Social Reflexivity Research Articles

Research Ethics and Moral Dilemmas of Social Research in Post-Socialist Europe and Beyond

The first two papers of this special section set the beginning of a series of workshops dedicated toexploring ethical challenges in the context of qualitative fieldwork conducted in Central and Eastern Europe andbeyond hosted by the Centre for East European Language Based Areas (CEELBAS 2009-2011). The idea behindthe first workshop in September 2009 was to give scholars and postgraduate students an opportunity toexchange their fieldwork experience relating to research ethics and practice within the Central and EastEuropean regional context. During this workshop, we realised that in addition to the need for knowledgeexchange about these fieldwork experiences, it is essential to critically engage with the seemingly universalnotion of research ethics. In particular, we concentrated on the specific question of ethical dilemmas whichresearchers face as either 'insiders' or 'outsiders' to the researched communities. Thus the issue of theresearcher's social positionality and reflexivity represent the core theme for discussion in the essays presented inthis special section.In their article Guillemin and Gilliam (2004) argued that one of the main criteria for 'good' qualitativeresearch is reflexivity. They maintained that it is necessary for researchers to be self-reflexive and detachedwhen examining their own commitments, relevant experience and social position. For them, the professionalcodes of ethical conduct, or 'procedural ethics', constituted a continuum with the microethics of research practice.Thus the ethical dimension of the research is defined by the researcher's ability to comply with ethical principles,defined at the procedural level, by reflecting on the concrete and specific microethical issues they encounter intheir research practice (ibid: 269).Feminist researchers were the first to call for a need for reflexivity about one's own position as aresearcher in the field (cf. Denzin and Lincoln 2000, Roberts 1981). Engaging in reflexivity is no longer anexclusively feminist strategy: there is a growing number of 'non-feminist' publications dedicated to issues ofreflexivity (cf. Back 1996, Blackman 2007, Murphy 1999). A few scholars conducting qualitative research in post-socialist societies have already engaged in reflections on the research process (Garifzianova 2010, Ledeneva2011, Popov 2009, Roberts 2012, Ziemer 2011). They have illustrated the use of reflexively examining thedifferent subject positions they inhabited during their research and the impact of these positions on the researchprocess.In the social sciences, generally speaking, reflexivity is understood as a deconstructive exercise forlocating the intersections of author, other, text, and world, and for penetrating the representational exercise itself(MacBeth 2001: 35). This collection of papers follows England's understanding of reflexivity as a processinvolving 'self-critical sympathetic introspection and the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self asresearcher' (England 1994: 2). Thereby, we place special emphasis on 'intersubjectivity' where there is'reciprocal sharing of knowledge and experience between researcher and the researched' and an understandingthat the researcher is themselves part of the production of knowledge (Shields & Dervin 1993: 67). Althoughpractices of reflexivity have been highly praised by qualitative researchers, sometimes they have helped to showthe limits of qualitative research, especially with regards to ethical practice. For example, Bosworth et al. (2011)

Performing for affect? Immaterial labour and performer training

Despite its well-documented precarious nature, graduates regard the social factory of the cultural and creative industries as a desirable career destination. University-based performer training has found itself at the forefront of this, championing the critical role of self-awareness, social reflexivity and cultural knowledge in the formation of the new working subjectivities on which such industries are based. That such valued educational and training objectives should have become vindicated by the demands of contemporary networked and affective working ought to be a cause for celebration. However, as a number of writers have argued, such developments present students and academics with a series of tensions and contradictions that are intrinsic to the new social and economic forms of ‘cognitive’ or ‘informational’ capitalism. One particularly influential group derives its inspiration (and some of its membership) from the Autonomy movement of 1970s Italy, which now counts academic and political activists as members across the world. This paper examines this body of theory, first summarising its key arguments before assessing its potential to contribute to a critical interrogation of the objectives and methods of contemporary performer training regimes with specific reference to the long tradition of psychophysical and post-psychophysical performer training.

Kriterien für die Priorisierung medizinischer Leistungen im Licht eines regionalen Surveys – Ergebnisse und methodologische Fragen

In Germany, in contrast to many foreign countries, scientists and medical professionals have been discussing prioritisation in medicine almost without consulting German citizens. We address the question of what questionnaire surveys can contribute to the understanding of citizens' attitudes towards prioritisation - with a focus on some difficulties and challenges of the method. We conducted a postal survey with a random sample of 3 000 residents of the City of Lübeck (age ≥18). Respondents were asked to appraise different substantial and procedural criteria for prioritisation in medicine. In addition to descriptive statistical analyses, logistical regression models were performed to identify potential explanatory variables for the appraisal of prioritisation criteria. The response rate was 45.6% (N=1 363). Some prioritisation criteria are accepted by the majority: severity of disease, effectiveness of an intervention and a firm evidence base. Other criteria were appraised controversially: personal life-style, responsibility for family members and general prioritisation of children. A patient's responsibility in society and age as well as an intervention's cost-benefit ratio were generally rejected. The results of logistic regression analyses showed some significant but minor effects of demographic and health-related variables. The citizens in our study want decision-making procedures in health care to be transparent and equally applied to all patients. According to the survey respondents decisions about the catalogue of services of Germany's statutory health insurance should mainly be made by doctors. The statutory health insurance as well as patients and scientists also should take part in the decision-making procedure. Comparing our results to those of a national interview survey reveals some relevant differences: The respondents' assessment of some substantial criteria seems to vary according to the contextualisation and wording of the items. We found less difference - but still some inconsistent results - in the participants' appraisal of potential decision-makers in health care. To our surprise, the logistic regression models including standard demographic and health-related variables account for only a small proportion of the variance of all dependent variables. Our discussion emphasises some difficulties and challenges of questionnaire surveys on prioritisation criteria - reflecting on the state of the German debate on prioritisation. There has been hardly any public discussion on this issue prior to our survey in autumn 2009. It is thus unlikely that people have been able to state well-informed preferences. Instead they seem to have followed some kind of "social reflexes" depending on the context and wording of each item. Subsequent studies on preferences and priorities should (i) more closely assess the understanding of each item in advance and (ii) adapt the aims of their study and its methodology to the actual stage of the public discourse on the topic in question.

Setting Sail on Stormy Waters: On the Role of Organizational Ethnographers in the Age of Financialization

Current financialization marks a broad cultural shift in the economy. It also marks a cultural shift within organizations. Primarily, it seems to challenge the status of profit as an ultimate measure that no logic transcends, sanctifying in its place the concept of ‘shareholder value’. This article discusses this transformation and argues that it has two major implications for organizational ethnographers. First, it holds the potential for overcoming the traditional suspicion towards ethnography in the fields of business and management, and the accompanying wariness towards the type of social reflexivity that ethnography entails. Second, it raises new questions to be asked of the ethnographic method and how new cultural issues might be examined.

Buried voices: Mexican migrants’ views on the question of illegality

How do immigrant Mexican workers perceive the policies and social discourses that regulate their insertion into American society as noncitizens and illegals? Using ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, evidence is presented that unauthorized Mexican migrants do not consider themselves lawbreakers but rather moral actors responding to difficult socioeconomic conditions. Informed by a keen understanding of the social forces oppressing them, these migrants articulate a discourse of social justice that works as a powerful counterpoint to the hegemonic ideas of citizenship, belonging, and illegality. A careful analysis of migrant social reflexivity offers a much-needed corrective to the prevailing top-down perspective typically offered among contemporary scholars. By looking at the ways in which migrants make sense of immigration policies and articulate their right to have rights, this examination departs from the widespread tendency among scholars and policy makers of analyzing the migrant’s social and civic status as a matter of assimilation and immigration control.

Tim May and Beth Perry, Social Research and Reflexivity: Content, Consequence and Context

Tim May and Beth Perry, <i>Social Research and Reflexivity: Content, Consequence and Context</i>

A review on the top management team reflexivity influencing strategic decision outcomes

Over the last fifteen years, there has been a great deal of interest in the role of team reflexivity (social reflexivity and task reflexivity) in team effectiveness. In this article, we review the theoretical and empirical research on this topic to summarize what we have learned and also to provide a foundation for future research necessary for application for this knowledge to strategic decision-making teams. We describe research that emphasizes the moderating effects of social reflexivity in the relationship between task-related arguments and affective conflict, and we discuss recent effects that attempt to enhance the relationship between task-related arguments and strategic decision outcomes by the moderating effects of task reflexivity in strategic decision-making teams. We conclude by identifying several issues that should take precedence in research in order to advance our understanding of the role of team reflexivity in strategic decision-making teams. Key words: Top management team, task reflexivity, social reflexivity, strategic decision making.

Team Learning and Reflexivity in Technology-Mediated Collaboration

This study examines technological, educational/learning, and social affordances associated with the facilitation of team learning during technology-mediated collaborative problem solving. An empirical interpretive research approach using direct observation is used to interpret, evaluate and rate observable manifested behaviors and qualitative content (i.e., discussions) associated with team learning and team reflexivity. The theory of affordances and social impact theory are integrated to develop a conceptual model that asserts that collaboration mode (collocated vs. non-collocated and videoconferencing supported) will dictate the quality of information exchange, progressive elaboration of ideas, and the social processes that influence team learning. Team learning is then suggested to give rise to task and social reflexivity behaviors aimed at monitoring and evaluating acquired understanding, adaptation of task strategy, and maintenance of quality intra-team interactions. Results showed that collocated teams did engage in better quality team learning behaviors. Further, persistent reflection on task progress and solution accuracy yielded better team productivity while maintenance of a mutual supportive and positive climate yielded higher perceived quality interpersonal interactions. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications of the study are also discussed.

HOW CREDIT INSTITUTIONS LOOK AT SOCIETY

ABSTRACT Twenty years ago, Anthony Giddens proclaimed that modernity was, inherently, deeply and intrinsically sociological in the sense that sociological knowledge tended to be rapidly assimilated by individuals and institutions and therefore incorporated into subsequent processes of change. Thus, it may seem relevant to question just how much sociology is actually being put into practice in economic institutions in general and in credit institutions in particular. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the marketing, risk, and financial departments of two Portuguese retail banks, this article describes how these institutions use specific views of society which are predominantly statistical and bear little resemblance to more qualitative sociological or anthropological accounts. Hence, there is a clear need to reconsider the problem of social reflexivity and to grasp to what extent the social sciences are still important in providing a framework for perceiving the economy and society.

Produsage as a form of self-publication. A qualitative study of casual news produsage

While Axel Bruns's theory of produsage offers an adequate way of looking at a variety of sites where the production of news content takes the form of collaborative, user-driven production, it seems less suited for the study of productive news use as a user experience, as a way users engage in a more productive way with content. This article gives a first impetus towards the expansion of the theory of produsage to a more user-oriented framework that is fitted to approach produsage as a social practice, rather than as a process of information production. The empirical work presented in this paper concerns the average news user, rather than the expert bloggers and citizen journalists most studies tend to focus on. Through a qualitative, semi-experimental study based on a Living Lab-approach, motivational, situational, and social factors shaping productive news use are identified. Drawing from the findings, conceptual elements as “potential public” and “social reflex” are introduced. Self-publication is proposed as a way to understand how average news users experience productive news use.

Mapping emergence across the Atlantic: Some (tentative) lessons on nanotechnology in Latin America

This article is a tentative exploration of the early history of nanotechnology, focusing on the distinct meanings attributed to this field within the United States, Europe and Latin America. In assessing the patterns of nanotechnology on both sides of the Atlantic, this article identifies this field as a hybrid category, combining forms of social reflexivity, industrial organization, and localized histories of research and development. It is argued that such patterns are only understood by rendering nanotechnology as a category used by actors in defining practices, products and institutions rather than as a solid core of technical competencies. Some implications of holding this view are drawn for Latin America.

What &lt;i&gt;Looking Backward&lt;/i&gt; Doesn't See: Utopian Discourse and the Mass Media

Edward Bellamy’s infl uential utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) dramatizes the epistemological impact of an increasingly media-saturated urban environment on turn-of-the-century American culture and identity. Bellamy’s fanciful adaptation of the telephone receives particularly careful analysis in this essay. Deprived of its transmitting function, this denatured instrument both disrupts Bellamy’s utopian project and, more subtly, registers the eff ect of mass media technologies on the construction and coherence of subjectivity. Lowenstein ultimately argues that Bellamy’s novel rehearses the displacement of an epistemology rooted in the search for ontological certainty by what Anthony Giddens calls an epistemology of social refl exivity. It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and

What Looking Backward Doesn't See:

ABSTRACT Edward Bellamy's influential utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) dramatizes the epistemological impact of an increasingly media-saturated urban environment on turn-of-the-century American culture and identity. Bellamy's fanciful adaptation of the telephone receives particularly careful analysis in this essay. Deprived of its transmitting function, this denatured instrument both disrupts Bellamy's utopian project and, more subtly, registers the effect of mass media technologies on the construction and coherence of subjectivity. Lowenstein ultimately argues that Bellamy's novel rehearses the displacement of an epistemology rooted in the search for ontological certainty by what Anthony Giddens calls an epistemology of social reflexivity.

A preliminary model of participation for small groups

We present a small-group model that moderates agent behavior using several factors to illustrate the influence of social reflexivity on individual behavior. To motivate this work, we review a validated simulation of the Battle of Medenine. Individuals in the battle performed with greater variance than the simulation predicted, suggesting that individual differences are important. Using a light-weight simulation, we implement one means of representing these differences inspired in part by Grossman's (On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1995) participation formula. This work contributes to a general theory of social reflexivity by offering a theory of participation as a social phenomenon, independent of explicit agent knowledge. We demonstrate that our preliminary version of the participation model generates individual differences that in turn have a meaningful impact on group performance. Specifically, our results suggest that a group member's location with respect to other group members and observers can be an important exogenous source of individual differences.

Social networks and aesthetic reflexivity in the creative industries

: This article reviews some key critical writing about the commodification or exploitation of networked social relations in the creative industries. Through a comparative case study of networks in fashion and new media industries in the city of Manchester, UK, the article draws attention to the social, cultural and aesthetic aspects of the networks among creative practitioners. It argues that within the increasing commercialisation in the creative industries there are networked spaces within which non-instrumental values are created. The building of social networks reflects on the issue of how creatives perceive their work in these industries both economically and socially/culturally.

I'll Walk This Way: Eyes Reveal the Direction of Locomotion and Make Passersby Look and Go the Other Way

This study shows that humans (a) infer other people's movement trajectories from their gaze direction and (b) use this information to guide their own visual scanning of the environment and plan their own movement. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants viewed an animated character walking directly toward them on a street. The character looked constantly to the left or to the right (Experiment 1) or suddenly shifted his gaze from direct to the left or to the right (Experiment 2). Participants had to decide on which side they would skirt the character. They shifted their gaze toward the direction in which the character was not gazing, that is, away from his gaze, and chose to skirt him on that side. Gaze following is not always an obligatory social reflex; social-cognitive evaluations of gaze direction can lead to reversed gaze-following behavior.

American Television as a Global Public Sphere

This article examines the hegemony of the American media industry, and the effect that American teltevision has on global publics and global citizens. On the one hand, American television newa (and other global news service) produces the subject position of the hlobal audience that encourages a new type of attentiveness, a new form of collective monitoring, and a new politics of publicity. This new subject position encourages social reflexivity, but it does so in an uneven way, which also provides a number of distancing mechanisms that allow viewers to escape from ethical responsibility. On the other hand, genres of American entertainment programming produce technologies of transnational cultural citizenship, allowing the popular to come into contact with the civil spherein public debates about cultural policy, in aesthetic publics (which combine cultural criticism and social commentary), and at the level of the social imaginary. In this way, American television provides a kind of hybrid public space, which combines local and global publics in a way that denaturalizes both, creating a situation of ideological competition between multiple discursive forms and competing forms of cultural origin.

Linking material and energy flow analyses and social theory

The paper explores the potential of Habermas' theory of communicative action to alter the social reflexivity of material and energy flow analysis. With his social macro theory Habermas has provided an alternative, critical justification for social theory that can be distinguished from economic libertarianism and from political liberalism. Implicitly, most flow approaches draw from these theoretical traditions rather than from discourse theory. There are several types of material and energy flow analyses. While these concepts basically share a system theoretical view, they lack a specific interdisciplinary perspective that ties the fundamental insight of flows to disciplinary scientific development. Instead of simply expanding micro-models to the social macro-dimension social theory suggests infusing the very notion of flows to the progress of disciplines. With regard to the functional integration of society, material and energy flow analyses can rely on the paradigm of ecological economics and at the same time progress the debate between strong and weak sustainability within the paradigm. However, placing economics at the centre of their functional analyses may still ignore the broader social integration of society, depending on their pre-analytic outline of research and the methods used.

Social Order, Fetishism and Reflexivity

In response to Strydom, Nicoll and Gregg’s queries, I draw out some further implications of my analysis of theory classrooms. I aim to clarify the theoretical basis of my concepts of social order and fetishism. I end by considering the pedagogical implications of my analysis. It seems to me that the contradiction between critical values and the classroom’s forms of authority remain irresolvable.

Is Managed Futures an Asset Class? The Search for the Beta of Commodity Futures

This paper investigates potential sources of return to speculators in the commodity futures market. Initially, we focus on the classic arbitrage model based on the theories of Keynes (1930), Kaldor (1939), Hicks (1939, 1946), Working (1948) and Brennan (1958). Next our study examines the simplified arbitrage model which references the term structure of the futures price curve and provides rationale for a structural risk premium known as the roll return. We then introduce our theory of roll yield permutations which is derived from integrating the futures price curve with the expected future spot price variable. Last, we investigate Spurgin's (2000) hedging response model from which asymmetric hedging response functions transfer risk premia to speculators. Our research indicates that these models have inherent shortcomings in being able to pinpoint a definitive source of structural risk premium within the complexity of the commodity futures markets. We hypothesize that the classic arbitrage pricing theory contains circular logic, and as a consequence, its natural state is disequilibrium, not equilibrium. We extend this hypothesis to suggest that the term structure of the futures price curve, while indicative of a potential roll return benefit, in fact implies a complex series of roll yield permutations. Similarly, the hedging response function elicits a behavioral risk management mechanisms, and therefore, corroborates social reflexivity. Such models are inter-related and each reflects certain qualities and dynamics within the overall futures market paradigm. With respect to managed futures, it is an observable materialization of behavioral finance, where risk, return, leverage and skill operate un-tethered from the anchor of an accurate representation of beta. In other words, it defies rational expectations equilibrium, the efficient market hypothesis and allied models - the CAPM, arbitrage pricing theory or otherwise - to single-handedly isolate a persistent source of return without that source eventually slipping away.