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Understanding Reality’s Production: On methodology and method

It is that methods, their rules, and even more methods’ practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand. (Law, 2004, p. 5; emphasis in original)

The implication of John Law’s assertion – that methods are generative in addition to being indicative and connotative – suggests that in selecting a methodology and its associated paradigm, a researcher assumes a considerable responsibility. In making his case Law argues for a complexity approach to understanding processes in the real world, noting that imposing an arbitrary order via one theoretical model or other imposes limitations and restrictions that may constrain the world to “behave” in the particular way the model suggests (and therefore enable it to be successfully modeled as conceived by the researcher or theorist). However, a successful characterization of any particular phenomenon does not necessarily mean that the world’s processes are best described by that model, or that another model might not provide an equally accurate, compelling, reasonable, or useful frame through which one can better understand any arbitrary slice of reality. He writes:

What is important in the world including its structures is not simply … [that they are] complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp (though this is certainly often the case). Rather, they are also complex because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them. No doubt local structures can be identified, but, or so I want to argue, the world in general defies any attempt at overall orderly accounting. The world is not to be understood in general by adopting a methodological version of auditing. Regularities and standardisations are incredibly powerful tools but they set limits. Indeed, that is a part of their (double-edged) power. And they set even firmer limits when they try to orchestrate themselves hegemonically into purported coherence. (Law, 2004, p. 6)

Law draws on Latour and Woolgar’s seminal, 1986 examination of how scientific facts are produced in the context of “laboratory life” to make the argument that science produces the realities that it describes. This is not an arbitrary, “anything goes” epistemology, but rather the product of a rigorous and difficult process of what I describe as “adding to the cultural compendium of wisdom” (Federman, 2007). Heterogeneous research practices and diverse contexts contributed by both researchers and participants produce heterogeneous perspectives and interpretive realities – both of which are, arguably, imaginary constructs – that nonetheless manifest in multiple real effects and consequences. Law then proceeds to suggest that “perhaps there may be additional political reasons for preferring and enacting one kind of reality rather than another” (p. 13; emphasis in original).

   In considering the researcher’s responsibility in his or her knowledge contribution, these “ontological politics,” as Law calls them, loom large, especially in the context of both affecting and effecting human behaviours in social settings. Peter Drucker differentiates between natural laws that operate irrespective of humanity’s often limited ability to understand and describe them, and the basic assumptions held by the particular select group of researchers and practitioners that,

…largely determine what the discipline assumes to be reality. … For a social discipline such as management, the assumptions are actually a good deal more important than are the paradigms for a natural science. The paradigm – that is, the prevailing general theory – has no impact on the natural universe. Whether the paradigm states that the sun rotates around the earth or that, on the contrary, the earth rotates around the sun has no effect on sun and earth. A natural science deals with the behavior of objects. But a social discipline such as management deals with the behavior of people and human institutions. Practitioners will therefore tend to act and to behave as the discipline's assumptions tell them to. Even more important, the reality of a natural science, the physical universe and its laws, do not change (or if they do only over eons rather than over centuries, let alone over decades). The social universe has no ‘natural laws’ of this kind. (Drucker, 2001, p. 69-70)

The researcher constructs a system of meaning through which sense is made of perceptions and lived experiences. Those who hearken to the researcher’s findings may rationalize behaviours in themselves and others that become reflexively justified according to those interpretations. Karl Weick (2001) argues that normative behaviours in a social setting create interpretations of events that become reified in social relationships, and subsequently crystallize into organizations. Over time, interpretive justifications of events become based on these social expectations of behaviour rather than on individuated reasons. The combination of justification processes and expectations create the effect of self-fulfilling prophesies, as well as self-perpetuating conceptions of reality.

In constructing his “Position Paper for Positivism,” Lex Donaldson (2003) recognizes that such sense-making underpins social constructionism which explains “micro-level processes whereby organizational members behave and bring about organizational changes” (p. 124). However, he dismisses the validity of constructionism as an appropriate research paradigm for organizational studies in favour of “a superior, more objective view that the analysts can help actors attain through de-reification … [of] the common sense of people at a specific time about their organization” (p. 125). The value of a positivist approach, Donaldson argues, is that it seeks to explain social interactions in a deterministic manner, based on testable hypotheses that can be deduced from theories, the consequences of which can be observed empirically. Seeming to ignore Drucker (let alone Latour and Woolgar), Donaldson contends that the objective of positivism is,

…seeking to build a science of social affairs of a broadly similar type to natural science. The success of the natural sciences provides an inspiration and role model for positivist social science. Positivist social science aims for theoretical generalizations of broad scope that explain social affairs as being determined by causes of an objective kind that lie in the situation rather than in the minds of people. (Donaldson, 2003, p. 117)

Donaldson, a major proponent of structural contingency theory (1985, 1995), contends that individuals are effectively constrained by their situations, deterministically responsive to external conditions, and that the collective behaviours of an organization’s members are shaped by material and social-environmental factors. The deterministic conclusion that Donaldson draws leads him to assert that “reliable, scientific knowledge about social affairs will be built most rapidly by following the positivist approach” (2003, p. 117), which is based on “systematic inquiry through rigorous empirical research, [that] can yield knowledge that is superior to common sense” (p. 118).

Thus, positivism is grounded in a phenomenological understanding of organizations as “concrete, stable, and identifiable entities with distinctive boundaries that can be described and analyzed, using appropriate research methodologies” (Chia, 1996, p. 143). The positivist approach assumes that:

…(a) ‘objective’ reality can be captured; (b) the observer can be separated from the observed; (c) observations and generalizations are free from situational and temporal constraints, that is, they are universally generalizable; (d) causality is linear, and there are no causes without effects, no effects without causes; and (e) inquiry is value free. (Hassard, Kelemen, & Wolfram Cox, 2008, p. 143)

Is a positivist approach appropriate for answering the research questions posed in the previous chapter? If one reads the historical argument presented in that chapter as technological determinism[1], a positivist-informed contention logically follows: that the nature of UCaPP organizations should be obtainable through positivist means. However, if one instead chooses to interpret history through the lens of complexity as multifaceted societal and cultural interactions that propagate through a multiplicity of human feedback and feedforward networks, it is difficult to see how positivist assumptions might apply in any but the most simplistic of analyses.

More specifically in the context of the current project, contemporary BAH organizations that are predominantly functionalist and instrumental in their foci exist along side UCaPP organizations, and have been explained in various contingency theory terms using positivist methods. Is it reasonable to conclude that positivism is an adequate investigatory framework to simultaneously explain these two, diametrically polar organizational incarnations? The question is especially salient when one realizes that both organizational forms exist in the midst of the same social “causes of an objective kind that lie in the situation,” to use Donaldson’s language (2003, p. 117), apparently denying the foundational premise of contingency theory[2].

As useful as positivist approaches may be in certain contingent contexts, understanding the nature and characteristics of UCaPP organizations, and the influences and emergent processes that may effect transformations from BAH to UCaPP and vice versa, necessarily requires other methods derived from a different worldview:

Social construction, or constructivist philosophy, is built on the thesis of ontological relativity, which holds that all tenable statements about existence depend on a worldview, and no worldview is uniquely determined by empirical or sense data about the world. (Patton, 2002, p. 97; emphasis in original)

This preceding argument highlights the importance of assuming a constructivist^[3] standpoint when attempting to understand individual and collective interpretations of experiences and events. The primary ontological assumptions of constructivism, can be summarized as follows: (a) truth is formed by consensus among “informed and sophisticated constructors, not of correspondence with objective reality” (Patton, 2002, p. 98); (b) facts have meaning only within the context of a framework of values that are imposed on any assessment of apparently objective discriminants; (c) supposed causes relate to effects only by being so ascribed; (d) events have meaning only within a context; changing the context will change the meaning and effect of a given occurrence, rendering the process of generalizing dubious at best; and (e) constructivist inquiry yields results that have no special legitimacy over any other, but contribute to the complex emergence of experienced reality (Guba & Lincoln, 1989, p. 44-45).

One must remain cognizant of the problematics and limitations of constructivism when attempting to understand newly emergent phenomena like those of the UCaPP world. On the one hand, “constructivism assumes the relativism of multiple social realities, recognizes the mutual creation of knowledge by the viewer and the viewed, and aims toward interpretive understanding of subjects’ meanings” (Charmaz, 2000, p. 510). Michael Quinn Patton describes it this way:

Because human beings have evolved the capacity to interpret and construct reality – indeed, they cannot do otherwise – the world of human perception is not real in an absolute sense, as the sun is real, but is ‘made up’ and shaped by cultural and linguistic constructs. … What is defined or perceived by people as real is real in its consequences. (Patton, 2002, p. 96; emphasis in original)

On the other hand, reality that is perceived and constructed according to a well-entrenched contextual ground is, de facto, the interpretive lens through which one interprets all subsequent events and actions, irrespective of any as-yet-unperceived changes in the dynamics of the ground that created the meaning in the first place.  A way to reconcile this apparent paradox of constructivism – that the effects of individually perceived reality may persist long past the time when the circumstances that constructed said reality have substantially changed – may be through the application of a complexity model as suggested earlier by Law. Indeed, constructivism is quite consistent with the principles of complexity theory as outlined by Paul Cilliers’s characterization of complex systems, if the system in question is a system of meaning.

Read on: Complex Systems of Meaning

Complex Systems of Meaning

Cilliers (2005) provides a concise, but useful, summary of complex systems framed in the context of their applicability to organizations. Complex systems are comprised of a large number of elemental components, any (or all) of which may be simple. These elements exchange information via interactions, the effects of which propagate throughout the system. Because complex systems – and in particular, systems that are interconnected via a network – contain many direct and indirect feedback loops, interactions are nonlinear with non-proportional effects. This means that seemingly small interactions may have quite substantial effects throughout the system, and what appear to be substantial interactions may have quite insignificant system-wide effects. Complex systems are open with respect to their environment, which means that there are continuous information exchange processes among the system, its components, and their mutual environment.

Complex systems also possess memory – a history of interactions, exchanges and effects – that is distributed throughout the system, and influences the behaviour of the system. This memory is significant: the behaviour of the system is determined by the nature (effects) of the interactions, not by the content of the components. Hence, the overall system’s behaviour is unpredictable based on an understanding of the components’ individual behaviours alone. The resultant patterns of system behaviour are called emergence, and refute models predicated exclusively on deterministic causality. Finally, complex systems are adaptive, and can reorganize their internal structure based on information exchange, as opposed to the action of an external agent (Cilliers, 2005, p. 8-9).

Weick (2001) cites Gergen’s (1982) three principles of constructivism that I recount here, with particular points of comparison with complex systems emphasized: (a) as events occur, they change the emerging current context from which both earlier and subsequent events have meaning; (b) the reference against which the interpretation of any event is contextualized is itself the product of a network of interdependent events and interpretations, often mutually and collectively negotiated among a network of people; (c) as a consequence of the previous two principles, the meaning of any given event is interpreted differently by different people, with collectively agreed meaning being achieved through processes of consensus, or the exercise of power (Weick, 2001, p. 10).

Complex systems are often described in mathematical terms using Henri Poincaré’s topological approach. In mathematics, and particularly in topology, solutions to sets of nonlinear equations are often depicted as sets of curves drawn through an n-dimensional phase space, where n represents the number of variables in the equations. A point that “travels” along one of these curves defines the state of the system at any time; its movement over time is called its trajectory[4]. The trajectory of the point is called an attractor, with three topologically distinct forms: point (a system that eventually reaches stable equilibrium, representing the end of change and growth; i.e., death), periodic, meaning a system that has regular oscillations between two states, and strange that applies to chaotic systems such as those characterized by Cilliers as exhibiting properties of complexity.

Strange attractors tend to create distinct patterns of trajectories for a given system, although the precise location of a point in phase space at a particular time cannot be accurately determined. This means that the system is non-deterministic – its future state cannot be accurately predicted from its past state(s). Substantial changes in the type, shape, or existence of an attractor, corresponding to substantive changes in the nature of the defining parameters (e.g., contextual ground of the system), is called a bifurcation point, and marks a state of instability from which a new order of greater complexity can emerge (Capra, 1996).

Now, consider a system of meaning, such as that typically described as emerging from empirical observations analyzed according to a particular research paradigm. Constructivism holds that people confer meaning onto their lived experiences by virtue of a complex intermingling of individual and collective past experiences that provide context – in other words, the system’s history – to current perceptions of events. A (contingently) stable meaning or interpretation can be considered to be an emergent property of that system of lived experiences. In complexity terms, that stable meaning can be described as one point along a trajectory of meaning that travels through a phase space defined by a set of parameters that might include individual history and memory, group history or collective memory, consensus processes, cultural influences, normative behaviours of one or more social networks, and other similar factors, forces and causes[5].

A person’s constructed reality, that is, the trajectory of meaning through the phase space of lived and interpreted experiences, can become disrupted when one or more of the parameters of that phase space significantly change. Although an individual may attempt to hold onto familiar, “privileged” (Weick, 2001) interpretations, the time during which the formerly stable meaning is disrupted is chaotic, and hence, often confusing for the individuals and groups concerned. At the bifurcation point, sufficient interpretive energy must be injected into the meaning system to enable emergence: the creation of a new stable state of higher order than before; in other words, the creation of new meaning and interpretation of events that is significantly different than the person’s prior understanding that, in turn, informs future sense- and meaning-making. This complexity understanding of meaning-making not only informs the current research process; it will also provide a useful framework through which I will later contextualize processes of organizational change.

Because the research seeks to discover what is expected to be a radical shift in organizational perception – from BAH to UCaPP – the specific methodology employed must be a sufficiently sensitive instrument to be able to recognize and report on any potential bifurcation that might occur during the time scope of the research, or laterally among the participating individuals and organizations. The methodology most appropriate to this undertaking is constructivist grounded theory, as characterized by Kathy Charmaz (2000).

Read on: Regrounding Grounded Theory

Regrounding Grounded Theory

Charmaz describes the nature of grounded theory and the reason to augment it with a constructivist standpoint:

The grounded theorist’s analysis tells a story about people, social processes, and situations. The researcher composes the story; it does not simply unfold before the eyes of an objective viewer. This story reflects the viewer as well as the viewed. … We can use [the critiques of grounded theory] to make our empirical research more reflexive and our completed studies more contextually situated. We can claim only to have interpreted a reality, as we understood both our own experience and our subjects’ portrayals of theirs. (Charmaz, 2000, p. 522-523; emphasis in original)

Grounded theory as originally conceived by Glaser and Strauss (1973) is rooted in the notion that comparing observations among cases enables theory to emerge, rather than beginning with preconceived hypotheses to be verified or refuted[6]. Like positivist methodologies, objectivist grounded theory presumes a reality external to the researcher that can be objectively discovered, characterized, and reported. In addition, it adopts a post-positivist standpoint that recognizes the existence of a subjective social reality, but attempts to explicitly exclude its effects from influencing the objective reality under study. Post-positivism uses human behaviours, responses, and interactions as consequential effects of structural and environmental causes, using the former to deduce the latter.

Grounded theory begins by collecting data concurrently with its analysis. Analysis begins with coding data based on actions, events, and concepts provided by participants in the actual words used, a technique called open or line-by-line coding. Constant comparison of coded incidents and events among various participants enables individual accounts to be eventually categorized, as open codes are combined and connected via the more conceptual process of axial coding. As more encompassing theoretical categories are discovered, the researcher returns to collect additional data that augments the emergent theory by filling in gaps in data created by subsequent questions suggested by the initial data analysis. The researcher formally reflects on this recursive process through memo writing that enables him or her to develop nascent ideas, see emergent patterns, and reconcile the developing interpretive analysis with their own lived experiences. The process is repeated until one reaches saturation, that is, when no new information emerges from coding, comparison, and reflection (Charmaz, 2000; Patton, 2002; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

In essence, Kathy Charmaz uses the analytical techniques of grounded theory, contextualized in a constructivist standpoint, to enable the emergence of knowledge “that fosters the development of qualitative traditions through the study of experience from the standpoint of those who live it” (2000, p. 522). She describes its purpose, one that is consistent with both the philosophical standpoints offered at the beginning of this chapter, and my own objectives:

A constructivist grounded theory distinguishes between the real and the true. The constructivist approach does not seek truth – single, universal, and lasting. Still, it remains realist because it addresses human realities and assumes the existence of real worlds. … We must try to find what research participants define as real and where their definitions of reality take them. … We change our conception of [social life] from a real world to be discovered, tracked, and categorized to a world made real in the minds and through the words and actions of its members. (Charmaz, 2000, p. 523; emphasis in original)

Read on: Research Design