Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research

A Reflexive Approach

Louise Phillips, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehviläinen, Ewa Gunnarsson, Louise Phillips, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehviläinen, Ewa Gunnarsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415540247
• eBook ISBN: 9781136186707
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Collaborative research embraces a multiplicity of practices in which social actors are invited to participate in the research process as co-producers of knowledge. But what is actually meant by "co-production" in collaborative research? Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research presents a range of critical, reflexive strategies for understanding and tackling the challenges emanating from the tensions that arise in the meeting between different participants, knowledge forms and knowledge interests. The chapters anchor discussion of ethical, epistemological and methodological questions in sustained empirical analyses of cases of collaborative knowledge production.

The book covers diverse theoretical approaches such as dialogic communication theory, actor network theory, poststructuralist writing as inquiry, institutional ethnography, dialogic action research, and pragmatic action research. The empirical cases span a broad spectrum of empirical fields of social practice: health services, organisational change, research, science communication, environmental communication in intermediary NGOs, participatory governance in relation to urban planning, and digital communication and virtual worlds.

1 Tackling the Tensions of Dialogue and Participation

Reflexive Strategies for Collaborative Research

Louise Phillips, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehviläinen and Ewa Gunnarsson

Across diverse disciplines and empirical contexts, research practices involving collaboration between academic researchers and social actors in the fields under study proliferate. Collaborative research projects share the aim of co-production whereby social actors in the fields under study are enlisted in collaborative knowledge production as co-producers of knowledge. Collaboration and co-production have a long history in the research tradition of action research; the current wave of collaborative research goes beyond the bounds of action research, embracing a multiplicity of extremely heterogeneous research practices (Gallagher 2008, Gershon 2009, Porath 2010, Shani et al 2008, William 2012). Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research is about this hugely varied terrain.

The starting point for this book is the assumption that the realities of collaboration are highly complex and fraught with tensions. Thus we de-romanticise the concept of ‘co-production’ and unpack its multiple meanings, exploring what is actually meant by ‘co-production’ in specific collaborative research projects and addressing the implications for questions of researcher-participant relations, power and participation. Crucially, collaborative research varies in relation to the extent to which the researcher relinquishes control of the knowledge production process so that all participants are engaged as co-producers. And therefore collaborative research also varies with respect to the extent to which, and ways in which, it is a co-production in the different stages of the research process. The chapters of this book illustrate this variability as researcher-participant relations, processes of co-production and participant subjectivities are understood and enacted differently in the different cases of collaborative research presented and discussed in the chapters.

Collaborative research can be understood as part of a ‘dialogic turn’ across diverse fields of social practice. In the dialogic turn, communication is conceived as a dialogue among participants in which knowledge is co-produced collaboratively (Aubert and Soler 2006, Gόmez, Puigvert and Flecha 2011, Phillips 2011). In addition to collaborative research, other fields permeated by the dialogic turn include (but are not restricted to) organisational development, health communication, science governance, ‘participatory governance’ in relation to national and local government and urban planning, digital communication and development communication.

Common to all the fields of social practice in the dialogic turn is a retreat, at least rhetorically, from the idea of communication as one-way flow—that is, knowledge transmission, diffusion, dissemination or transfer—from experts to less knowledgeable target groups. Instead, a conception of communication as processes of dialogue is embraced in which the different participants co-produce knowledge collaboratively on the basis of the different knowledge forms that they bring into play when they meet and collaborate. The idea is that research-based knowledge with roots in the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences enters into dialogue with other forms of knowledge including experiential knowledges (see, e.g., Coenen 2010, Dietz and Stern 2008, Fischer 2009, Fung and Olin 2003, Gόmez, Puigvert and Flecha 2011, Select Panel on Science and Technology, House of Lords 2000, Wilsdon and Willis 2004). This conception entails a view of the production and communication of knowledge as intertwined processes since it is in communication processes that the (co-) production of knowledge takes place (Phillips 2011).

The dialogic turn is driven, among other things, by a normative hope of furthering human co-existence across differences including those of organisational position, ethnicity, social class, gender and politics (e.g., Deetz and Simpson 2004, Roberts 2002). Dialogue, it is implied, has the capacity to build bridges across differences because, in dialogue, difference is treated as a dynamic and positive force in collaborative processes of meaning-making and not as an obstacle to co-existence. Dialogic approaches aim to harness the transformative power of social and cultural difference and collaboratively generate new, shared knowledge that often is actionable—that is it can form the basis for action often involving individual empowerment (the achievement of power and control over one’s own life) and/or community empowerment (extending the community’s ability to shape its own future).

One way of theorising ‘dialogue’ is as a central sign within a discourse, gaining its meanings through its relations to other central signs in the discourse such as ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’. While the discourse of dialogue, participation and empowerment represents a delimited cluster of meanings across contexts of practices, those meanings are shifting and unstable and the discourse therefore takes different forms in different contexts of practice.

In official policy discourse and research practices, a positive picture is often painted of collaborative processes of knowledge production and communication as sites for mutual learning on the basis of the different knowledge forms that the different participants bring with them. As mentioned earlier, the starting point for this book is that the realities of collaboration are much more complex and riddled with tensions. In Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research, we present and discuss a range of strategies for reflexively understanding and tackling the challenges of collaborative research. These challenges, we propose, are rooted in tensions that arise in the meeting between different participants, knowledge forms and knowledge interests.

For instance, tensions may arise in collaborative research projects from co-articulations of the discourse of dialogue, participation and empowerment and the discourse of the knowledge economy. The instrumentalist focus of the knowledge economy discourse on research collaboration as a strategy for social and technological innovation and economic growth may conflict with dialogic views of knowledge production as collective processes of mutual learning to be valued at least as much as the outcome (Gayá Wicks and Reason 2009, Spencer and Taylor 2007, Staunæs and Søndergaard 2008). Thus collaborative researchers may face a struggle between their commitment to dialogue and participation and the demands of their funding body for particular kinds of results in line with the discourse of the knowledge economy.

Our assumption is that researchers can best deal with such tensions through reflexive, complexity- and context-sensitive analyses of how they are played out concretely in collaborative research practices. Accordingly, each chapter anchors discussion of methodological, epistemological and ethical questions related to tensions in a sustained empirical analysis of a case of collaborative research.

Across the chapters, the range of reflexive strategies presented cover a wide transdisciplinary and theoretical terrain, spanning the traditions of dialogic communication research, action research, post-structuralism, feminist research, science and technology studies and actor-network theory. Moreover, the empirical fields of practice which form the objects of research in each chapter are extremely diverse. By virtue of its theoretical and empirical diversity and the anchoring of metatheoretical and methodological questions in detailed empirical analysis, our book is designed to offer a distinctive—and we believe, much-needed—contribution to the literature on collaborative research.

In this introductory chapter, we first sketch out the contours of the field of collaborative research, identifying what we see as key features of the terrain. Then we describe the routes taken in the book through this terrain with respect to theory, methodology and empirical topic areas, concentrating on our book’s specific take on collaborative research. Finally, we introduce each of the chapters, locating them in that terrain and indicating their distinctive contributions to research in, and on, collaborative research.

Features of Collaborative Research in the Dialogic Turn

Policy discourse on collaborative research stresses the value of dialogue between research and the rest of society and the participation of a diverse range of social actors and knowledge forms. The aim is to generate socially relevant knowledge that can further social and technological innovation and economic growth in the knowledge economy (see, e.g., Ministry of Science, Technology and Development 2003). Thus the discourse of dialogue, participation and empowerment is co-articulated with the discourse of the ‘knowledge economy’. Formulated within the terms of the discourse of the knowledge economy and the discourse of dialogue, participation and empowerment, research policy encourages researchers to engage in collaborative research with diverse social actors in order to meet the supposed need of the ‘knowledge economy’ for knowledge contributing to economic growth and social and technological innovation (Spencer and Taylor 2007, Thorpe 2010). Collaboratively produced knowledge, it is asserted, is socially relevant and integrates other forms of knowledge in the research process.

To give an example, the European Research Advisory Board Final Report ‘Research and Societal Engagement’ (2007) asserts that dialogue between researchers and other societal actors is of benefit to the research process on the grounds that researchers can use the resulting knowledge of the public’s concerns in order to enhance the relevance of their research for solving social problems (2007: 5). Research policy also advocates the dialogic communication of research-based knowledge whereby researchers engage in an exchange of knowledge with non-researchers (see, e.g., Ministry of Science, Technology and Development 2003).

Research designed within the terms of the knowledge economy has been dubbed Mode 2 research in an extremely influential analysis by Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny et al. (2001). In their analysis, Mode 2 represents an emerging mode of knowledge production that is problem-oriented, collaborative, context-driven, transdisciplinary and socially accountable. They distinguish it from Mode 1 research which they define as academic, investigator-initiated and discipline-based knowledge production. Empirical analyses of the ways in which researchers make sense of current knowledge production practices point at how researchers construct understandings across discourses that articulate perspectives associated with both Mode 1 and 2 (e.g., Cohen et al. 2001). Whether or not they meet the criteria of Mode 2 research or fall into the category of action research or some third category, the co-articulation of the discourse of dialogue, participation and empowerment and the discourse of the knowledge economy can be seen to underpin the growth of a plurality of diverse research practices that, across their diversity, all involve collaboration between academic researchers and other social actors in the production of knowledge.

When academic researchers and other social actors engage in collaborative research, the production of knowledge is understood as a co-production and actors are understood as co-producers of knowledge and are called partners, participants or co-researchers as opposed to the informants or respondents of non-collaborative research. Thus a key feature common to all collaborative research approaches is a commitment to co-production.

What does this commitment to co-production entail? Here we would like to draw attention to two aspects: the features distinguishing collaborative research from non-collaborative research and the internal differences distinguishing collaborative research approaches from one another. We deal with each aspect in turn.

The outer boundaries separating collaborative from non-collaborative research are not as clear-cut as they may appear at first glance—and as they sometimes appear in accounts of the qualities of collaborative research. There are both similarities and differences between the positions of informant/respondent and participant/partner/co-researcher. Contemporary qualitative researchers, taking the social constructionist path now commonly followed in qualitative research, view their data as the product of an active negotiation of meanings between themselves as researcher-interviewer and their informants/respondents—that is, as a form of co-production (e.g., Silverman 2006). The interview guide is often semi-structured in order to accommodate the responses of informants and allow the informants to shape the agenda. And researchers are trained to recognize and reflect upon their own performative role in co-constructing the research objects and subjects through the co-production of meanings (Denzin and Lincoln 2008c).

This sense of co-production also underpins collaborative research. However, collaborative research works with another sense of co-production too, and it is this that unites all collaborative research approaches and distinguishes them from non-collaborative, constructionist forms of qualitative research. While the latter recognise the active role of the informant in the co-production of meanings and give her space to shape the interview process, the participants are primarily positioned by the researcher and position themselves as ‘the researched’; they provide the data that forms the basis for the researcher’s knowledge production. Contrastingly, in collaborative research, there is a much more extensive blurring of the distinction between researcher and researched as researcher-participant relations are configured as a foundation for collaborative knowledge production.

Collaborative research projects vary widely with respect to how they understand and enact ‘co-production’ and the categories of partner/participant/co-researcher. In particular, there are considerable differences vis-à-vis the extent to which the categories of researcher and researched are merged so that all participants are engaged in joint co-production processes in a common project. Assessing co-production in the various stages of research, we can talk about the extent to which all participants take part in decision-making about the aims, the design, the implementation of the design in the production and analysis of data and the communication of the research results.

The Book’s Take on Collaborative Research

The chapters of our book present a plurality of different ways of understanding and enacting processes of ‘co-production’, researcher-participant relations and subjectivities: each chapter works within and across different theoretical traditions to produce different forms and analyses of collaborative research. And they also reflect the huge variety of empirical contexts in collaborative research, embracing diverse contexts such as organizational development, science communication, participatory governance in urban planning, and NGOs. At the same time, the chapters also take some o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Tackling the Tensions of Dialogue and Participation Reflexive Strategies for Collaborative Research
• 1 Reflexively Analysing ‘participation' and ‘dialogue' in Collaborative Research
• 2 Reflexively Tackling the Ethics of Collaborative Research Relations
• 3 Reflexively Tackling Epistemological Issues in Collaborative Research
• 4 Tying the Ends Loosely
• Contributors
• Index