Bricolage Approach Research Articles

Conducting Research with People with Nonverbal Autism: An Inclusive Methodological Approach

Abstract
 Current academic literature exposes a paucity of information about people with severe (nonverbal) autism from their own perspective. Most research pertaining to this population has obtained data from a secondary source such as a parent or caregiver. This paper describes the methodological approach to a study exploring the spirituality of people with nonverbal autism. The study was intentionally designed to work inclusively with people with nonverbal autism, rather than conducting research on or about them. As such, opportunity was provided for them to participate as direct respondents in the research process. The study explored the use of interview as a strategy for sourcing data from participants with nonverbal autism. A bricolage approach incorporating participant’s personal narratives provided an inclusive method for working with people who do not use spoken language to communicate. As communicating with this population necessitates the use of some type of augmentative device, certain strategies were adopted to address the particular practical, methodological and ethical challenges confronted during the research process. Interviews resulted in a rich source of data, providing unique insights into the lived experience of a severely under researched population. This study demonstrated that with researcher flexibility, a methodology that provides participants meaningful and inclusive involvement is not only possible, but beneficial in learning more about this marginalised group. Furthermore, this paper introduces a methodological approach that provides a platform for further research concerning people who do not communicate by speech. 

Frugal Entrepreneurship at the Grassroots Level: An Emerging Phenomenon

Frugal enterprises are recognized as change agents who serve less fortunate customers in emerging markets. The extant literature lacks knowledge about the early stage struggle of these enterprises. This study extends the existing entrepreneurship research by empirically examining the frugal entrepreneurship phenomenon. Using inductive, theory building approach across multiple cases, we investigate how frugal enterprises by using bricolage approach develop frugal innovations, successfully commercialize them, and make an impact in a society with resources constraints and institutional constraints. Findings show that frugal entrepreneurs face unusual challenges. Financial and institutional supports at the early stage of the ventures provide a significant value for them. Despite numerous constraints, frugal enterprises successfully serve underserved customers and contribute to sustainability.

“Making energy transition work”: Bricolage in Austrian regions’ path-creation

In the quest for energy transition pathways, energy regions have become the instrument of choice in peripheralized Austrian regions. This paper unveils why “locked-in" regions usually struggling with systemic change can still create alternative paths. Based on the bricolage concept and the ASID heuristic, we develop a framework to examine the transition processes of three Austrian energy regions (Güssing, Hermagor, Murau). The case studies illustrate the significance of bricolage in mobilizing agential, structural, institutional and discursive resources towards regional path-creation, and show how strategic agents skillfully assemble these resources to mold the transition process in their favor. We thus conclude that (1) the bricolage approach can be a valuable analytical lens for all aspects of regional development in “locked-in” regions, and (2) the energy regions instrument reinforces existing power structures, suggesting why inclusive energy transitions might still fail despite resourceful and robust plans.

Interdisciplinary methodologies for the fan studies bricoleur

As a relatively young field, which brings together scholars from a wide variety of different home disciplines, fan studies faces questions of disciplinary cohesion and methodological practice. Moving from a multidisciplinary space to an interdisciplinary field that creates new synergistic knowledge is facilitated by cross-discipline communication and collaboration. However, this is impeded by many barriers. Examining the history of design research provides useful parallels that may help us learn from the experiences of researchers who faced similar concerns. A bricolage approach will allow scholars in new fields of knowledge to benefit from an interdisciplinary landscape that provides methodological breadth. By using such an approach, fan studies researchers can borrow or synthesize the tools most appropriate to their research questions; for example, participatory action research is a methodology that fan studies researchers may find useful. Participatory approaches may cut through issues of fan/academic positioning and contribute to research with positive social value.

Moving Beyond Templates: A Bricolage Approach to Conducting Trustworthy Qualitative Research

Although the rising popularity of methodological templates has yielded an increasing interest in qualitative research, we discuss how the misuse of methodological templates can diminish the quality of research. As an alternative, we propose methodological bricolage as an organizing metaphor for how to do qualitative methods, which involves the combining of analytic moves for the purpose of solving a problem or problems tailored to one’s own research project. To develop a methodological bricolage approach, we draw on our own research as well as a broader set of qualitative research articles to illustrate how authors arrange various methodological moves to create an effective arrangement that communicates trustworthiness. We outline the benefits of methodological bricolage and some cautions in using this approach.

Entrepreneurial Universities and Sustainable Development. The Network Bricolage Process of Academic Entrepreneurs

This paper studies the network bricolage process of academic entrepreneurs (AEs). Based on a qualitative study, surprisingly, it shows how these entrepreneurs still encounter institutional barriers which exist in universities, in particular regarding building the social capital needed for exploiting their business ideas, and they are not, as expected, well connected to the existing formal networks but rather to the informal ones. This paper uses the bricolage approach of entrepreneurship and the literature on academic entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial universities, and social capital. In-depth interviews with key informants were conducted. Specifically, the study reveals the existence of a relevant network bricolage process of these AEs using informal versus formal networks to develop their ventures. As policy implications, there is a need for a better support from different university levels in order to increase the engagement in entrepreneurial activities of the different individuals. Universities should take a more proactive role when fostering AE activity and solve several barriers that still exist regarding knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship (e.g., bureaucracy and lack of confidence). For AEs, they need to take a more proactive role in building networks and ‘see-sawing’ between both types of network (formal and informal). By doing this, they can overcome the lack of knowledge, build trust, and improve word-of-mouth about their companies. All of this will benefit the university knowledge exchange. As a contribution, this paper explains the behavior of individual entrepreneurs when they exploit business ideas using the networks they have at hand in order to overcome institutional barriers in universities. Furthermore, it describes the process of the selection (‘see-sawing’ metaphor) of informal versus formal networks by AEs when applying their network bricolage.

The political economy of land law and policy reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo: an institutional bricolage approach

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of the contemporary land reform process in the Democratic Republic of Congo and presents strategies used by various local, national and international actors to influence the reform. It also indicates how initiatives in the forestry and agriculture sectors influence land reform. Using a conceptual framework of institutional bricolage, we avoid simple notions of “policy failure” in order to indicate how spaces may be opened up for different actors. We argue that despite extensive external involvement in the reform process, it is characterised by debates over local and national issues, as much as by global narratives.

Corporate Renewal through Internal Innovation: The Four ‘R’s of Bricolage in Large Firms

I explain the elements of bricolage — creating solutions with what is at hand — as they apply to innovation in large firms. First, managers can enumerate existing resources through architectural and historical analysis to uncover valuable assets. Second, managers can encourage employees to alter their routines by changing how people interact across internal boundaries; either promoting boundary-spanners, restructuring, or destructuring. Third, managers can recognize new market opportunities by asking employees, customers, and others already in the firm’s network to engage in analogical thinking or interact with existing artifacts, such as products. Fourth, to enable the ideas generated through any of the first three steps to come to fruition, managers can relax mechanisms for selection by choosing more organic, decentralized structures. The bricolage approach is recommended when alternative means of innovation would take too much time or money. The framework has implications for corporate strategy and structure.

Embracing entrepreneurial action through effectuation in social enterprise

PurposeMainstream entrepreneurship research tends to adopt either the causation or effectuation perspective in their studies. Yet, the social enterprise literature has largely focussed on the bricolage perspective to explain social entrepreneurial action. The authors argue that when investigating legitimacy driven opportunity pursuit of an enterprise’s pre-emergence stage, all three perspectives of causation, effectuation and bricolage are required. The purpose of this paper was to address the research question how does effectuation determine entrepreneurial action in the pre-emergence of a social enterprise?Design/methodology/approachAn in-depth single case study approach was used based on the data provided by the founding entrepreneur of Good-Faith Learning social enterprise in Australia.FindingsThe results demonstrated the complementary evolution of the three perspectives. In the following sequence, the effectuation, causation and bricolage actions were identified during the pre-emergence stage of the Good-Faith Learning social enterprise. Specifically, the input–process–output perspective of the study confirmed that the initial stage reflects on the effectual means linked to the causation-based strong articulation of the social vision and mission. The process stage dominates the bricolage approach to resourcing leading to effectual outcomes subsequently. Further, the specific actions of the pre-emergence stage are comprised legitimacy driven symbolic management approaches conveying the entrepreneur’s credibility and commitment, professional organising through website, gut-instinct based team selection, and organisational achievement.Research limitations/implicationsThe future research may conduct multiple case study analysis with multiple respondents to observe the consistency or deviations of the patterns identified in this study.Originality/valueThis single case study demonstrates the complementary existence of causation, effectuation and bricolage elements in entrepreneurial actions in a single social enterprise context and advances the social entrepreneurship literature.

Bricolage research in history education as a scholarly mixed-methods design

Research using a mixed-methods design is increasingly becoming the norm, crossing the myriad of educational fields of research, including history education. While commonly interpreted as a combining of qualitative and quantitative methods, mixed methods in history education can also extend to a bricolage approach, whereby the epistemological aspect of research is explicitly used to frame a study incorporating a combination of interdisciplinary methodologies and theoretical underpinnings. It extends beyond the often asserted binary of qualitative and quantitative research. In considering directions of qualitative research in the broad discipline area of education, the work of researchers such as Kincheloe (2005) and Denzin and Lincoln (2005) is used throughout this paper within a qualitative research context based on the work of Kincheloe and Tobin (2006). Adopting their approach of investigating the complexity of the lived world means placing research within a number of contexts. Research can be framed – from conceptualization to data gathering to analysis – in a range of contexts, appropriately matched between stage of research and underpinning theories. This paper reports on how bricolage can be used to frame research in history education.

Questioning the professionalization of recovery: a collaborative exploration of a recovery process

While the recovery concept strongly resonates in clinical mental health care today, it first arose in service user-led contexts. A major risk of this professionalization shift is that recovery primarily becomes defined by treatment providers. This study aims to keep the debate on recovery alive through a collaborative exploration of Pete’s recovery process by means of a bricolage approach. This resulted in an idiographic portrait of Pete’s experiences of recovery and treatment, clustered around four themes: life rebuilding, identity, continuity of care and the role of drugs. His experiences illustrate a number of contradictions in the operationalization of the recovery ethos in today’s mental health care; whilst recovery appears as a hopeful vision of empowerment, it also risks being reduced to a tokenistic model that fails to address the social realities of people in recovery and in which the assumption that mental illness is chronic is still latently present.

Extraction Empire: Undermining the Systems, States, and Scales of Canada's Global Resource Empire, 2017–1217 ed. by Pierre Belanger

Reviewed by: Extraction Empire: Undermining the Systems, States, and Scales of Canada's Global Resource Empire, 2017–1217 ed. by Pierre Belanger Arn Keeling Extraction Empire: Undermining the Systems, States, and Scales of Canada's Global Resource Empire, 2017–1217. Pierre Belanger, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. 800, color photographs, maps, figures. $55.00, paperback, ISBN 978-0-262-53382-9. Extraction Empire is part exhibition guide, part compendium, part edited collection, and part insurgency manual aimed at exposing Canada's historical birth within and ongoing complicity with systems of global colonial "extractivism." At eight hundred glossy pages and weighing in at more than two kilograms (four pounds), it is a literally and figuratively unwieldy attempt to marshal disparate scholarly and activist literatures toward a critical convergence on mineral and energy industries in Canada and beyond. Informed by scholarship but a decidedly unacademic approach to these questions, Extraction Empire generates some interesting insights through its juxtaposition of essays, poems, images, and artifacts, but it labors under its idiosyncratic structure, polemical framing, and lack of empirical insight. As a collection, Extraction Empire has its origins in an installation prepared for the 2016 Venice Bienalle, created under the direction of urbanist and landscape architect Pierre Belanger. The installation featured a short film, screened subterraneanly through a hole in the ground, aimed at documenting the historical implication of mineral extraction in the colonization of Canada and that nation's subsequent emergence as a leading center of global mining capital by the end of the twentieth century. The subsequent collection bears the marks of this particular origin in its at times confusing and repetitive but also stimulating organization and content. A good deal of the material included appears to only indirectly reference mining, dealing with topics such as parks, urban planning, and Indigenous resurgence, its inclusion justified by its links to the "empire" side of the book's framing. It's difficult to know how to approach or use this book, given that its structure resembles more bricolage than narrative inquiry. The volume [End Page 230] is composed of "Essays," "Visions," "Declarations," "Media," "Maps," "Surveys," "Treaties," and "Ads"—though not in that order. Indeed, these materials (a small proportion of which is original to the volume) are interleaved to generate jarring juxtapositions of text (say, a reprinted scholarly essay, interview, or poem) with images (from news pictures to diagrams of mineral survey posts to company advertisements and logos) and artifacts (such as copies of treaty texts, flags and coats of arms, or other official documents). This strategy provides moments of interest and insight as the reader encounters the "thing" under discussion (rather than a textual reference to it), but it can also be a bit bewildering when the images or artifacts appear decontextualized and unreferenced. Similarly, the overall page layout and sequencing is confusing to the point of being unhelpful, but there are also creative and arresting diagrams and pages throughout. Th e exhibit and book's basic premise—that geology and the search for minerals have long been and remain deeply implicated in, if not central to, the expansion of European empire and the (ongoing) settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples—is a pretty well-established one. In centering this story on Canada, and linking mineral development to the full suite of settler-colonial strategies and technologies deployed in the country, from the fur trade to treaty making to residential schools and the reserve system, the book does make a contribution of sorts. Through both reprinted and original essays, the text links traditional approaches to Canadian resources and history (notably those associated with staples and Harold Innis) with critical insights from scholarly and activist literatures on settler colonialism and Indigenous studies. Lacking much engagement with recent scholarship on mining in Canada, the book falls short of generating original insights into the historical geography (or contemporary conditions) of mining, either at specific sites or in the country as a whole. At times, some of the text tends to mirror the bricolage approach of the volume as a whole, resulting in a sort of critical free association and repetition that made it difficult to follow. Nor is the role of Canada's mining...

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven: reflecting on how Christian text can influence nonfiction writing

Child adoption practices in twentieth century Australia were largely reliant on Christian agencies to facilitate the separation of child from mother and the subsequent re-homing of that child with others, almost always married couples referred as suitable parents by their local minister or priest. Stories told by adoptees are frequently stories of loss, grief and abandonment, as recorded in memoir, government inquiries and research studies. The creative work presented in this paper is titled another Exodus: men women leaving children. In this work I chose to ‘embody’ the ‘shell’ of the King James Version of the first two chapters in Exodus, a book in the Bible’s Old Testament. The work forms part of my broader study of experimental writing, in this case combining a bricolage approach to research with the hermit crab form of the lyric essay, undertaken during my creative practices research. The reader is invited to form fresh, and perhaps transformed, understandings of the impact of the Christian churches’ role in adoption policy and practice in Australia, and the subsequent effects of that influence and intervention on our collective cultural and emotional psyche.

Walking on the light side

PurposeGhost tours are an important part of tourism in many towns and cities around the world. Described as light dark tourism, they are a mix of the macabre and entertainment. Ghost tours are usually small business enterprises. In order for their venture to be sustainable, ghost tour operators must engage in effective entrepreneurial marketing (EM) practices. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which ghost tour operators use EM within their business.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative bricolage approach is used as a way to explore the use of EM practices within ghost tourism; that is, a niche tourism product. Data were collected using 21 in-depth interviews, participant observation and analysis of venture websites. This study used a two-stage data analysis procedure.FindingsFindings reveal that ghost tour operators practice several dimensions of EM that are often simultaneously present and interwoven through the practices ghost tour operators use, as identified by thematic analysis.Originality/valueThis study adds an EM lens to the light dark tourism literature.

Integrated software deployment and management innovation: a bricolage perspective

This paper examines the relationship between management innovation (MI) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems deployment in the context of small subsidiaries of an intermediate size enterprise (ISE). In these small enterprises, embedded locally, the resources are limited and the necessity of doing with the means at hand while respecting the rules and directives of the group is important. The results of our intervention research show the existence of several forms and practices of bricolage (tinkering) present at several levels: intra-affiliates, inter-affiliates and group. This research shows the complementarity between both technology innovation (TI) and MI which lead to continuously improve the technology and management practices. The MI and TI co-evolution within the ISE and its subsidiaries, stimulated by the multilevel bricolage approach, allows the continuous improvement of the 'core model' and generates a competitive advantage.

Integrated software deployment and management innovation: a bricolage perspective

This paper examines the relationship between management innovation (MI) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems deployment in the context of small subsidiaries of an intermediate size enterprise (ISE). In these small enterprises, embedded locally, the resources are limited and the necessity of doing with the means at hand while respecting the rules and directives of the group is important. The results of our intervention research show the existence of several forms and practices of bricolage (tinkering) present at several levels: intra-affiliates, inter-affiliates and group. This research shows the complementarity between both technology innovation (TI) and MI which lead to continuously improve the technology and management practices. The MI and TI co-evolution within the ISE and its subsidiaries, stimulated by the multilevel bricolage approach, allows the continuous improvement of the 'core model' and generates a competitive advantage.

Beating the monochrome: emerging market multinationals and the bricoleur approach to embracing heterogeneity

ABSTRACTThe research aims to analyse the social identities of emerging multinational corporations from India. It looks at whether the difference of geography and ethnicity can be overcome with a multi-dimensionality or bricolage approach as a managerial paradigm – where the manager, as bricoleur, adopts a socially efficient hybrid approach of changing the arrangement of socio-historical rules through negotiation of both past and present practices, rather than assuming a revolutionary or disruptive engineering approach. We present thematic and discourse analyses of the communication (interviews, blogs, press releases, and public statements) made by the top and middle management of 15 Indian MNCs. The findings reflect the strategies adopted by the firms to fit their public image to a particular culture or audience, and the ways firms migrate to a transnational image with changes in its geographical identities.

Integrating rapid assessment of flood proneness into urban planning under data constraints: a fuzzy logic and bricolage approach

ABSTRACTTo increase city climate resilience, a rapid data-constrained flood-proneness assessment (FPA) technique for the Kolkata Metropolitan Region (KMR) in India is proposed, and a conceptual urban-climate plan (UCP) framework capable of incorporating the FPA outputs into the mainstream planning process is developed. To overcome data and computational demands of FPA mapping, this integrated framework is based on the concept of data bricolage and integrates four flood-conditioning factors – surface elevation, normalized difference water index (NDWI), flow accumulation and surface run-off – into a single output using fuzzy inference. The KMR results show that elevation had the most significant impact on flood proneness, and that NDWI and surface run-off played a vital role in more urbanized areas.

How social entrepreneurs manage resource constraints? A study of innovative bricolage

Social entrepreneurship plays an important role in economic development especially in a crisis situation and in developing countries like Tunisia. Lack of resources, especially financial ones, is an obstacle for the development and growth of social enterprises. Social entrepreneurs must respond to social needs, refund their social activities and ensure financial sustainability. For this purpose, this research aims to explore the resource mobilisation strategies, operated by social entrepreneurs, through an innovative bricolage approach. We have conducted a qualitative study with 11 Tunisian social entrepreneurs. They mobilise resource through social bricolage strategies, especially persuasion, stakeholder engagement and improvisation.

High-Tech Invention

This article proposes a more complex consideration of the idea-generation stage of the document design process. Survey data collected from multiple sections of graphic design and technical communication classes show that design software and other technology can help students generate solutions to design problems by enabling them to realize design options that they may not have known exist and to adopt a bricolage approach to design that facilitates the process. The author makes several recommendations for how instructors can negotiate the sketching-software divide in their classrooms to ensure that the invention process is optimized for all students.