‘Psy’ research beyond late modernity: towards praxis-congruent research

Abstract

Lees and Freshwater's Practitioner-based Research is a significant intervention into the struggle for the ‘research soul’ of the psychological therapies. Positivistic notions beloved of the managerialist ‘audit culture’, centred on the totem of ‘evidence-based practice’, are increasingly colonizing psy research, creating a new ‘regime of truth’ that privileges ‘standards’, ‘competencies’ and ‘quality assurance’, and presages a shift in the locus of power away from practitioners' professional autonomy and towards managerialist bureaucracy. In arguing that no one (‘scientific’) paradigm should necessarily be assumed to be more ‘valid’ than a multiplicity of possible others, they advocate the practitioner's voice having at least equal validity to that of academics and bureaucrats, aiming to establish an ‘epistemology of practice’ that redresses a balance that has become too skewed towards uncritical, and in many ways anti-human, ‘technical rationality’. This review article explores the rationale for this shift, and finds it compelling and convincing. It is also argued here that great benefit can be gained for the future flourishing of psy research from building bridges to other radical-critical research traditions and innovations in late-modern culture. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.