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Chapter Three: Data and Method
“Against positivism, which
halts at phenomena – ‘There are only facts’ – I would say: No, facts
is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish
any fact ‘in itself:’ perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 267, (emphasis in
original).
Data
“Discourse is the way we do things … discourse becomes social structure”
(Loseke, 1993, quoted in Miller, 1997, p. 170). Social settings and
institutional discourses create possibilities for reality construction (see
Hindess, 1996, especially p. 19; Sunwolf & Seibold, 1998). “Reality”
construction is not so precisely determinate that participants may predict
the exact ways issues will be interpreted, but reality construction occurs
under conditions, i.e., (SINS) STRUCTURES, INSTITUTIONALIZATIONS,
NATURALIZATIONS, SIMULATIONS, that make some reality claims more
available than others, as Foucault (1977/1995) suggests.
Foucault’s methodology (as discussed in 1972, especially p. 6-8) is
characterized by the kinds of data he chose to utilize. Rather than
documents of renown or merit produced by famous philosophers or texts
surrounding extraordinary events, he most often employed common, generally
unknown and/or disregarded documents, those considered by many to be
insignificant. Examples include records kept by doctors, teachers, and
priests; manuals; grant proposals; files kept by government agencies or
other organizations; and personal diaries and journals of ordinary people
doing ordinary things (see Sacks, 1970). Foucault wanted to address “a
layer of material which hitherto had no pertinence for history and which
had not been recognized as having any moral, aesthetic, political or
historical value” (Foucault, 1980, p. 50-51). Such documents are local,
providing a look at the way a system really works (in a day-to-day
sense, these documents providing nuts-and-bolts parts, an empirical way of
observing the discourse which constitutes the system). Examples of such
documents utilized in the present study are the rules written by
regulators, with the various interpretations of those rules appearing in
the handbooks and on the websites of research institutions. These texts
provide insight as to the ways federal regulations are used by participants
to produce new layers of institutional-level rules. Foucault’s (1972) ideas
about what constitutes data are not inconsistent with those set forth by
Dilthey (1900/1969) and Kant (1781/1958). Dilthey (1900/1969) advocated the
use of literature, art, social life, and “the course of history” as data.
And Forester (1992) utilized (as data) twelve lines of text, a transcript
from an “insignificant” city planning meeting (see footnote # 85, p. 74).
Based on these theoretical ideas, data for this analysis includes
textual materials from the regulatory bodies holding (by virtue of being
given) the power to make policy. These materials include transcripts of
Congressional hearings; commission reports; journal articles; the Code of Federal
Regulations (CFR, the codification of general and permanent agency rules
published in the Federal Register); handbooks issued by federal regulators
and those written by institutions; information user-lists featuring
announcements about changes in and interpretations of regulations; press
releases from government agencies; transcripts and reports from proceedings
designed to stimulate discussions about human subject research and
regulation; articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education and
other academic, research, news, and related publications; numerous websites
of regulatory agencies and research institutions, and other materials.
This study will examine the talk,{80}*
the discourse produced by regulators, research institutions, and others
related to the policy and rule making surrounding the use of human
subjects. Deetz (1982) suggests this (kind of) discourse is of interest to
interpretive researchers as data for analysis of the “processes by which the
meanings of organizational events are produced and sustained through
communication” (p. 132).{81}*
Emphasis in the present study is placed on social science and qualitative
methods (particularly the distinctions between these and clinical methods,
as described earlier, see p. 26). Documents spanning approximately 60 years
– from 1940 to the present time – are part of the analysis. The discourse,
the “conversation” that constitutes this regulatory system involves 10s of
organizations, 100s of regulators, 1000s of institutions (IRBs), 10s of
1000s of researchers{82}*
and 100s of 1000s of two-legged research participants (not to mention
millions of feathered, finned, furred and four-legged participants).
Specifically, the discourse among and between the regulators, the
institutions, and researchers within the IRB system constitutes the data
for this study.{83}*
Somewhat extended analyses are done utilizing a federal government
agency report (GAO, 1996), a presidential commission report (ACHRE, 1995),
a guidance (i.e., how to be in compliance) document (USAID, 1999), a
Senate bill (the Human Research Subject Protection Act of 1997), and the
University of Oklahoma’s IRB application form.{84}*
Method
In a way consistent with the mission of critical theory, proceeding with
postmodern sensitivity and sensibility (see Lash & Urry, 1987, who
place emphasis on disorganization, untidiness and flexibility), and
utilizing the work of Foucault (particularly 1972), these qualitative, phenomenological,
and critical methods, especially Foucauldian analysis, can be used to
address the questions posed here. Forester (1993) says by linking control
structures to daily experience, voice, and action, we form a structural
phenomenology: “it is structural because it maps the systematic staging and
framing of social action; it is phenomenology because it explores concrete
social interactions (promises, threats, agreements, deals, conflicts) that
are so staged” (p. 140).{85}*
Postmodernism “primarily serves to attempt to open up the indeterminacy
that modern social science, everyday conceptions, routines, and practices
have closed off” (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996, p. 210). This is the purpose,
as mentioned, of the present study, i.e., to open questioning, to
begin more active, more aggressive whying as social scientists, especially
those researchers employing unobtrusive methods about unobtrusive topics.
The result of such questioning and re-evaluation of the arrangement between
purpose for the IRB (and other organizations) and the processes that have
come to constitute them, is a kind of anti-positive knowledge (Knights,
1992; see also Alvesson & Deetz, 2000). Knights argues that
conventional approaches to management and organizational study involve the
(SINS) STRUCTURES, INSTITUTIONALIZATIONS, NATURALIZATIONS, SIMULATIONS of
positivism, encouraging researchers to produce positive knowledge in the
“form of representations of what they consider to be the real world of
management” (p. 514; see Reyna, 2001, p. 10-11 for an example in
anthropology; Agar, 1980, particularly Chapter 4; Mumby & Stohl, 1996,
about the role of communication department in the study of management; and
Goffman, 1971 on the failure of positivism to deliver) or the academy, as I
have argued (see footnote # 72 regarding dissertation production, p. 64).
For Denzin (1989), traditional ethnographic concerns regarding the
search for valid generalizations and substantive conclusions, are
currently, perhaps temporarily, set aside, replaced by “thick descriptions”
(Geertz, 1973, 1983) that will in turn make possible “thick
interpretations” – joining ethnography to both biography and lived
experience (Denzin, 1989, p. 32-34). Postmodern, contemporary ethnographers
are informed by the work of deconstructionists such as Derrida, Lyotard,
and Baudrillard,{86}*
and make attempts to disprivilege “all received texts and establish
discourses in behalf of an all-encompassing critical skepticism about
knowledge” (Denzin, 1989, p. 78). Legitimate, important conflicts can occur
about questions such as how we know what is “needed.” Who says? Why do we
do certain things certain ways at certain times? Why do we think these ways
are The Way, that a certain way is any more “right” (i.e.,
appropriate) than some other way(s)?
Changes in social, political, and research conditions provide new areas
of application for postmodern and critical theory work, deconstruction, and
resistance reading (see next paragraph) in organization studies. “Critical
theory and postmodern writing have provided innovative and instructive
analyses” (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996, p. 192). The IRB regulatory system
provides an excellent area of application for this kind of scrutiny: The
IRB is a useful “vehicle” for illustrating regulation functioning in
general, and it is an organization particularly relevant in academia.
Two primary postmodern methods are deconstruction and resistance
readings. Deconstruction involves the exploration of suppressed terms and
the system that allows positive terms to become established. Resistance
reading is a broader process in which the construction activity is
demonstrated and indeterminacy illustrated. “The positive and the polar
constructions are both displayed as acts of domination, subjectivity doing
violence to the world and limiting itself in the process” (Alvesson &
Deetz, 1996, p. 210). Conflicts that were suppressed by the emergence of
positive terms are re-opened, brought back for creative redetermination –
constant dedifferentiation and redifferentiation” (p. 210).
“Given the power of closure and the way it enters common sense and
routines, especially in simulations, such rereadings require a particular
form of rigor and imagination … a keen sense of irony, a serious
playfulness, and freedom from the dull compulsions of a world made too easy
and too violent” (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996, p. 210; see also Cooper &
Burrell, 1988, re: serious play). Virtually every piece of text analyzed in
this dissertation utilizes these techniques.
Regulatory processes are the focus of much critical theory and
postmodern writings.{87}*
These have “now found fertile ground in management studies{88}*
[in part because of] the decline and disillusionment of what is broadly
referred to as modernist assumptions by both organizational theorists and
practitioners” (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996, p. 191; see also Mumby &
Stohl, 1996). As is generally understood by writers such as Alvesson and
Deetz, who pointed out, a central feature of both critical and postmodern
studies are attacks on modernist traditions.{ii}*
“[Critical theory] tends to treat management as institutionalized and
ideologies and practices of management as expressions of contemporary forms
of domination” (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996, p. 198; see also Alvesson &
Deetz, 2000).{89}* Of course, critiques of the postmodern perspective
(for example Hammersley, 1995), abound.
When “naturalization and freezing of contemporary social reality”
(Alvesson & Deetz, 1996, p. 211) occur, opportunities for important
conflicts, i.e., open questioning of “authority” and, in this case
regulatory systems (i.e., the authorities and processes), are lost.
Some groups of people and values (such as qualitative methodologies and
researchers utilizing those methods) are marginalized.
A critical theory/postmodern approach to the study of management and
regulations, and particularly analysis of the IRB system seems appropriate.
Precedents exist, for example, Alvesson’s (1987) study of constraining work
conditions that lead to intrinsic work qualities such as creativity,
variation, development, and meaningfulness being ignored or subordinated to
instrumental values, and various studies concerning the development and
reinforcement of asymmetrical social relations between experts and
non-experts (or Marx’s distinction between owners of capital and owners of
labor, see Alvesson & Willmott, 1996; or Fischer, 1990, especially
“politics of expertise, p. 28 and 106; Forester, 1989, re: the politics of
planning, p. 3-4; and also Hollway, 1984). Additionally, there are
precedents in studies of extensive control of employee mindsets and a
freezing of their social reality, more recently referred to as
“culting,”{90}* (Mumby, 1987; Arnott, 2000), and far-reaching control
of employees, consumers, and the general political-ethical agenda in
society, through mass media and advocating consumerism and the priority of
the money code as a yardstick for values, perception of individual worth{91}*
and collective political decision-making – perhaps most relevant to the
“commercialization” of research (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996; Deetz,
1992; DHHS OIG 2000a).
From their neo-Marxist, critical theoretical perspective, Alvesson and
Deetz (1996) state, “In the guise of technocracy, instrumental rationality
has pretenses to neutrality and freedom from the value-laden realms of
self-interest and politics. It celebrates and ‘hides’ behind techniques and
the false appearance of objectivity and impartiality of institutionalized
sets of knowledge, bureaucracy and formal mandates” (p. 204). This is at
once why it is difficult to locate the many techniques of domination and a
justification for attempting to do so. A form of technological determinism,
i.e., the view that if something is technically feasible then it is
both desirable and bound to be realized in practice, exists even if we
don’t want it and even if it is likely to be socially, culturally, (or
environmentally) harmful (Watson & Hill, 1997). As mentioned, we as
researchers do things, we go along, in the name of process even when
the purpose doesn’t seem clear, important, useful, right, sensible,
moral, or logical to us. (See also Adorno quote, footnote # 67, p. 60,
herein.)
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