Writing Research Critically

Developing the power to make a difference

John Schostak, Jill Schostak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317215158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This is not a standard guide to writing a dissertation, thesis, project report, journal article or book. Rather, this book will help researchers who are dissatisfied with the typical recipe approaches to standardised forms of writing-up and want to explore how academic writing can be used to greater effect.

Writing Research Critically shows that writing up is not just about 'presenting findings' as if the facts would speak for themselves. As the authors show there are certain vital skills that any writer needs to develop within their academic writing, such as the ability to:

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• develop critical understanding and a personal academic voice

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• question assumptions and the status quo

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• frame the background and transgress the frame

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• read between the lines when reviewing the literature

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• strengthen interpretations and conctruct persuasive arguments

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• challenge and develop theory and explanations

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• develop ideas that create possibilities for realistic action

Packed with examples from a range of writing projects (papers, dissertations, theses, reports, journal articles and books), this book provides a practical and refreshing way to approach and present research. Through case studies the authors offer a step-by-step guide from the early stages of planning a writing project, whether an undergraduate paper or a professional publication, to the polishing processes that make the difference between a merely descriptive account to an argument that intends to be critical and persuasive.

Written in a clear accessible style this book will inspire a wide range of researchers from undergraduates to postgraduates, early career researchers and experienced professionals working across a wide range of fields, and demonstrate how research can have more impact in the real world.

Chapter 1 Agenda Setting – and the violence of writing

DOI: 10.4324/9781315619842-1

There is a now-famous experiment in perception. It involves a small group of people who pass a ball to each other. Some are dressed in black t-shirts and others in white. The audience is asked to count the number of times the ball is passed to those in white. Those who do the task assiduously get the right answer. However, they are then also asked if they noticed the gorilla that entered on to the scene of play. About half, it is said, do not notice. If they did notice, then they did not perceive the curtains changed colour, nor that a player dressed in black left the scene (Chabris and Simons 1999; www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html). The play of attention creates a perceptual surface upon which certain things appear as foreground to be noticed and others as background. As in the ‘gestalt’ experiments of Kohler, incomplete circles are still seen as complete circles – the ‘mind’s eye’ as it were closes the gap to create the circle. This perceptual surface mentally constructed is without cracks and gaps. It is seamless. Yet there is much that is not noticed. When it comes to writing up research, just looking and recording is not enough. There are, in effect, multiple surfaces. This is often interpreted as there being surface readings and ‘depth’ readings, where the ‘truth’ or ‘what is really going on’ happens below the surface. We do not accept this reading but rather want to suggest that it matters how we put multiple readings together, not to see a ‘depth’ but to see multiply, alternatively, even subversively. In the gorilla experiment, there was a hidden agenda. In one sense, it could be argued that this was the ‘truth’ of the experiment. In another, that ‘truth’ has to be set alongside many others: the ‘truth’ of the ethics of doing such an experiment; the ‘truth’ of the discourse of science enabling the exploitation of people, positioning them into the ‘dupes’ versus the ‘smart’; the ‘truths’ of the interpretations made by each person who sees, experiences and evaluates his or her identity and the identities of ‘others’ in relation to the experiment. The idea of the agenda being explored here is then that it emerges multiply through multiple readings. What is important is how the multiplicities of readings are put together and the effects that they individually and collectively produce on people.

This chapter takes what might be thought of as a ‘big picture’ approach to the agenda. This ‘big picture’ is the surface to be written upon. Any agenda, no matter how local or specific, will be conditioned and influenced by what the ‘big picture’ determines as ‘real’-without-question. If any differences to the lives of people and the organisations that affect their lives are to be made, the ‘big picture’ must be opened up to reveal what is repressed, what is kept silent, what is accused of being nonsense.

Writing the Surface

A surface is in one sense invisible. Perceptually, it is what enables everything to be seen as a whole, as reality. There are no gaps in this perceptual real. However, each body that is seen is also a surface that raises the possibility of something beneath that surface. Beneath that surface there are only ever other surfaces, each posing a further ‘depth’, or ‘behind’, or ‘underneath’. Whether it is the agenda of science to exhaust the possibility of there being yet-undiscovered surfaces through which the fabric of reality is woven as one text or it is the agenda to discover a reality beneath an illusory surface already begins to establish competing agendas, and through that competition arouses a politics of knowledge, of reality. Perhaps there is more to a surface than meets the eye.

The dominant descriptive and practical model for the modern sciences, since Descartes, has been the geometry of the visual where statements are defined unambiguously in ways that can be measured, sequenced logically and operationalised in order to be tested empirically. The key language constructed for this has been mathematics. In The Crisis of the European Sciences Husserl (1970) described what he called the mathematisation of the world. Its power in mastering the physical world has been impressive. It has done so by what we would call a closing strategy, that is, by seeking the ideal of detailed descriptions of observable phenomena that can be checked and re-checked by others without ambiguity, thus contributing to a sense of objectivity, a sense of closure. Each observable object once unambiguously defined can be classified into increasingly comprehensive taxonomies that in turn ‘represent’ the observable ‘reality’. Indeed, rather than just representing a reality, it may be so accepted that it comes to be indistinguishable from it and so be that reality in such a way that analytics and the real seep into each other. So much so, that the mathematics employed to describe relationships between the taxonomically described objects may be spoken of as the ‘deep’ reality, the ultimate reality of everything. Once there is a clear taxonomic vocabulary then detailed observations can be made about relationships between one thing and another. There is an analytic framing enabling questions to be posed: if x varies will y vary because of it? Or, x has happened, what are the specific conditions that produced that event? By setting up experimental situations where everything is constant except for the specified objects (or variables) to be varied, any changes or outcomes due to the manipulations of particular objects can be identified. Hence, important statements like ‘a change in x causes y’. The problem then is to transfer the practices that lead to particular desired results in the laboratory to the real world where there are so many more variables that can intervene and thus upset the results. If the essential (or necessary) structures underlying relationships between the taxonomically defined objects of the world can be described, then increasingly powerful explanations can be developed. Indeed, it may well be possible, as in theoretical physics, to predict the existence of objects simply because they are necessary to the coherence of a theory that has the potential to unify a whole field of study. Confirmation may take many years. But when it does happen, the power and prestige of science is enhanced further.

On the agenda, then, modelled after the physical sciences was the potential to engineer society in the way that the landscape, the transport systems, the factories could be engineered. On the one hand, the search was for social facts as solid as the facts of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and engineering; on the other was the desire to develop theory as robust as the sciences of the physical world. However, to explain the social world and the mental life of people, the observation of ‘facts’ of behaviours in the way that Comte or Durkheim advocated, was not sufficient for those like Weber or Dilthy who saw alongside the observable, the meaningful, the subjective, and indeed with Freud the ‘hidden’ drives, the emotional and the irrational.

In the march towards industrialisation, towards giving the vote to ever more of the wider public there was the implicit if not fully explicit question of whose agendas are to be included and how they are to be engaged with in political, economic and social life. If science was uncovering the ‘truth’, the ‘reality’ of the world, then it could for example be argued that scientific reason would provide the best guide to creating a human world that fitted the reality discovered by reason. For Kant (1784) in his article ‘What is Enlightenment?’ it was to be the free use of reason publicly in all matters that would underpin freedom. He wrote his essay to explain what is required to achieve this ambition:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

(Kant 1784)

This is not about imposing one’s will upon the world about and upon others. Rather if the use of reason is to be in public, then it is about the courage to create the organisations necessary for the public to use reason freely in all matters. Kant gave his answer at a time when the power of reason was being discovered and developed across a range of academic and practical disciplines. As such it provides a textual surface that can be read alongside other textual surfaces both to explore the use of Kant’s writings as well to employ them in contemporary contexts to reflect again and again on the question: what sort of public would have to be created for the free use of reason by all?

It seems to us that in order to use reason at all, it has to go through a public, that is, a space where people can freely voice their arguments in ways that are open to rational scrutiny. The public then is a particular kind of ‘surface’ created through multiple voices engaged in the free use of reason to express their agendas. It is a surface upon which people can write their agendas as a method of gaining public assent. Without such assent freely gained in public, the accomplishment of an agenda would be at the expense of the freedom of others and thus would be invalid. Generalisation of a validly agreed agenda could then only be achieved through its public examination. Underlying the development of this sense of the public is a principle articulated through a term coined by Balibar (1994): égaliberté. In English this might be translated as equaliberty, meaning that freedom and equality are co-extensive. Similarly, in many ways freedom and money today are co-extensive – a point made by Simmel (2004). Hence those who have more money have more freedom at the expense of those who have less, or indeed no, money. Thus, if one person has the greater resource or strength to express his or her freedom regardless of the objections of another, then the freedom of that other is taken away. As a principle for building democratic public spaces that then impact on society, it is powerful. As a practice, of course, it has to contend with contemporary social, economic and political inequalities. In particular, it has to contend with how neo-liberal economic practices ‘sell’ democracy to the people it needs as consumers and citizens. The key contested surface then becomes the people, in particular, their bodies and their ways of thinking and speaking through which collective forms of social interaction and organisation are created and maintained.

Inscribing the people

The effects of power are in a very real sense written upon people. Essential to the adoption of one political form over another is the organisation and exercise of power. This power may be organised either consensually, where each person contributes his or her powers of thought and action to a common undertaking, or it can be organised through the threat of violence. For Hobbes (1651) the warring natures of people have to be subdued by a Leviathan whose violence or threat of violence is seen to be overwhelming. Underlying the stability of nation states is the threat of violence to subdue threats both to their populations and externally to neighbouring states. This is as true to modern ‘democracies’ as to monarchies and tyrannies. Through violence and the threat of violence, however nuanced or crudely expressed within a given political form, fear can be inscribed upon the bodies and minds of people whether as scars or as mental traumas that repeat their nightmarish effects time after time. Fear is written in and readable from the submissive postures and the servility of behaviour and the deference of the voice of those defeated by the violence of the strong. But what of those who have grown used to the conditions under which power is enforced by violence or the threat of violence?

It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they are born. There is, however, no heir so spendthrift or indifferent that he does not sometimes scan the account books of his father in order to see if he is enjoying all the privileges of his legacy or whether, perchance, his rights and those of his predecessor have not been encroached upon. Nevertheless it is clear enough that the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection.

(Boétie c.1552: 55)

Boétie wrote a call to freedom that analysed, according to the knowledge of his time, the reasons for the subjugation of the many by the few. His basic solution was for people simply to stop obeying. Since the people were millions and the powerful elites surrounding the tyrant were hundreds best, there would be nothing they could do – their power would simply fall away. The idea of civil disobedience as a practice of protest is still powerful today, as is the practice of what Boétie called voluntary servitude composed of habits of mind, discourse and behaviour. The idea of democracy can be read alongside these discourses of voluntary servitude and of civil disobedience as its antidote. If democracy is a discourse and practice of political freedoms, it necessarily subverts all organisations dependent on the subjection and servitude of people. However, contemporary discourses of freedom and democracy have no existence outside of the historical conditions through which their current meanings are lived and contested.

Nietzsche argued that underlying the contemporary meanings of such universals as freedom was the violence of the elites over the masses. It is through the exercise of violence that one meaning dominates over, represses or erases another. To understand the present configurations of meanings involves an historical excavation, an uncovering of the organised powers of elites who seek dominance. Perhaps even, in Nietzschian terms, it is a tracing to the source, the original pure meaning of terms like democracy that have been historically perverted, corrupted. In this sense the terms freedom and democracy can be historically re-viewed, their validation deriving from a stripping away of the ways in which they have been bent to the purposes of the powerful over time. The generalisation of their meanings over a given population is then accomplished through the application of force and their truth recognised and avowed by those who are subjugated.

A Marxist reading of such sources of power over people draws attention to the prevailing material relations of production and also to the kinds of psychological accommodations people make when they exercise or are subjected to the demands of the powerful. The contemporary form of capitalism is neo-liberalism, which in brief:

describes the idea that people are encouraged to see themselves as if they are autonomous, rational, risk-managing subjects, responsible for their own destinies and called ‘to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy – however constrained one might actually be’ (Gill, 2006, p.260; see also Kelly, 2006). From this position, the social context in which a person lives is reduced to their immediate interpersonal relations, and any personal, social or health problems, and their attendant solutions, are located within the individual. Neo-liberalism allows people to make sense of themselves in individualistic and psychological terms, understanding their consumption practices as freely chosen markers of their identity (Cronin, 2003). Neo-liberal rhetoric of individual choice and responsibility now dominates much of post-industrial sense making about what it means to be a good person. Such changes have been identified as powerful new forms of governance (Rose, 1989). For example, being asked to work excessive and low paid hours may not be considered exploitation but accounted for in terms of a worker’s psychological characteristic of being a helpful person (Walkerdine, 2002). Thus, young people are developing their sense of self in a context in which wider discourses in society encourage them to understand themselves through psychological and individual discourses, rather than those that are communal or sociological.

(Riley 2008)

In this account there is a complex discursive weaving of ideas and practices, psychological and social mechanisms, with forms of social, political and legal organisation to govern and construct the world about us. The relations of production and the forms of consumption are critical to how people are being subjected, indeed, subjugated to the dominant organisation of power. Riley’s focus is the impact of neo-liberalism on young people’s identities, subjectivities, activities and ...