Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Research

Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781629581637
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315421353
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume of plenary addresses and other key presentations from the 2014 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry highlights the politics of research in the neoliberal state and the role of qualitative researchers in that debate. Marginalized by an increasingly top-down, assessment-driven university system, the fifteen contributors from a variety of disciplines show the responses of qualitative scholars in their research, writing, advocacy, and teaching, both inside the university and in the broader society. Sponsored by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.

Chapter 1

An Unfinished Dialogue about Problematizing Knowledge Production in the Peer Review Process1

Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Elliot P. Douglas, David Carlson, and David J. Therriault

Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war.

(Foucault, 2003, p. 50)

So, if a narrow claim to “expertise” allows one to operate machineries of domination, that person is also positioned to leak the secrets of the machine, even to calibrate its parts toward opposite functions.

(Caputo & Yount, 1993, p. 8)

For many qualitative researchers interdisciplinarity offers possibilities for wider distribution of knowledge, access to broader knowledge, and a network of collaborators and knowing subjects (Kotowski & Miller, 2010). Interdisciplinary research is important in today’s society to address complex social problems, but scholars engaging in interdisciplinary research may face many complex challenges, including a variety of negotiations and normative, political decision making (see, e.g., Greckhamer et al., 2008; Lorenzetti & Ruthenford, 2012). One possible dilemma has to do with the publication processes and peer reviewing of articles, especially within scholarship that cuts across different contexts and disciplines (see, e.g., Langfeldt, 2006; Laudel, 2006).

The event of peer-reviewing is an important and vital part of producing research and academic life. Peer review is used by journals to guide what work is published and used by authors to improve their work. The peer review process is commonly used to judge manuscripts’ acceptability and “serves as a filter to improve the quality of research” (Elsevier, n.d.). However, problems may occur when using traditional guidelines to review articles based on qualitative research. Alternatively, uncritical transfer of review standards across disciplines or from one discipline to the reviews of interdisciplinary papers and projects may create friction and resistance (see also Langfeldt, 2006). There is evidence that qualitative work, especially creative, innovative work, or scholarship that is viewed to push the limits of normative qualitative research practices, does not get published as often as other works for various reasons (see, e.g., Beddoes, 2014). One reason might be a lack of knowledge about qualitative epistemologies, sometimes causing the use of inappropriate standards for reviewing. Another reason might have to do with the strong focus of journals on ‘traditional’ non-qualitative styles which have different approaches and formats than qualitative work (see also Langfeldt, 2006; Schoenberg & McAuley, 2007).

Although the peer-review event and process as an institutionalized form appears to be objective and rational, this chapter illustrates that it is fraught with various forms of Foucaultian power relations. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to illustrate from multiple perspectives the complexities of micropolitics associated with interdisciplinary projects namely in relation to peer review and publication processes. As the first quote above indicates, we take the stance that even claims of peace represent a strategic move in the overall battle among various forms of domination. All authors of this chapter are members in different discursive communities and take part in diverse political practices within academia. Even though each of us has (at least slightly) different reasons to engage in this project, all of us desire to disclose the secrets, unspoken, and the silenced in the peer-review process, most notably, the endemic struggle of forces in seemingly sanitized and transparent processes. The following “unfinished dialogue or dialogue raw/brute” illustrates our changing and uncertain subject positions while reflecting on the knowledge production in the peer review process. Our unfinished dialogue builds from multiplicities of inquiries and wonderings without totality—wonderings that link together and connect with other wonderings and events (events that are also at least partially unformed, irrational, yet forceful). Through dislodged structures, forgotten strategies, abolished policies, and dispersion of concepts and perspectives we document our reflections and sensed experiences. In addition, this dialogue reflects our desires to face uncertainty, rawness, and perspectival chaos by doing, engaging, collaborating, and reflecting without predetermination, rationalization, continuous purification, and ‘cleaning’ efforts (see also Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson, Tesar & Anderson, in press).

The interdisciplinary work exemplified in this manuscript brings together engineering, education, educational psychology, and qualitative methodology. All these disciplines have different journals, and somewhat varying standards, practices, and expectations. The following Foucaultian analysis highlights the exchanges between authors and editors (reviewers), strategically problematizing these exchanges. By engaging in this problematization we place a “given into a question, this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response” (Foucault, in Rabinow, 1984, p. 389). The acceptance and subsequent rejection of the article (discussed as an example in this chapter) problematizes academic subject positions in two ways. First, editorialship and authorship become problematized in that it removes the veil of objectivity, disinterestedness, and “blind peer-review.” This process, although heralded as a means to determine the truth and to establish truth of a discipline against falsehoods, is fraught with multiple forms of power. Hence, from a Foucaultian standpoint, knowledge is always/already established via multiple discourses and practices of power as an action upon an action and as a means to demarcate spaces for academic subjectivities and subjection positions to be produced and fashioned (Foucault, 1983). Second, the authors of this chapter, by disclosing the events around the publishing process, problematize, or place in relief, the ways and means of knowledge production that appear divorced from power relations. The peer-review process itself comes under close scrutiny when methods of power/knowledge become revealed. In short, the peer-review publishing process, the sine quo non of academic life, is both problematized and is highly problematic, or in Foucault’s terms, “dangerous.”

This chapter also illustrates how power/knowledge/ethics/resistance interact in the academic arena. The implications of this work are epistemological, methodological, and ethical. Epistemologically, the reader sees how knowledge is produced through an agonistic relationship among various discourses and power relations (e.g., disciplinary, juridical, pastoral, and sovereign). Disciplinary power seeks to render bodies docile through subtle means of surveillance techniques and spatial arrangements; juridical power seeks to determine outcomes based on rights and rules (or laws); pastoral power strives to save or preserve the purity of a flock (group, or body) in order to progress to a greater or better future; and finally, sovereign power adjudicates, mostly in overt ways, the “right to take life or let live” (Foucault, 1978, p. 136). The numerous assemblages of power formations in this particular situation reveal how various forms of power produce knowledge.

Methodologically, the reader witnesses how one might operationalize Foucault’s notions of power/knowledge in a “real-world, empirical” situation. More important, Foucault’s nominalistic stance regarding historical and present events reveals its value in moments such as these. As he argues, profound events that generate historical or present change occur in the everyday reversals of power relations and not necessarily major events such as revolutions or mass protests (Flynn, 2005; Kendall & Wickham, 2000). It is events, such as the one described later in this chapter, that redesign and reconstruct the shifting spaces of power/knowledge relations that spur or foster larger alterations to discursive spaces. It is subjugated knowledges and experiences such as the ones described in this chapter that foster modifications and transformations of social spaces. In regard to ethics, the reader may also see how relations of power/knowledge allure and encourage academic subjectivities that produce a scholarly body. One final point, from a Foucaultian stand-point, hierarchies exist, but they are often used as a ruse to disguise more subtle forms of power/knowledge at play in a given relationship. They tend to be strategies used to produce specific subject positions in a given context. This means that all individuals in a given agonistic, contentious relationship have multiple strategies to acquire advantage over another or to dictate the procedures of battle to obtain their objective (Foucault, 1983).

Ideological and methodological differences and hierarchies produce power and create discourses that constitute and circulate knowledge and produce knowing subjects. In this chapter we were interested in different objects of scholarship, rituals, and the ‘right to speak’ within normative practices of research and publication, and we describe the progression of events as they unfolded in the peer-review process. The emails between our research team and the editors became the object of scholarship that was examined through normative rituals of the blind peer-review process. Throughout this process we were constituted differently as subjects and objects, and our position as the authors became realized only under the conditions of the normative review process. For example, at first we were constituted as knowing subjects, and we had a right to speak and to be heard when sharing our scholarship and research findings during the initial editor’s review. However, later we were silenced, and reviewers were allowed to speak. Interestingly, the editor legitimatized the voice of the late third reviewer and positioned that reviewer as the knowing subject, ultimately even more knowledgeable than the editor. The rituals associated with the peer review process generated knowledge that eventually overturned the editor’s first favorable publication decision.

Foucault (1980) referred to the crisis of the universities as opportunities to multiply and reinforce institutions’ power effects as centers of individuals who relate and constitute the academic system. Thus, we should also consider the institutional site that made the editor’s decisions possible—the site that serves as a legitimate source and point of application (Foucault, 1972). This editor positioned himself as an ethnographic listener interested in engineering studies, especially practices of knowledge in service, and whose actions are aimed to work against normative practices. The institutional site, in this context, is known both for its college of engineering and departments of engineering education and of science and technology in society. Furthermore, Journal X (impact factor 0.5) juxtaposes contributions from distinct disciplinary and analytical perspectives to encourage authors and readers to look beyond familiar theoretical, topical, temporal, and geographical boundaries for insight and guidance. According to the journal’s editorial statement, the diversity in the editorial staff and board is designed to map the diversity in the field and support its persistence. The heterogeneity of perspectives in Journal X is its lifeblood, and the goal is high quality scholarship in every case. By these words Journal X marks its diversity, its democratic and justice oriented authority to regulate truth (science) and make distinctions between true and false, good and bad quality (of reviews and manuscripts).

In the following we discuss the events that constitute the micropolitics of this particular review process. To show how power operates as a network, we highlighted the most important forms of power working throughout the interactions between the authors and the journal editor. The dominate form of power in the interaction appears in all capital letters (e.g., JUDICIO), while the less important form of power appears in lower case letters (e.g., pastoral). This nomenclature is meant to be illustrative rather than psychological. We do not pretend to know the editor’s intentionality in the exchange with the authors, and we do not claim a certain consciousness of the subjects involved in this process. We simply want to show how power produces knowledge and that power/knowledge operates within a network of forces. Finally, we put our examples of the different types of Foucaultian power in the text in proper order to offer the reader examples of these forms.

Events and Reflections

Event 1: Formal acceptance

Strategies: announcement of acceptance, establishment of formality of the review process [JUDICIO-disciplinary]

Editor x: As Editor of Journal X, I am delighted to formally accept your manuscript Discourses and engineering students’ identities in engineering education and practice for publication in the journal.

The additional material you included in this draft helps considerably with the concern I raised earlier. Our next formal step is detailed below.

Event 2: Suspension of manuscript processing [judicio-PASTORAL]

Strategies: indication of worry and seriousness, selfdisclosure and emphasis on past failure to notice the problems with the manuscript, publicity of record keeping, meditated decision making (weighing in options, increased legitimacy)

Editor x: Last week I received a late review of the revision you submitted January 15. A copy of it is below. As you know, I have kept the review of revisions in-house among associate editors, who have full access to the file.

The review concerned me greatly. It repeats three serious concerns that were raised by reviewers for the initial manuscript. I failed to emphasize the first in the summary portion of the August decision, although you acknowledged it in submitting the revision. The August decision summary did elaborate the second and third concerns. The December decision summary elaborated the second concern but not the third.

After pondering the case for several days, I am writing to let you know I must suspend the processing of this manuscript, pending your response to this review and letter. This step is unusual and unprecedented for me. Since it also potentially raises questions about my handling of the manuscript as Editor, I am informing my three fellow coorganizers of Network X, as well as the publisher. Should a subsequent decision alter the January acceptance, I want to be sure you have an avenue to appeal to the leadership. I would recuse myself from any deliberations of the coorganizers and abide by their decision.

Once again, the purpose of this letter is to alert you I had suspended processing this manuscript, pending your responses to these concerns [judicial]. I regret not having R3’s review in time for the January decision. Since my primary responsibility is to ensure that all articles published in Journal X meet a minimum standard of quality, I am bound to take this step [pastoral].

Reviewer #3:
This paper has serious methodological and analytical problems that make me doubt the usefulness or value of the findings. I do not believe they are problems that can be fixed with a revision and I would recommend a decision to reject this article.

Event 3: Response to the suspension

Strategies: expression of dissatisfaction and unfairness, indication of authorship experience, questioning editor’s ethics and decision making, response to the reviewers’ comments [JUDICIO-disciplinary]

Submitting authors: We were quite disturbed to receive an email from the editor informing us that he has rescinded the acceptance of our paper and suspended its processing for publication [judicial]. Among the authors we have considerable editorial experience, and we have never encountered such a situation. Rescinding an article that has already been accepted is generally reserved for cases of clear fraud, such as fabrication of data or plagiarism. While this decision raises serious questions with respect to the process, for now we set aside those ethical issues to focus on the substance of the editor’s comments.

Before addressing each of the specific points raised by the reviewer, we would like to address two general issues. First, the editor acknowledges his lack of knowledge in Discourse analysis, but then proceeds to accept the view of a single reviewer [disciplinary]. We would expect the editor to consult a diversity of sources in order to obtain a full understanding of a subject with which he might be unfamiliar. We question what privileges this particular reviewer’s perspective over ours and other reviewers’ who have supported the research. In fact, as we discuss below, the reviewer appears to have somewhat limited understanding of Discourse analysis.

David C.: From Foucault’s perspective power is not possessed by anyone but it is always a network...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Research
• 1. An Unfinished Dialogue about Problematizing Knowledge Production in the Peer Review Process
• 2. Critical Qualitative Research in Global Neoliberalism: Foucault, Inquiry, and Transformative Possibilities
• 3. Practices for the ‘New’ in the New Empiricisms, the New Materialisms, and Post Qualitative Inquiry
• 4. The Work of Thought and the Politics of Research: (Post)qualitative Research
• 5. Qualitative Data Analysis 2.0: Developments, Trends, Challenges
• 6. Critical Autoethnography as Intersectional Praxis: A Performative Pedagogical Interplay on Bleeding Borders of Identity
• 7. Writing Myself into Winesburg, Ohio
• 8. The Three Rs—Remembering, Revisiting, Reworking: How We Think, but Not in Schools
• 9. Teaching Reflexivity in Qualitative Research: Fostering a Research Life Style
• 10. Coda: The Death of Data
• Index
• About the Authors