Feminist Praxis (RLE Feminist Theory)

Research, Theory and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology

Liz Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415635134
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136204357
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminist social scientists often find that carrying feminism into practice in their research is neither easy nor straightforward. Designed precisely with feminist researchers in mind, Feminist Praxis gives detailed analytic accounts of particular examples of feminist research, showing how feminist epistemology can translate into concrete feminist research practices.

The contributors, all experts in their field, give practical examples of feminist research practices, covering colonialism, child-minding, gay men, feminist social work, cancer, working with young girls using drama, Marilyn Monroe, statistics – even the writing and reading of research accounts. These detailed accounts are located in relation to the position of feminism and of women generally in the academic world, and looked at in the light of discussions, debates, and controversies about feminist methodology across several disciplines.

Feminist Praxis is unique in combining theoretical discussion of feminist methodology with detailed accounts of practical research processes. This blend of the practical and the theoretical will make it an invaluable text for feminists carrying out research at all levels, and it will also appeal to those interested in the relationship between theory, method and feminist epistemology.

Part one

Feminism and the Academic Mode

Chapter one

Feminist praxis and the academic mode of production

An editorial introduction

Liz Stanley

Feminist sociology of a ‘Manchester School’

The chapters in this edited collection derive from a series of feminist working papers produced under the auspices of the Sociology Department at the University of Manchester, England. ‘Studies in Sexual Polities’ (SSP) was set up to give ‘a voice’ to feminist sociological work produced in the tradition of the Manchester Department. The series started in 1984, producing six titles a year; I have been its main editor throughout; and a full list of SSP titles appears as an appendix to this introduction. The tradition of the Manchester Department is one of detailed, particularly but not exclusively ethnographic, styles of research; and it derives from the 1940s and 1950s when the department was a joint Sociology and Anthropology one headed by Max Gluckman (see here Morgan 1981; also the introduction to Frankenberg 1982). Such a combination of detailed empirical work and theory, although not of a ‘grand theory’ kind, still characterises the work of the now separate Sociology Department, from interactionist occupational ethnographies to Marxist development studies to ethnomethodological conversational analysis and other strands. It is therefore no accident that much of the feminist research produced within it should show a similar determined concern with the close details of feminist sociological research processes.

This is not to argue that there is anything unique about this work compared with much feminist research produced elsewhere in Britain. What is perhaps unusual is such broadly based departmental support for qualitatively focussed empirical feminist research and theory; and, as a consequence of the long departmental tradition of producing and writing about this kind of research, the existence of a wide range of analytic skills to draw upon.

However, there is another difference, an altogether epistemologically more consequential one. This is the conscious reflexivity concerning the feminist research process explicitly encouraged by the SSP series. Rather than simply acknowledging the researcher's active role, the SSP series encourages a close analytic attention to the details of that process. Rather than describing at a general level ‘the research’ before getting down to the serious business of discussing ‘findings’ and their relationship to ‘theory’, the intention has been to draw the process of knowledge production, in research and theorising, into its product, in the shape of written accounts of it Thus ‘feminist research’ itself has been centred as a researchable topic.

This has happened because, from the start, the development of the SSP series has been located in a coherent set of ideas about knowledge production and a concomitant need for feminist researchers to avoid producing yet more ‘alienated knowledge’ (Rose 1983). This can usefully be explained in relation to ideas about an ‘academic mode of production’.

The academic mode of production

The notion of an ‘academic mode of production’ has been discussed by a number of commentators, and in relation to feminist thinking in David Morgan's (1981) account of the combined production and use of ‘masculinity’ within the academic mode. I build on these ideas here.

A mode of production is characterised by a particular kind of relationship between the relations and forces of production; the following discussion locates academic work, research in particular, firmly within such a materialist analysis although the focus is on academic feminism (see also Kuhn and Wolpe 1978; Thompson 1983).

Within Marxist analyses of modes of production the emphasis is on the feudal, the transition to capitalist, and the capitalist modes. Nevertheless, the conceptual apparatus developed to analyse these is also pertinently applied to the academic production process, particularly in view of its combination of capitalist and patriarchal definitions and usages of ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ in what is an effective denial of the labour processes involved in these. Thus it lends itself well to a feminist analysis of such features of the academic mode.

I am using this notion of a ‘mode of production’ as an analytic category in the same way that Marxist usages do, and with a similar recognition that, just as different societies will have more than one mode of production, so too will academic life (particularly, as now within academia, in periods of change). Similarly, as with other modes of production, so the academic mode too has a particular set of politics and ideology as part of the conditions of its existence, indeed as a defining feature of that existence. These politics centre, as Jurgen Habermas (1972, 1984) has argued in a number of wide-reaching works, on ‘scientism’ – that is, on essentially Cartesian ideas about ‘science’, ‘knowledge’, ‘the research process’, ‘theory’ and ‘expertise’. And the existence of academic feminism – indeed academic feminisms – acts as a challenge to current expositions of these linked ideas (Stanley and Wise 1983a, 1983b; Harding 1987; Resources for Feminist Research 1987; Pateman and Gross 1986).

The relations of production are difficult to define with precision. However, as in the capitalist mode, production relations in the academic mode divide over who controls and has the capacity to possess the product and who does not. What is less clear is just how we are to assign different groups across that divide. To speak of two fundamental groups, whether of classes or men and women, is certainly insufficient.

Within the academic mode there are those who act as official and unofficial gatekeepers of academic inputs and outputs. Who these people are in terms of their sex, but also the academic politics and ideologies to which they subscribe, is consequential for feminists, indeed for women in general (Smith 1978; Spender 1981; Stanley 1984; Ward and Grant 1985; Cook and Fonow 1984, 1986). Publishers and publishers’ readers; internal and external referees for research funds, books, journal articles, examinations and job applications; professors, heads of departments, deans and pro-vice-chancellors – all these act as gatekeepers. Moreover, in different times and places many of them are also subject to gatekeeping practices themselves. For at least the last twenty years one of the aims of academic feminism has been to join them; but another has also been to dismantle at least some of the sources and uses of their power over ‘peers’.

The relations of production within the academic mode are further complicated by the organisational structure that surrounds written/published academic outputs. There is an associated pedagogical process here, and there is also a hierarchical organisational structure across departments, faculties and whole institutions. This is composed by other professional groups, but also by secretaries, other office staff, cleaners, porters, refectory and cafeteria staff, building maintenance workers, security staff and others. Academic institutions are complex organisational structures indeed; and within them academic divisions are crosscut, duplicated, under-cut and otherwise complicated by these other groups of necessary workers. It needs to be remembered at all times that without them academic staff could not function as academics.

This complexity is further demonstrated by discussing the forces of production in the academic mode. The ‘materials worked on’ and the ‘tools of the trade’ include not only blackboards, computers, blank sheets of paper, books, articles and conference papers in the making, but also people: as research subjects/objects, and also as students. And some of these people are located within and are an immediately identifiable part of the academy, while others just as clearly are not. The ‘techniques of production’ similarly range from those either at hand or learned within the organisation or a related one. and those necessarily learned outside the academy such as the ethnographic research method or the various clinical skills of medics, psychiatrists and others. And many of the specific techniques of social science research are themselves necessarily used in part outside of the organisation, in the ‘production of data’ of different kinds, as well as inside it in the analysis thereof.

Within the academic mode it is difficult to distinguish precisely between the ‘classes’ on either side of at least some of its production processes. For instance, are students at undergraduate but also at graduate levels commodities, raw materials, or co-producers? Perhaps the most sensible view is to suggest all three, depending on which part of the process an analysis is focussed on. Also the ‘better’ (but how to measure this? another by no means simple issue) the student, the less they are raw materials and the more co-producers (Rutenberg 1983; Coyner 1983; Smyth 1987; Minnich, O'Barr and Rosenfeld 1988). The notion of a labour theory of value in relation to the academic mode has its problems. Most research products and academic publications have either no monetary exchange value at all (for example, academic journal articles and conference papers), or are accorded an exchange value which has more symbolic than actual monetary value (for instance, advances and royalties for academic books rarely cover even the costs of typing and basic research expenses, let alone accord a monetary value to the labour time of either writing or researching).

In spite of this, it is clear that an academic market operates, albeit one with its own rather quirky characteristics. At its most basic a market is an ‘area of exchange’, where important activities of production and consumption are organised, as well as those of distribution and exchange. Moreover, this market (of job-seeking, funding applications, publication-seeking, promotion applications, applications for research studentships, the assessment of students, courses, departments and institutions) is operated by an overlapping variety of people, from academics to people employed in commercial capitalist organisations to government and related officials of various kinds and levels. The position of women in general, feminists in particular, in this market is a complex one closely related to the overlapping divisions of labour that exist within the academic mode, the sexual ‘sedimentation’ or hierarchi-calisation of particular occupational groupings, the similar sexualised distribution of women/feminist students, but to an extent cross-cutting this the often more advantageous market position of feminist writings and thus of feminist researchers in publication terms.

I have already noted that some exchange values do not reflect the ‘true value’ of the commodities produced but are rather accorded symbolic payment. Often ‘payment’ is given actually in the form of symbolic credit, which can later be measured and ‘expended’ against jobs, promotions and so forth. Bourdieu (1977, 1984) has argued that those in power control the form that culture takes, and that they sustain their positions through cultural reproduction and the differential hierarchical distribution of accrued (inter-generationally as well as intra-generationally) cultural capital gained through the informal as well as formal educational system. Bourdieu's prime concern is with ‘those in power’ as an elite group in society generally. However, the same argument is made about the generation and accrual of cultural capital (what I referred to as ‘symbolic credit’) within the academic mode itself. Within the academic mode different and overlaid divisions of labour can be observed.

It has become conventional to note a technical division of labour, a division of tasks made on a technical basis; a social division of labour, in the form of sub-divisions of tasks into elements shared between people; and a sexual division of labour. To these I would add an academic division of labour.

The technical division of labour within the academic mode turns on what at first sight looks like divisions of qualification; but these in their turn come to rest on sex, race and class divisions and the inter-generational perpetuation of these through, among other factors, the educational system. To account fully for this claim requires an examination of the operations of both the educational system and of the job market, and cannot be undertaken here (but see Deem 1980 for an account of this in terms of sex/gender).

Within the academic mode a social division of labour exists which is in complex ways related to the specifics of the pedagogical process. ‘Lectures’ may be done by one person, ‘tutorials’ by another, and ‘supervision’ by yet another; but at its basis teaching is a relationship between two parties, ‘a teacher’ (who may be more than one in number) and ‘the taught’ (who may be one person or many). There is certainly also a technical division of labour within the pedagogical aspect of the academic mode (between teachers and other workers; between teachers divided in grades) but the specific activity of teaching by any one of these is a single interactional event that contains no division apart from that between the teacher and the student-commodities produced. Thus the division of labour that produces ‘teachers’ paradoxically contains an unseamed interactional act in the production of taught and qualified students. But then again – a further paradox – these students, or rather the best among them, are more autodidacts than the product of didactism.

The academic sexual division of labour and inequalities within it has received some attention from feminist researchers (for example, Acker and Warren Piper 1984). Women students and teaching staff alike are concentrated in particular disciplines and subjects, and at lower leve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Feminist Praxis
• Title Page 1
• Frontmatter 2
• Dedication
• Contents
• Brief biographies
• Acknowledgements
• Part one Feminism and the Academic Mode
• Part two Feminist Research Processes
• Section A Beginning and Finishing Research
• Section B Demolishing the ‘Quantitative v. Qualitative' Divide
• Section C Recognising the Role of Auto/Biography
• Section D Analytically Using Experience
• Section E Analysing Written and Visual Texts
• Name index
• Subject index