Empowering Methodologies in Organisational and Social Research

Emma Bell, Sunita Singh Sengupta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367370589
• eBook ISBN: 9781000516586
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book explores the meaning and practice of empowering methodologies in organisational and social research.

In a context of global academic precarity, this volume explores why empowering research is urgently needed. It discusses the situatedness of knowing and knowledge in the context of core-periphery relations between the global North and South. The book considers the sensory, affective, embodied practice of empowering research, which involves listening, seeing, moving and feeling, to facilitate a more diverse, creative and crafty repertoire of research possibilities. The essays in this volume examine crucial themes including:

· How to decolonise management knowledge

· Using imaginative, visual and sensory methods

· Memory and space in empowering research

· Empowerment and feminist methodologies

· The role of reflexivity in empowering research

By bringing postcolonial perspectives from India, the volume aims to revitalise management and organisation studies for global readers. This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of management studies, organisational behaviour, research methodology, development studies, social sciences in general and gender studies and sociology.

1

EMPOWERING METHODOLOGIES IN ORGANISATIONAL AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

Emma Bell and Sunita Singh Sengupta

DOI: 10.4324/9780429352492-1

Introduction

Empowering methodologies can be understood as an ethical stance that involves creating spaces for qualitative researchers to seek to equalise power differentials ‘in their relationship with research participants by paying attention to issues of voice, interpretation, interactions, dialogue, and reflexivity’ (Davis 2012, 261). A key premise of empowering methodologies is that people who are othered, oppressed or exploited in or through organisations and management are invited to participate in the production of knowledge that is related to them. These people are also entitled to expect that the research process will involve some form of reciprocally beneficial exchange, for example by enabling their lived concerns, fears or aspirations to be voiced in a way which enables them to be heard, including by those who occupy positions of power.¹ In addition to systematically developing methodologies that challenge established inequalities, research empowerment relies upon an incremental practice of seeking out moments when traditional power imbalances between researchers and participants are disrupted (Ross 2017). To accomplish this, empowering methodologies draw on perspectives that engage with difference and seek to challenge oppression and inequality, including feminist (Lather 1991, 2007), critical (Alvesson and Deetz 2000), decolonial (Smith 2012) and participa-tory (Burns, Hyde, Killet, Poland and Gray 2014) research.

A key feature of empowering methodologies concerns their role in raising epistemological questions. For feminist methodologist Patti Lather (1991), this is founded on an examination of what it means to know, by considering ‘the textual staging of knowledge’ and seeking to avoid one’s ‘own authority from being reified’ (p. 84). Empowering methodologies thus involve embracing epistemological uncertainty through the realisation that knowing is ‘uncertain endeavour … [which involves] dealing with an uncertain world’ (Morgan 1983, 386). In so doing, they acknowledge that there is no such thing as value-free knowledge and allude to the inseparability of ethics and epistemology (Code 2020; Bell and Willmott 2020). Empowering methodologies thereby introduce axiological considerations related to the importance of values in producing knowledge through research. Specifically, they present a challenge to the notion of value-free science which ‘simply drives values underground’ (Lather 1991, 51). To enable these shifts, empowering methodologies call for reconsideration of the power relations embedded in social and organisational inquiry – for there can be no exploration of research empowerment without an understanding of power in research, including the power to silence or obscure from view.

Our commitment to empowering methodologies is prompted by concerns about the effects of colonising (Ibarra Colado 2006; Gobo 2011), Anglo-American, positivist (Üsdiken 2014; Grey 2010) and masculinised (Bell, Meriläinen, Tienari and Taylor 2020) practices of knowledge production, in the field of organisation studies. While much critical, reflexive work has been done by qualitative researchers to analyse research practice as a series of embodied, affective relationships, most mainstream research in our field adopts a positivist epistemology that assumes the existence of objective truths awaiting discovery. Values are seen as ‘subjective, undermining the pursuit of truth and a potential source of bias or error’ (Hiles 2012, 53). These epistemological commitments invite transactional, rational and instrumental views of research relationships which make the kinds of engagements on which empowering research relies impossible.

Our collaboration since 2011 combines two distinct and different vantage points.² Emma has drawn on feminist, decolonial, new materialist and qualitative methodologies and used them to rethink what it means to ‘know’ in organisation studies- and the purposes and consequences of such knowing (Kothiyal, Bell and Clarke 2018; Bell, Kothiyal and Willmott 2017; Bell and Willmott 2020; Bell, Winchester and Wray-Bliss 2020). Sunita has traced how concepts from Western psychology have been imported into Indian management research with a disregard for indigenous alternatives. Through her work on Indian values, spiritualities and cultural traditions (see for example Singh-Sengupta 2009, 2013), she has sought to highlight the importance of concepts of Indian spirituality – which British colonialism and Christianity attempted to destroy and appropriate – ‘as sites of resistance for indigenous peoples’ (Smith 2012, 78). At the same time, we seek to acknowledge the tensions that arise from our situatedness – Sunita in India and Emma in the UK. Bi-cultural (Smith 2012) research partnerships involving researchers in the global South working with those in the North are subject to power relations in a context where connections, including ‘academic travel … patronage and sponsorship, publication and the formation of research networks … commonly centre on prominent figures in the metropole’ (Connell 2007, 218). The publication of this book in the Routledge India Originals³ series is intended as a gesture whereby we have sought to situate our collaboration, and the knowledge it has fostered, in India and the global South to a greater extent than these dynamics encourage.

The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. We begin by explaining why we believe empowering research is urgently needed due to the current ‘repositivisation’ (Lather 2007) of research in a context of global academic precarity (Kothiyal et al. 2018). Next, we reflect on the situatedness of knowing and knowledge in the context of core-periphery relations between the global North and South. In the section that follows, we discuss the epistemological arguments on which empowering methodologies rely and the ethical and political purposes that they serve. We draw in particular on concepts developed by feminist philosopher and epistemologist Lorraine Code, including ‘ecological thinking’ (Code 2006) and ‘epistemic responsibility’ (Code 2020). We then consider the sensory, affective, embodied practice of empowering research which involves listening, seeing, moving and feeling, suggesting that this can facilitate a more diverse, creative and crafty (Bell and Willmott 2020) repertoire of research possibilities.⁴ Finally, we identify three aspects of empowering research, showing how they relate to each of the chapters that make up this volume.

Post-positivism and repositivisation in organisational research

The assumption that knowledge can aspire to be value-free has been widely challenged by feminist, postcolonial, postmodern and critical scholars who refute the logic of scientific inquiry based on the epistemology and methodology of positivism. Some commentators argue that we are entering an era of post-positivism in the human sciences (see Prasad 2005) – a period in which the socially constituted, historically and culturally embedded and value-based nature of knowledge is recognised. Empowering methodologies are aligned with the ‘methodological and epistemological ferment’ that characterises ‘post-positivist’ human science (Lather 1991, 50). Post-positivism encourages experimentation with interactive, contextualised methods of study that are oriented towards co-constructing knowledge based on lived human experience.

Despite the ambition of the post-positivist turn, in organisation studies there has been a shift towards ‘repositivisation’ (Lather 2007). Thus, while there is considerable interest and diversity in qualitative research in the management disciplines, including those ‘traditionally seen as founded on objectivity, “facts”, numbers and quantification’ (Cassell, Cunliffe and Grandy 2018, 2), the proportion of qualitative research that is published in prestigious journals continues to be low and is growing very slowly. This has been accompanied by a growing standardisation of qualitative management research where creativity has been constrained and practices have become more homogenous and formulaic (Cassell 2016). There has also been a move towards neo-positivism in qualitative organisational research. This is indicated by practices that involve demonstrating the objective validity and reliability of analytical procedures, for example statistical, inter-rater reliability checks (Cornelissen, Gajewska-De Mattos, Piekkari and Welch 2012), counting occurrences and the unreflexive use of terms like ‘bias’ (Bell and Thorpe 2013).

Understanding the turn towards repositivisation in organisation studies requires consideration of the contexts where knowledge is produced – the neoliberal, globalised business school. Organisational researchers face increased pressure to conform to conservative, technocratic and isomorphic norms of what counts as ‘good’ empirical research, often framed within a positivist or neo-positivist paradigm (Bell et al. 2017). Precarious working conditions, intensification of research and teaching and prescriptive managerial regimes mean that early career researchers are tacitly or explicitly told that critical, qualitative research is too risky, likely to be viewed as insufficiently ‘systematic’ and hence less likely to be published or enable academic employment (Bristow, Robinson and Ratle 2017). Practices of ‘othering’ qualitative research(ers) are also situated in patriarchal and colonial cultures, which position qualitative research as feminised (Mir 2018). Significant detrimental, professional and personal effects can arise for these researchers as a consequence of their failure to comply with dominant methodological norms. Ann Cunliffe (2018) offers a passionate and moving account of the oppressive effects of scientism on her identity as a qualitative organisational researcher. Her ethnographic narrative draws attention to the political and ethical consequences of her career choices over a twenty-year period in a context where ‘opportunities to be imaginative and write differently are diminishing’ (p. 9). Related sentiments are also expressed by researchers at the start of their research careers. Ruth Weatherall (2018) describes how she felt estranged from the normative, scientific conventions of academic writing that framed her doctoral thesis, which distanced her emotionally and ethically from women who had experienced domestic violence and had participated in her research. She urges consideration of the uneven power relationships that shape doctoral research writing and poses questions related to the kinds of researchers we want to become and who we are writing for.

The effects of uneven power relations on researcher identity are also reflected on by Rashedur Chowdhury (2017, 1111) in a discussion about his fieldwork encounters with traumatised victims and rescuers in the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013 which ‘killed and injured at least 1135 and 2500 people respectively’. Chowdhury describes how his ‘multiple identities’ as a Bangladeshi, who had lived for 15 years in the UK, shaped ‘what I think about myself, and how I am perceived by fellow academics’ (p. 1113). For Chowdhury, feelings of double-consciousness resulted when ‘Western society and academia … fails to take victims’ feelings seriously’. He questions whether ‘victims voices’ and their ‘lives, agony, and grievances’ ‘matter at all’ in conventional research (2017, 1113–1114). Chowdhury advocates a paradigm shift in research on marginalised actors that challenges ‘the narrow, orthodox way of publishing research’ and instead makes ‘use of oral history, literary theories, art work, and alternative philosophies’ (1115–1116). As these examples powerfully attest, researchers who refuse to comply with dominant positivist norms are constituted as the ‘other’ who does not belong, contributing to feelings of personal and professional isolation.

Situated knowing

The contributors to this book share a concern about the need to decolonise social scientific knowledge production by translating postcolonial theory into empirical and methodological research practice. Postcolonial scholarship has done much to problematise the ontological and epistemological ground on which fields like organisation studies are based through the exposure of ‘epistemic coloniality’ and ‘violence’ (Ibarra Colado 2006; Spivak 1988). Postcolonial critiques of social scientific knowledge production trace how methods and practices (that are assumed to be universal) were, and continue to be, exported from the global North to researchers in the global South (Alatas 2003; Gobo 2011; Bell and Kothiyal 2018). In the global South, research has been a ‘site of significant struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other’ (Smith 2012, 2). In considering the role of place and power in determining how knowledge is produced, Raewyn Connell (2007) traces the influence throughout the twentieth century of ‘urban and cultural centres of the major imperial powers’, which she refers to as the ‘metropole’ (p. 9), in defining the classical sociological canon. She demonstrates how sociological knowledge is linked to the imperialist gaze through the feature of ‘bold abstraction’ developed through the comparative method. This rests ‘on one-way flow[s] of information, a capacity to examine a range of societies from the outside, and an ability to move freely from one society to another … features which all map the relation of colonial domination’ (Connell 2007, 12). Theories are thereby claimed to be universally relevant through relating to ‘social practices and human beings in general’ (p. 34, emphasis in original). However, this assumption overlooks global inequalities in ‘scientific’ knowledge production that arise from European and North American imperialism. In addressing this, Connell draws attention to embodied practices of social science which she suggests may be used to challenge as well as reinforce core-periphery relation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• Notes on contributors Page
• 1 Empowering methodologies in organisational and social research
• 2 Decolonising management knowledge and research: reflections on knowledge, processes and actors
• 3 A decolonial feminist ethnography: empowerment, ethics and epistemology
• 4 Vulnerability as praxis in studying social suffering
• 5 Drawing one’s lifeworld: a methodological technique for researching bullied child workers
• 6 Creative memory: memory, methodology and the post-colonial imagination
• 7 Drawing together, thinking apart: reflecting on our use of visual participatory research methods
• 8 Autoethnography and personal experience as an epistemic resource
• 9 Affective, embodied experiences of doing fieldwork in India: a feminist’s perspective
• 10 From doing, to writing, to being, in research
• Index