Science, but not as we know it

The populist view of science – and of research as its handmaiden – is that it is objective, impersonal, that it examines a reality detached from the viewer, i.e. the positivist world view. There have, however, been many voices challenging this view (Polanyi, 1962, Kuhn, 1962, Schon, 1983, Seale, 1983, Hollis, 2002).

Polanyi, a chemist and philosopher, claimed that the scientist’s personal participation in creating knowledge is an indispensable part of science itself and that, even in the ‘exact’ sciences, knowing is an art. Science, he argued, cannot meaningfully be separated from other ways of knowing.

John Shotter (2003), a social constructionist, goes further. He claims that there is really not much difference between the ways in which pure science and action research (loosely interpreted as qualitative research) are approached.

In the exploratory stages of pure science, e.g. physics, chemistry, scientists have to develop a grammar (language, constructs) to communicate. The style is conversational and informal as they decide what to focus on and how to interpret their findings.

Shotter describes this stage as having ‘neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character’. The scientists are actively creating their ‘findings’. However, when the science become established, the scientists, according to Shotter, ‘seek to erase… their own involvement in producing matters of objective fact’. That is, they cut the umbilical cord from their research findings and pretend that the structure was there from the beginning waiting to be discovered, rather than having created it themselves.

This is not deliberate deception, it is just the protocols that have grown up around classical science. An article in Organisation Science illustrates this by suggesting that ‘there are still times when it is best to conceal or downplay the role that qualitative data plays in developing an author’s ideas’ (Sutton, 1997).

In fact this process is not dissimilar from our own behaviour in presentations, when we position ourselves as bearers of ‘findings’ and then distance ourselves from the process of their creation, i.e. aping the classical model. A complexity approach, by contrast, would mean presentations as a working session in which everyone contributes heart and soul to move the learning on.

If we adopt this broader understanding of science – and research – as a spectrum of activity from tentative, messy, intuitive exploration through to the development of a collection of principles and rules for understanding the world, then qualitative research is an essential component of the scientific world-view. You cannot develop new scientific principles or suppositions without the initial inchoate, shuffling around in their formation and there is little sense in artificially separating the two processes.

This re-framing could precipitate a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962) in which qualitative research is accepted as a necessary part of the scientific method, although the ways in which it is evaluated needs to reflect its different contribution to science. It is more likely that qualitative research will align itself with the complexity sciences because this will give it greater weight as part of a wider body of scientific thinking..
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT >>