Colloquium: Thursday, February 19, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

Research contributes to the growth of knowledge. So it is reasonable to ask how much knowledge we have before our research is completed. What is it that supposedly “grows” by the addition of my research results? One answer is found by doing a literature review. Here you try to characterize the current “state of the field”, i.e., what is known within your specialty, by people who use your theories and your methods, and often also people who have investigated the same or similar phenomena. This kind of knowledge is part of a conversation; it is highly active and dynamic.

But there is also a much more stable store of existing knowledge. It’s what you find in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks. While these resources are becoming increasingly specialized, they are not, normally, sites of conversation. Rather, they are repositories of common, uncontroversial knowledge. They constitute the background against which the conversation proceeds. Ideally, then, a specialist reader will have no cause to dispute what an encyclopedia or dictionary says, even when its subject matter is embroiled in controversy.

To take a simple example: the Oxford English Dictionary defines “capital” both as “real or financial assets possessing monetary value” and as “the holders of wealth as a class” (and as many other things besides). That is, it provides both the economic and sociological meanings of the words. Neither an economist nor a sociologist will take issue with the presence of the other sense of the word in the dictionary. They will even be tolerant of imprecisions in the definition of “their” sense of the word. They understand that a dictionary is only able to provide a very broad, somewhat vague, definition. A place for the layperson to begin.

The same goes for more substantive issues. While an article in the journal of Organization Studies, may be committed to a postmodern perspective, the entry in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management about “postmodernism” will describe it in neutral terms, as a “cultural movement”, as one way among others to view the world. While what the journal article says may not be able to hold up if postmodernism is finally wrong, the handbook entry will not be affected. A good encyclopedia will have articles on defunct sciences and cultural movements too. And if it has an article on postmodernism it will also have one on modernism.

Note, however, that The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management doesn’t have an article on modernism. This is because there was never a distinctly “modernist” movement in management science. Indeed, management science is better thought of as an aspect of modernity in general. This is not true in the arts, where both modernism and postmodernism deserve their own entries. This is an important insight to be gathered from reading an encyclopedia.

Next Thursday, we will look at the CBS Library’s dictionaries, handbooks and encyclopedias. Many of them (and pretty much all of the ones you’ll want to use) have online access. For this reason, we’ll also look at how best to cite these resources in our writing. (But with the caution that scholarship normally does not rely on handbook knowledge; rather, handbooks rely on scholarship.) And we’ll consider the most famous alternative to the library: Wikipedia. This resource is becoming an increasingly important tool in the craft of research. It’s well worth talking seriously about.

Colloquium: Thursday, February 12, 14:00 to 16:00  in room A 2.35 (inside the CBS Library at Solbjerg Plads)

Interdisciplinarity is normally approached as a meta-theoretical issue. This week’s craft colloquium will be devoted to its infra-methodology. If the meta-theoretical issue is one of why we should mix our methods, combine our theories and multiply our paradigms, the infra-methodological questions turn on how to go about it. I should say at the outset that this is difficult work, and to fully appreciate this difficulty we must count it as a reason (though not an overpowering one) not to do it. What this means is that we should have our meta-theoretical arguments for interdisciplinarity in place before we struggle too much with the materials of the craft. We need a reason to make the effort.

This actually reproduces the basic problem of matching theory and method in general. After all, methods don’t provide easy routes to knowledge. Rather, they prescribe a particular set of difficulties that make possible a particular degree of precision in knowledge. They are the means by which we can come to know difficult things. Since the application of a method, then, means grappling with a particular set of difficulties, we must have some good reason to do it. And it is our theory that requires this effort of us. The conceptual apparatus that govern our thinking indicate the methods that generate our data. The precision of our concepts make demands on the precision of our instruments.

Now, in traditional, paradigmatic research, which is to say, in Kuhnian “normal science”, one does not, properly speaking, choose one’s theories and methods. They are given in advance of any research project, and are what we were taught in graduate school. At some point in time, early on in our careers as scholars (while we’re still students) we chose our discipline and, subjecting ourselves to it, we learned the received theories and their associated methods. Being a competent researcher meant knowing what combinations of theory and method were acceptable to our peers. It was a matter of doing ones part in the community.

Interdisciplinary work is precisely a challenge to this community feeling. The founding theoretical and methodological choices that are “normally” experienced as necessary, are now experienced as contingent. We see ourselves as having a choice of what theories to invoke and what methods to employ. And this, finally, means giving ourselves a choice of what company we keep, what community we are going to work in. We even sometimes imagine we have the ability to found an entirely new community, establishing an entirely novel combination of theory and method. In any case, the problem is to a large extent that of constructing your audience.

The more I read Golden-Biddle and Locke’s  Composing Qualitative Research, the more I like it. (This is, of course, because great minds think alike.) In preparation for today’s colloquium on literature reviews I’ve been rereading chapter two, with a focus on the second and third “moves that authors use to establish theorized storylines” (p. 27). Like I say, I’m basically in agreement with them, and on the one point were I’m inclined to disagree I have to grant that their suggestion follows convention. (It’s just the convention I disagree with.) What I’m going to do in this post then, is re-describe their approach in terms of my own suggestion for how to write the second paragraph of a three-paragraph introduction to a standard-issue social science paper.

The first paragraph, by the way, does exactly what Golden-Biddle and Locke suggest as the the first “move”. It situates the paper within a practical set of issues that gives the study its significance. The second paragraph, then, re-situates these issues within a theoretical problematic. As I like to put it, the first paragraph describes the world, the second paragraph describes the science you use to study it. Broadly speaking, there are three things you can say about a science by way of introducing your theoretical problematic, the last of which I don’t recommend, but which is certainly often, even conventionally used. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you about it.)

The first is to characterize the founding consensus that defines your discipline. This is what Golden-Biddle and Locke call “coherence”, and they have an interesting take on it. They distinguish between “synthesized” and “progressive” coherence. The first is a consensus that you, the author of the paper, are able to discern in the literature, but which isn’t talked about much among scholars. It may appear as an implicit, underlying assumption that is taken for granted. The second is an openly recognized, often-touted agreement among scholars, part of their identity as members of the discipline. In both cases, I’d recommend presenting the consensus as an “easy sell”; that is, if you have to spend a great deal of time convincing your readers that they are in fact in agreement about this point, you’re not “theorizing your storyline”, you’re outright theorizing. You should be writing a theory paper, not a qualitative study. Your literature reviewing should give you the materials you need to essentially just remind the reader of what he or she shares with all your other readers. This invocation of community is an important move in writing.

The other option is to remind your readers, not of what they have in common, but what keeps them apart. There’s nothing sad or wrong about this; disagreement in science is very normal. Golden-Biddle and Locke refer to this as “noncoherence”. As they put it: “In articles constructing noncoherent intertextual fields, we find referenced works presented as belonging to a common research program, but whic are now linked by disagreement” (p. 36). That’s exactly right: the articles are “linked by disagreement”. Hopefully, you will not have to conclude that the whole field is subtended by incoherence, however. Your literature review, will find localized coherence, i.e., sub-communities of scholars working in different “camps”. The point is that you’ve chosen to define your scientific community  by one of its constitutive controversies, rather than by its foundational consensus.

In my view, you’re now already in a position to make your “contribution” to the literature. But Golden-Biddle and Locke insert an intermediate step, famously (and in the circles under my influence infamously) called “problematizing the literature”. Here the existing literature is explicitly described as something that needs your study’s conclusion. To my mind this goes without saying: your study will either provide a reason to doubt the founding consensus of your discipline (why else did you remind us of it?), or it will choose a side in one of its defining controversies (why else did you tell us about that?). It may, alternatively, propose a controversy to replace the consensus, or a consensus to transcend the controversy. In any case, you’ve already set the stage for your contribution. This is more or less the strategy that Golden-Biddle and Locke describe as presenting an “incommensurate” thesis (p. 41). Colloquially speaking, you’re going to claim that we’ve gotten something wrong and you’re here to set it right. We can put that in a slightly kinder and gentler way: you are going to be “pushing back” against the literature.

But as Golden-Biddle and Locke point out, there is another way to “problematize” the literature: you may characterize it as “incomplete” (p. 38) or “inadequate” (p. 39). Here, the goal is to “create a gap” in the literature in order “to argue the uniqueness and value of the theorized storyline” (p. 37). It’s true that this is a strategy that does often work, i.e., it helps you get published and/or a doctoral degree. But it is, to my mind unseemly. I’m out of time, so I won’t argue the point further now. Until I return to it at this blog, I’ll just refer you to a post on my other blog, in which I discuss Jörgen Sandberg and Mats Alveson‘s critique of this practice. As a scholar, I recommend against it; but as a writing consultant I’d be remiss not to tell you about it. It’s one of the tricks of the trade, though it will hopefully one day fall into dis-use through dis-repute.

I’m reading Karen Golden-Biddle and Karen Locke’s Composing Qualitative Research (SAGE, 2007) these days. The second chapter is called “Crafting a Theorized Storyline” and in it they work through four “rhetorical moves” that resonate nicely with my 3-step proposal for writing an introduction. As far as I can tell, my second step essentially combines their second and third moves. This is because Golden-Biddle and Locke distinguish between the literature review and the theory section while I, following Ezra Zuckerman, prefer just to write a theory section grounded in a reading of the literature.

If you have access to the CBS Library, you can read the chapter here. On page 27, they outline the moves as follows:

1. Articulate study significance
2. Situate study in literature
3. Problematize literature to make space for study to contribute
4. Foreshadow how the present study addresses problematization

Interestingly, they allow you to make these moves within the same paragraph and even within the same sentence. My approach is less open-minded, I guess, prescribing three distinct paragraphs:

1. Write a paragraph that describes the part of the world that interests you.
2. Write a paragraph that describes the state of the science that studies it.
3. Write a paragraph that describes your paper.

Done right, these paragraphs will accomplish the same thing that Golden-Biddle and Locke suggest. You’re free to discover for yourself which works best. Next week, in any case, I’ll work through each move/step. I certainly agree with Golden-Biddle and Locke that theorizing the stories you tell in qualitative research is an important part of the writing process.

“Learn of the green world what can be thy place.”

Ezra Pound

One of my authors …

(as a writing coach, I have “authors” like other coaches have players, and lawyers have clients, and doctors have patients …)

One of my authors recently expressed a familiar frustration that is, ironically, and perhaps tragically, often occasioned by an initial moment of gratification, which we then proceed to undo with vanity. She had been praised for her writing — her vivid imagery, her clear line of argument, her readable language. The problem was that the text in question was something she had written in Danish, her native language. When writing in English, she said, such praise was conspicuously absent, indeed, her readers were sometimes altogether unkind. Since she knew she could write well (in Danish), she was having a hard time accepting the judgment of her English readers that she is a “bad writer”.

The problem, she said, not implausibly, was that she lacked “the words” (including the subtle joints of the grammar needed to put them together) to do in English what she could do in Danish. She simply wasn’t good enough at the language. As she put it, it was like trying to paint grass without having any green on the palette.

Now, as her coach, I happened to have some insight into her writing process, so I asked her if she experienced the act of writing in English differently from the way she experienced the act of writing in Danish. That is, does writing “well” feel different from writing “badly”? (For the sake of argument, we would agree that her Danish was better written than her English.) Of course it does! she exclaimed. Writing in her native language is an enjoyable adventure, while writing in English is a torment, an incarceration. In Danish she is able to describe her experiences as they are, while in English she is painfully aware of the inadequacy of her language. The world is green. But she has no word for green in English!

Sometimes I’m a very wise soul. And since I’m telling this story, I can tell you I was very wise here. In reality, of course, I never know how well I get through to people. But listen to what (I think) I said. I hope you’ll agree it was at least a little clever.

I asked her to think about exactly what she does during the hours that she spends writing in Danish. Does she start on time? Take regular breaks? Sit up straight? Does she concentrate? Does she let herself be distracted? Does she start with a clear sense of what she wants to say? Most importantly: is she having fun? Then I said: whatever it is, just do that when you’re writing in English too. Sure, you don’t have any green to work with. But then paint the green grass in black and white. Once you’ve accepted that it’s not going to be green in the usual way, and perhaps not green at all, you can learn how to use the colors you do have to produce something pleasing. Accept your limitations, and then insist on making the most of it. In Danish, you enjoy saying things as well as you can (you will admit you are not perfect, right?). Even if you’re not as good at it, insist on that enjoyment in English too. The joy of doing the best you can.

From the point of view of the author, the difference between good writing and bad writing is neither in the raw materials nor in the finished work. It’s in the process. Here’s the secret: the joy you feel when working well is the sensation of getting better at something.