Research and Social Change

A Relational Constructionist Approach

Sheila McNamee, Dian Marie Hosking

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136463204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book bridges scholarly forms of inquiry and practitioners' daily activities. It introduces inquiry as a process of relational construction, offering resources to practitioners who want to reflect on how their work generates practical effects.

There are hundreds of books on research, but in keeping with social scientific traditions, many emphasize method and neglect broader, overarching assumptions and interests. Further, most are written in ways that speak to those in the academic community and not to a wider audience of professionals and practitioners. The present text lays out relational constructionist premises and explores these in terms of their generative possibilities both for inquiry and social change work. It is applicable for professionals in the fields of social services, education, organizational consulting, community work, public policy, and healthcare. Using accessible language and extensive use of case examples, this book will help reflective practitioners or practice-oriented academics approach inquiry in ways that are coherent and consistent with a relational constructionist orientation.

This volume will be useful for undergraduates, graduate students, and practitioners engaged in professional development, with particular use for those scholar-practitioners who want to reflect on and learn from their practice and who want to produce practical results with and for those with whom they are working. It is also aimed at those scholar-practitioners who want to contribute to a wider understanding of how social relations (groups, organizations, communities, etc.) can work effectively.

1 Inquiry Possibilities

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

INQUIRY AS CONSTRUCTION

In this chapter we introduce a constructionist stance toward research and social change. Our aim is to raise questions about how research is understood and how one might engage in the process of research within a relational constructionist stance. Specifically, we are interested in opening up the sacred domain of research—that domain frequently understood as occupied only by scientists—to illustrate how the everyday practices of consultants, change agents, educators, and a whole host of professionals qualify as research.

We make this argument from within a very particular discursive space, the space of what we call relational constructionism. Although we could easily identify our orientation as social construction, we believe the term “relational construction” more adequately identifies the philosophical stance we take and also helps us highlight the precise understanding we have of social construction. Social construction is often conflated with versions of constructivism (radical constructivism, social constructivism) where the focus is on how interaction in the social milieu constructs internal knowledge. There are also versions of social construction that are purely language-based, where interest is limited to the ways in which words construct realities.

Our own orientation will become clear as this volume unfolds (in particular, see Chapter 3). For now, let us simply orient you to our relational constructionist stance by saying that we are focused on relational processes and the ways in which these processes construct various forms of life. We do not concern ourselves with individual mental processes or individual traits and characteristics. Rather, our focus is on what people do together and what their “doing” makes.

We regularly run workshops focused on the theme of this book. Many of our workshop participants are working on a Ph.D. from a relational constructionist perspective and want to learn more about what this could mean for their inquiry methods, design, analysis, and report. When we first meet, we ask them to write a brief description of their work—one that could bring us into a conversation with them about how they can move forward in generative and useful ways. Here is one such description from Temi, a man working in Nairobi, Kenya.

Challenges of Working with a Community
of HIV/AIDS Care Givers

It's a Saturday morning in a remote rural town called Migwani. The town is located some 200 km to the east of the capital city of Nairobi and is the administrative headquarters of the Migwani division. The division has a population of about one hundred thousand people and is divided into seven administrative locations with each location being further sub-divided into between five and nine sub-locations.

It is barely ten o'clock in the morning, yet on this particular day, the menacing African sun is already too hot to bear. As I step out of my car, a couple of businesswomen, who hawk ripe bananas for a living, approach and we exchange pleasantries.

It is from these ladies that I hear the sad news that Mutunga passed away three days ago and is being buried today. In that instant, all of my plans for the day are completely changed. Mutunga was one of my most ardent HIV/AIDS community educators and was scheduled to give a talk on “positive living” in a workshop I was to hold today for leaders of the HIV/AIDS community of care in a neighboring village. A cheerful fellow who used to work in the coastal city of Mombasa until 2002, Mutunga was fired by his employer for being sick most of the time and missing work.

Upon returning to the village, he invested his last earnings in a small retail shop in Migwani town. Yet, after only one year, the business failed. While Mutugna's health had somewhat improved, the health of his wife and five year old—and youngest—daughter were on the decline. In December 2005, his last-born daughter passed away, followed by his wife within the same month. Mutunga was devastated. It was the story of the entire area. Mutunga's family had been bewitched, and unless something was done and done very quickly, the entire family would disappear soon.

I heard the story of the sad demise of Mutunga's family during the Christmas holidays of 2006. I asked one of the board members of our community organization to ask Mutanga to get in touch with me the following weekend. Sure enough, Mutunga came to see me at my rural home the following Saturday very early in the morning. This is when I learned that he was 40 years old and had been working as a waiter with a leading tourist hotel at the coastal city of Mombasa for fifteen years but had been fired in 2002 when he became ill. He told me that he had been tested for all kinds of illness except HIV/AIDS.

I also learned from him that he was the first born in a family of nine, six girls and three boys. Three of the girls had been doing odd jobs in Mombasa where they contracted some mysterious ailments, and all had died, leaving him with the extra burden of taking care of six orphaned nieces and nephews. However, after the shocking demise of his youngest daughter and wife, he was ready to do anything to stay alive and take care of his remaining six children as well as his late sisters’ children.

After listening to Mutunga for about three hours, I came to the conclusion that he had all the symptoms of HIV/AIDS but was too frightened to go for testing. His fear was the product of the stigma associated with the disease. I assured him of my total confidentiality and support as well as that of Omega Child Shelter, a local community-based organization that I, together with some friends, started in 2002 for the sole purpose of initiating local, sustainable HIV/AIDS coping mechanisms among the infected and the affected. Today, the organization is giving direct support to well over 500 children orphaned by HIV/AIDS and well over 150 people living with AIDS within our program area.

Our field coordinator made the necessary arrangements, and Mutunga was able to travel to Muthale Mission hospital the following Monday for HIV/AIDS testing and counseling. The test results confirmed our worst fears. Mutunga was not only HIV/AIDS positive but his T-cell count was dangerously low. Mutunga was immediately put on anti-retroviral drugs. He was also enlisted into our newly formed psychosocial counseling and support group for people living with AIDS and willing to live positively with the disease.

Within a period of about six months, Mutunga went public about his HIV/AIDS status following which we sponsored him for several courses on holistic post-HIV/AIDS management. Going public about his status was a milestone of sorts because, until then, the disease had been a complete stigma within the community. Following his disclosure, the disease was being openly discussed as an unfortunate condition that no one could cure. However, discussion was now focused on how one might live positively with such an incurable disease.

Soon, we appointed Mutunga to head our special unit, which was moving from school to school teaching young boys and girls of the dangers of early and unprotected sex, HIV/AIDS management, and training and counseling of care giver groups. He was the most sought-after public speaker in virtually all forums where people needed to be educated about the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

But now, Mutunga is no more. He is gone. And, as I get back into my car to drive the eight or so kilometers to Mutunga's home, I cannot stop wondering almost out loud about a number of critical issues: Why now? Where the hell are we going to get another charming, eloquent, convincing team leader like him? How are we going to deal with his orphaned children as well as those of his late sisters, all of whom we must now care for?

As I drive into Mutunga's compound, I cannot avoid noticing the thousands of mourners, young and old, who have come to pay their last respects to a man who, partly due to fate and partly because of his condition, had touched so many souls within such a relatively short period of time. As I park my car, I cannot stop wondering, why now? Is there somewhere I could make an appeal to have him back—even if only for a few more years?

When we read Temi's story, we were deeply touched. Mutunga's situation raises many questions about public health, community, and care. Temi's story, while also raising these same questions, invites us to think about how we, as consultants, researchers, and change agents, can work with people to create possibilities for social transformation; this was Temi's concern. For example, he was interested in exploring how he could conduct research with the communities in which he was engaged. For whom should the work be done and for what purposes or interests? How can the quality of the work be evaluated? Could and should work of this sort still be called “research” or might other terms be more helpful? And, perhaps most pressing for Temi was the commonly experienced insecurity that the work he was doing in this community, as in others, could not be considered ‘research.’

OPENING “INQUIRIES”

Temi is one of many student-practitioners with whom we work. Practitioners’ fields of practice include government or public services, community and international development, healthcare, organizational consulting, education, and counseling and therapy. We have found that such persons often view “research” as something only scientists do. It is for this and other reasons that we have shifted to the more everyday term “inquiry.” The term “inquiry” can seem more a part of the daily practices of those who do not think of themselves as scientists and it gives space to activities that some views of science would not count as scientific. For us, and for those with whom we work, the term “inquiry” seems to imply an orientation toward exploration and opening up to the senses along with a curiosity and openness to what might be. The term “science,” in contrast, is often understood to imply the use of a reliable method or technique for objectively discovering how things are. We will have more to say about this, particularly in Chapter 2.

The ‘everyday-ness’ of the term “inquiry” also seems to connect with the daily activity of reflection. People with whom we work often speak of their reflective orientation toward their own practice as managers, consultants, therapists, educators, and other professionals. Many of them want to make reflection a central feature of their master's or doctoral theses, or of their professional practice. In other words, they want to make their own practice the subject of their inquiry rather than, for example, contriving special situations for the purposes of data collection. This desire to reflect on practice is gaining widespread attention; we see this as an illustration of what Donald Schön (1983, 10) refers to as a “reflective practitioner” approach.

Yet practitioners are not the only ones who feel that research is something only scientists do. Students—at both the undergraduate and graduate levels—commonly share a narrow view of research, one that is circumscribed by the discourse of post-positivist science. To us, this unreflective view severely limits students’ (as well as practitioners’) abilities to orient their inquiry from the questions and issues that engage them and that they would be eager to explore in more detail. We find that using the term ‘inquiry’ invites those new to research into a more generous space.

From now on, we will use the term “inquiry” very broadly to include the interests and practices that certain communities would call research. Of course, different communities have very different ideas or “meta-theories” about what counts as research. Because we are writing this text from the standpoint of relational constructionism, we will focus on the interests and practices that this particular community allows, invites, and legitimizes. In this book we outline practical features of constructionist-inspired inquiry including: the blurring of boundaries between inquiry and daily life, an emphasis on process, and a general orientation toward openness and multiplicity, appreciation and relational engagement.

OPENING UP TO MULTIPLE, COMMUNITY-
BASED CONSTRUCTIONS OF INQUIRY

Perhaps now is a good moment to say that, even within the social sciences, it is possible to identify multiple communities characterized by different social science perspectives. More than forty years ago, Thomas Kuhn (1970) spoke of multiple “coherent traditions of scientific research,” each being characterized by a bundle of interrelated but different assumptions, different interests, and different ways of doing things. He further suggested that identification with a particular “tradition” is effectively a matter of becoming a member of a particular professional community. Although Kuhn spoke of traditions succeeding one another, recent years have witnessed the emergence of multiple co-existing research “traditions.”

The simultaneous presence of different traditions with different norms, values, and interests (meta-theories) suggests the need to closely consider and be sensitive to the different coherences that define each tradition. Without such sensitivity there is the risk that one set of community-based constructions may dominate, mute, obscure, or devalue practices that have their own different intelligibility in relation to a different tradition. As we have said, it is our intention to focus this book on a relational constructionist tradition, meta-theory, or “intelligibility.” One of the defining qualities of this tradition is that it centers relational processes and relational realities. We begin with the notion that relational processes construct particular, local-historical, community-based understandings. To begin from this presumption suggests that we also acknowledge that other communities are engaged in similar processes whereby they may construct very different particularities. We have much more to say about this in Chapter 2.

Reflexively applying this orientation to the writing of this book reminds us of one of our reasons for writing it. Perhaps we can illustrate this with a story about the most recent piece of writing we did together. We were responding to a call for papers for a special issue of a practitioner journal whose focus is Appreciative Inquiry (AI) (http://www.aipractitioner.com/). The call noted that AI is often evaluated in relation to traditional scientific norms, values, and interests and that, when judged in this context, is usually found wanting. Commonly voiced criticisms included lack of rigor, lack of control, lack of quantitative and shown-to-be-reliable and valid data concerning outcomes, and so on. For these and related issues, the editors wanted a special issue that focused on the question, “How does AI change the way we do research and think about it?” Our response was to write an article setting out relational constructionist premises, tracing their interrelations (coherence), and showing how these were reflected in the practices and purposes of AI (Hosking and McNamee 2007). Our purpose was not to argue for the superiority of a relational constructionist sensibility. Rather, our attempt was to invite critics of AI to consider the relational, process orientation that guides this work and that provides the context within which the quality of AI should rightly be judged (Haar and Hosking 2004).

(RE)CONSTRUCTING NON-HIERARCHICAL RELATIONS AMONG MULTIPLE FORMS OF LIFE

The human or social sciences are often identified as having a way of knowing (one way) that is superior to other ways of knowing. Scientific knowledge is constructed as reliable, valid, and generalizable. As such, it is commonly viewed as constituting the rational basis for design (e.g., organizational structuring) and intervention (e.g., new, more effective working practices). However, our relational constructionist tradition offers no basis for privileging any one ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1953) over others. In this view, science (of whatever tradition) is not necessarily privileged over other local community-based constructions.

In short, inquiry need not be designed and justified in relation to the norms and standards of what people might think of as science. Indeed, relational constructionist premises invite openness to possibilities rather than closure or critique that routinely valorizes one tradition over others. Relational constructionist premises invite practices that are open to the multiple, different, more or less local norms and values of the many communities involved in some inquiry and not just those of the scientific community. This brings us to a key aspect of our relational stance—that such practices require a shift in relations. A shift is required in how we understand the “position” of the researcher (as expert or as collaborator, for example) and the “researched” (as research objects or as co-constructors). Now we are faced with the puzzle of what inquiry can become when a researcher does not attempt to relate to other as a potentially knowable and formable object in subject-object relation. To put the question in slightly different terms: How can inquiry practices make space for multiple communities to shape inquiry purposes, methods, and forms of reporting? This issue is the central theme of this book.

Our point is not that all inquiry has to do this. Rather, we are interested to create space for and to explore possibilities that make no sense or are viewed as nonsense in a more conventional science tradition. These are practices that can be developed through attempts ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances in Research Methods
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Images
• Preface
• 1 Inquiry Possibilities
• 2 Meta-Theories and Discourses of Construction
• 3 Our Community: Relational Constructionism
• 4 Inquiry as Engaged Unfolding
• 5 Transforming Inquiries: Enlarging Possible Worlds
• 6 Valuing and E/valuation
• 7 Quality: Reflexivity, Dialogue, and Relational Aesth-et(h)ics or So What?
• Recommended Reading
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index