Social Practice Research Research Articles

Secrecy and knowledge production: Doing research in corporate organisational settings

This paper examines the challenges of conducting research in secretivecorporate organisational settings where corporate professionals areinformants and gate keepers of the research. It draws on experiences ofnegotiating access to informants and conducting research within regulatoryand Contract Research Organizations (CROs) for a PhD project aimed atexploring the ethical and regulatory issues associated with the conduct offirst-in-human clinical trials in the UK. The explicit ways in which secrecysurrounds the practice of clinical trials, relates to a theory of, and ways of,knowledge production that directly opposes the principles of modernacademia. This brings up important questions for researchers: is it possibleto carry out research while abiding by the values of good research practice,such as transparency, if one's informants or gatekeepers are not open andtransparent? This is because the secrecy in the practice of pharmaceuticalresearch is in sharp contrast to postmodern social research practices in whichsocial scientists believe that the production and distribution of knowledge iskey to resolving social problems. Precisely, this paper explores thechallenges faced by early career researchers (ECRs) in negotiating access andconducting research, and how such settings influence not only the questionsfor the research but the methods to be used as well. Drawing on experiencesin tackling these issues, the paper argues that to carry out research ECRshave to use a swathe of tactics and sometimes depend on luck to gain accessand eventually do their research.

ADHD medication and social self-understanding

This paper addresses some of the contradictions, dilemmas, and struggles in a Danish primary school practice involved in medicating children diagnosed with ADHD. It draws on a social practice research study of a 7-year-old boy diagnosed with ADHD, who was medicated against his will. It focuses on his struggles when being medicated, and particularly on meaning making processes and changes in social self-understandings in the first grade class, 1B, generated among students, teachers, and parents. The paper is an analysis of moments and movements in Dennis’ social self-understanding generated as part of a social practice research project combining a variety of methods, ranging from collective biography inspired group work and qualitative interviews with teachers and students, photo-based interviews, and participant observation in the school. The study has a double aim of generating theory regarding social self-understanding and ADHD medication, and analyzing concrete contradictions, dilemmas, and action possibilities in a primary school, enabling new “practice recognitions” that (at least partly) move beyond practices that generate marginalized social self-understandings.

Epistemología, metodología y métodos. ¿Qué herramientas para qué feminismo? Reflexiones a partir del estudio del cuidado

En este trabajo pretendemos profundizar en los aspectos epistemológicos y en la práctica de la investigación social desde la perspectiva de los estudios de género. Partiendo de la complejidad de la metodología de la investigación y de la diversidad de enfoques feministas, se trabajará en la clarificación de algunos conceptos en torno a qué significa “investigación feminista” y se intentará dar respuesta a algunas de las cuestiones en ella implicadas. ¿Existe un método feminista? ¿Es posible considerar unos tipos de metodología más acordes con el feminismo que otros? Desde las investigaciones con un punto de vista de género se han planteado fuertes críticas a las epistemologías y metodologías tradicionales que, entre otros muchos aspectos cuestionables, servían a la pretensión de legitimar o justificar situaciones de subordinación, marginación o exclusión de las mujeres en determinados ámbitos. Eliminar los sesgos sexistas y androcéntricos que lastran el conocimiento desde tiempo inmemorial es un punto principal de los programas feministas de investigación, que cada vez más centran su atención en los métodos mediante los que se obtienen las “evidencias” sobre las que se construyen los diferentes saberes.

Cuestionamiento de dinámicas de patologización y exclusión discursiva desde perspectivas trans e intersex

Frente a una tradicion de una investigacion ‘sobre’ personas trans e intersex sin la participacion de las mismas, a lo largo de las ultimas decadas esta surgiendo una produccion discursiva desde perspectivas teorico-activistas trans e intersex que aporta reflexiones y conceptualizaciones al debate sobre ciudadania, interseccionalidad y reflexividad. Desde la vivencia de practicas de patologizacion en el ambito clinico, juridico y social, autor*s trans e intersex plantean la pregunta por dinamicas de categorizacion, patologizacion y exclusion discursiva inherentes a practicas de investigacion social, incluyendo el analisis de desigualdades en el acceso a circuitos de produccion discursiva a escala global. Estas reflexiones teoricas se encuentran en una estrecha interrelacion con los discursos aportados por el activismo por la despatologizacion trans y movimiento intersex que a lo largo de los ultimos anos han adquirido una creciente presencia en diferentes partes del mundo. Desde una mirada autorreflexiva de la propia posicion teorico-activista y geopolitica, asi como la revision de la aportacion de autor*s trans e intersex en el ambito de la investigacion social, se presentan dos proyectos editoriales teorico-activistas creados desde perspectivas trans e intersex.

Self-evaluative practices to enhance e-pedagogy

New technologies and an evolving higher education landscape create pedagogical challenges for educators. This environment demands e-pedagogy — the capacity of technology to satisfy real learning which bolsters the student experience. However, how can educators be supported to make the cultural shift necessary to embrace technology in convincing ways? This social practice research draws alongside seven educators studying a postgraduate award in e-learning in academic and professional practice at an English university. Educators who are making and evaluating a technology enhanced learning innovation. The study's rather unusual object is their self-evaluative practices and knowledge on this is co-constructed via dialogical conversations with participants. The significant output is a series of seven typologies built-up around RUFDATA, an established evaluatory framework with seven categories: reasons and purposes, uses, focus, data and evidence, audience, timing and agency. Substantial new knowledge of how educators do self-evaluation when making a technology enhanced learning innovation in higher education is created. This knowledge is about constellations of routine behaviours; behaviours which seek out value and are themselves intrinsically worthwhile. Collectively known as SEPT4TEL (self-evaluative practices typologies for technology enhanced learning), these 25 guiding principles depict self-evaluative practices and are promoted to educators seeking guidance on pragmatic ways to enhance their e-pedagogy. Evaluation is about judgements and it is the attribution of worth which distinguishes self-evaluative practices from other deliberative ways educators explore their professional practice, like reflection and action research. Self-evaluative practices are promoted as a foil to academics' tendency to adopt their pedagogy uncritically, simply merging it with habitual institutional practices. In this paper the introduction and research methods are followed by an exposition of self-evaluative practices which forms the main part of this paper. Numerous quotations illustrate how dialogical conversation leads to the SEPT4TEL framework. For example, the transformational effect of 'evaluative creep' on change processes and its ability to advance educators' competence is profiled. Ultimately, self-evaluators become 'carriers' of practices as they knowingly or unknowingly exert a bottom-up influence on the use and effectiveness of technology for learning. I conclude that self-evaluative practices can benefit use of new technologies for learning and recommend the SEPT4TEL framework to educators seeking to improve connections between technology and learning. Indeed, a sufficient constellation of self-evaluative practices is potentially powerful in a sociocultural sense, acting as a catalyst — with the power to leverage more widespread change.

Augmentation and Improvisation

Augmentation and Improvisation

Do Teachers Leave Their Ethics at the School Gate? Social Practice Research in a Danish Primary School

This study addresses teachers' ethical dilemmas in everyday participation in school structures in a Danish Primary School. It focuses in particular on their relations with 'disturbing children'. The author and four first grade teachers work in a research team, documenting and analysing the teachers’ interactions in the classroom. This paper focuses on the interactions between two of the teachers and one of the students. The research team focuses on the teachers’ struggles with stress and burnout symptoms that they impute to students’ misbehaviour. Through their work together, documenting what happens in the classroom, and then working together in collective biography workshops, the research team reveals the contradictory conditions of teachers’ work. They find that following current guidelines for good classroom management, and accepting without question current discourses on ADHD, places the teachers in a double-bind, with teachers and children in opposition to each other, and both teachers and children being judged and found wanting. The paper seeks new ways of thinking/doing classroom interaction that challenges some of the binds of current management practices.

Логические и практические трудности многомерного подхода к измерению религиозности

The article is dedicated to analysis of difficulties arising from applying multidimensional approach to religiosity. Those difficulties are divided into logical and practical ones. Logical difficulties are connected with the absence of clear base (self-evident, theoretical or empirical) prescribing the usage of one set of scales or another and the framework of such usage. Practical difficulties are explained in context of social research practice where multidimensional scaling of religiosity is eventually non-applicable nowadays. Conclusion made regards the advantage of unidimensional measurement.

Bringing Students Into a Discipline: Reflections on a Travel Study

This commentary describes a two-week domestic travel study course for undergraduate sociology students designed to introduce students to the practice of social research and to the larger discipline of sociology. We arranged activities, presentations, and experiences in Chicago and Washington, DC. In this article, we outline the relevant parts of our travel study program and highlight benefits of our travel study program for students and for our major program.

The Diverse Worlds and Research Practices of Qualitative Software

The article considers the way that digital research technologies and online environments increasingly support new forms of qualitative research that have emerged as a result of new user groups taking up the practice of social research. New practitioners of qualitative research have entered the field from societies where qualitative research is a newly-established practice, and new cadres of citizen researchers have turned to qualitative methods for non-academic purposes. These groups challenge accepted understandings of qualitative methods. The article uses the example of qualitative software as a case study of how qualitative research is enabled by new digital tools that help new user groups extend the application of qualitative research methods.

A Video Testimony on Rural Poverty and Social Exclusion

In this paper, we seek to illustrate the potential theoretical and methodological contributions that video research methods can make in advancing social-scientific understanding and informing public debates on social problems. We do so by presenting findings on the experience and impacts of poverty and exclusion based upon the video ‘testimony’ with 33 people experiencing low income in one relatively remote rural area, the County of Herefordshire. Based on these data and subsequent follow-up qualitative work, this study highlights the personal impacts of disadvantage associated with a denial of rights, assault on dignity, and processes of stigmatisation and disempowerment. In doing so it demonstrates the potential of video data both as an emerging social research practice in its own right and as a vehicle for giving voice to marginalised groups within wider public debates and policy development.

Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity

The paper develops a method of research called ‘ cooking as inquiry. ‘ This method seeks to add layers to the typically disembodied practices of social research that have long overlooked the body and the mundane rituals of foodmaking as sites of knowledge. Informed by autoethnography and collective biography, cooking as inquiry recognizes bodies and food as sites of knowledge and engages researchers as researcher-participants in reflexive, collaborative study that explores the ways in which the embodied self is performed relationally through foodmaking. In addition to a discussion of the epistemological and methodological frames of this method, this paper offers a case study that describes a project conducted by a colleague and the author.

Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization - Jeffrey S. Juris

Networking Futures represents an important contribution to research on transnational organizing, social networks, and on the effects of technology on social relations. Juris, an anthropologist, draws from several years of field research that is part of his multi-sited, global ethnographic study. His experiences in the field lead him to offer, in addition to insightful analyses of contemporary organization and activism, important insights into the practice of social research in a networked, global age.

Reflexivity in Practice: Developing a New Attitude as Part of Teaching and Engaging in Participatory Research and Development

The position taken in this article derives from a reflexive self-discovery of the assumptions underlying my teaching and conducting of social research over the years. Undoubtedly, as qualitative approaches continue to evolve in recognition of the plurality of persons, cultures, and ways of knowing, participatory research and development will increasingly require of teachers and researchers new self-knowledge, sensitivities, and humility. Using my experiences as the context for discussion, the article examines existing definitions and the place of participatory research and development within the qualitative paradigm and posits that there is room for radical reflection on the value of inclusionary processes in both the teaching and practice of social research and development.

Thoughts on an Improvisation

On June 20, 2009, late afternoon, I improvised with Joe Sorbara as part of Lex Non Scripta, Ars Non Scripta: Law, Justice & Improvisation, a conference organised by the McGill Centre for Intellectual Property Policy as well as the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research project. The performance entitled “Improvised Contemporary Movement and Sound Performance” took place at Sala Rossa in Montreal. I was moving, using corporeal mime and other movement techniques, and Joe was making sound with various percussion objects. Joe and I were improvising based on a score that we developed together. The score was spatially defined in the shape of a line that we followed as we improvised. The coordination of our movements and sounds was also defined. Although primarily Joe was the musician and I was the mover, sometimes the line was blurred between who was moving and who was producing sound. Our improvised performance lasted around 17 minutes. This commentary aims to build on those 17 minutes by exploring the improvisational structure of the performance and examining this structure as the “law” of our improvisation. This text will also reflect on the broader relationship between law and improvisation.

Outside Practices: Learning within the borderlands

Social practice research can be seen to illuminate the practices of marginalised learners in ‘borderlands’, areas outside of formal educational frameworks. This paper examines the issues and challenges of social practice researchers as they explore borderlands logic set against a critique of the prevailing skills-based educational philosophies that dominate in the knowledge-based economies of the US and England. Social practice research highlights meaning-making through a wide-angled view of the learning contexts of marginalised groups. This paper introduces the themes and sets the scene in a series of papers in this volume from leading social practice researchers.

Researching researchers: lessons for research ethics

There is widespread debate about ethical practice in social research with most social researchers arguing that situational relativist approaches are appropriate for resolving the ethical issues that emerge. In this article, we draw on research conducted on an ESRC-funded study of informed consent in social research to explore the ethical issues that are raised when conducting research with one’s peers. The study involved conducting focus groups and telephone interviews with academic and non-academic researchers. The ethical issues emerging from the study related to consent, data ownership and the management of confidentiality and anonymity. Participants’ responses to these issues and the ways that we managed them are discussed. We conclude by exploring the implications of this study for research more generally and argue that the increased regulation of research needs to enable researchers to attend reflexively to the social context in which consent takes place.

Fairness in Sovereign Debt

Christian Barry and Lydia Tomitova Fairness in Sovereign Debt WHEN CAN WE SAY THAT A DEBT CRISIS HAS BEEN RESOLVED FAIRLY? What makes the processes of debt restructuring, debt cancellation, or the enforcement of debt contracts more or less fair, or the outcomes of such processes better or worse? These are not idle questions. The recent economic collapse in Argentina and financial crisis in Turkey, along with the persistent unsustainable debt burdens of many developing countries, highlight the urgent problem of excessive indebtedness. High debt levels can limit a sovereign government’s capacity to provide social services necessaryforthe well-being ofits citizens, and divertresources and energy from the pursuit of long-term development strategies. In addition, after a government defaults, the mechanisms for managing the restructuring of sovereign debt usually act slowly, do not return the country to debt sustainability, and often leave the different classes of creditors as well as the people of the indebted country feeling as if they have been treated unfairly. This in turn can create disincentives for lending and investment that can be crucial to the prospects of developed and developing coun­ tries alike. An often overlooked but veiy important effect of financial crises and the debts that often engender them is that they can lead the crisis countries to increased dependence on international institutions and the policy conditionality they require in return for their continued support. This limits their capabilities and those of their citizens to exer­ cise meaningful control over their policies and institutions. These outcomes have been viewed by many not merely as extremely unfortunate and regrettable, but also as deeply unfair. And social research Vol 73 : No 2 : Summer 2006 649 indeed, increasingly potent popular movements have pressured govern­ ments, financial institutions, and the financial community to seek what they take to be fairer solutions to debt crises. Some of these resulting initiatives, including that for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), have focused on defining sustainable debt levels for poor countries and designing policies to maintain debt at these levels. Other proposals, such as the Fair and Transparent Arbitration Process, mimic at the global level the legal bankruptcy regimes under national law (albeit without the same enforcement authority). These proposals have sought to distin­ guish between debts for which creditors deserve full repayment from those for which creditors either lack claims or have claims that are too weak to recover what they have lent (see Raffer, 1990; Afrodad, 2001; Erlassjahr, 2001). Still others have instead recommended a contractual approach to sovereign debt crises in which new clauses are introduced into bond contracts to enable debts to be restructured more easily and quickly (see EMTA, 2003; Porzecanski, 2003; Group of Ten, 2002). The merits ofthese programs and proposals for dealing more fairly with sovereign debt remain hotly disputed. In this essay, we try to take a step back from the political fray and examine some more fundamental considerations that seem relevant to assessing the fairness of current arrangements governing economic exchanges related to debt contracts and alternatives that have been (or might be) proposed to them. Our discussion is organized into seven sections. First, we char­ acterize briefly the concept of fairness and its role in social evalua­ tion. Second, we clarify what sovereign debt is, and, third, the ethical statuses that particular sovereign debts can have. Fourth, we identify and describe the main features of current practices related to sovereign debt. Fifth, we describe an “ideal picture” of creditor-debtor relations and argue that, in such a scenario, a broad range of ethical consider­ ations can plausibly be invoked in support of practices that closely resemble those presently governing sovereign debt. Sixth, we draw attention to the many ways in which in reality the relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors differ markedly from the relation­ ships between the creditor and debtor in the ideal picture. Because of this, many of the ethical considerations that would support present 650 social research practices were relations between sovereign debtors and their credi­ tors to resemble more closely those depicted in the ideal picture fail to do so under present circumstances. We conclude, moreover, that the remaining ethical considerations that might be advanced...

Book Review: The Practice of Social Research

Book Review: The Practice of Social Research

Contextualizing Democratization and the Practice of Social Research

Political communication is strictly distinguished from social and individual activities that are interest-laden and thus lack the autonomy to be political. The latter belongs solely to political societies that are democratic. Indeed, there must be a strict restriction of the use of political to a public domain in which every member of society participates in public debates and decisions. This participation is the continuous origination and maintenance of the political domain as a guarantee of human autonomy and equality.This equality suggests that the publicly appointed officials are bound by the democratic ethos to maintain such a public domain and thus are called on to communicate the public issues; any communication that is designed for effect, for rhetorical obfuscation, is interest-laden and hence designed to advance the motives of an individual or a group and not the concerns of the public. In various ways, such a communication, and those who in their expertise help in its design, adds to the legitimation crisis that leads finally to public cynicism.Political journalism, as part and parcel of the originating and maintaining of the political society, is designed to serve the public by providing information that is of public concern. This is not to say that gossip columns of social interest are to be excluded from mass media. Rather, the primary task is information – despite the tendency of the public officials and their experts to obfuscate and mislead. One could in fact argue that political journalism and communication is, by now, the primary instrument of continuing the origination and maintenance of political (i.e., democratic) society (Mickunas, Pilotta 1999).