it. But, knowledge is now produced as much outside universities as within them (Gibbons et al. 1994). In an informationhungry society, there is pressure on universities to create more and more of it. Yet at the same time, philosophically, academics have, so to speak, pulled the rug from under their own feet. There is a quite widely held view that knowledge is in crisis (see for example, Barnett and Griffin 1997). What this all adds up to is that the ownership and creation of knowledge have clearly become contested space. In undertaking research in any academic co...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE PRACTICE OF RESEARCH
• CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS RESEARCH?
• CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
• CHAPTER 4: FOLLOWING RULES
• CHAPTER 5: KNOWLEDGE
• CHAPTER 6: PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS
• CHAPTER 7: NEW KNOWING
• PART II: RESEARCH IN CONTEXT
• CHAPTER 8: RESEARCH AS A COMMODITY
• CHAPTER 9: RESEARCH AND LEARNING
• CHAPTER 10: RESEARCH AND TEACHING
• CHAPTER 11: RESEARCH AS DISCOURSE
• CHAPTER 12: RESEARCH AND THE FUTURE
• REFERENCES