The Relevant PhD

The Relevant PhD

Hugo Letiche
Geoffrey Lightfoot
University of Leicester, UK
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword vii

Introduction: Why Write or Supervise a Practitioner PhD? 1

1. As If Writing Can Make a Difference 21

2. Relevance: From politics to Selling and Back Again 47

3. The Role of the University: Democracy versus Entrepreneurship 75

4. Research Ethics and Methods 103

5. The Affect of Being-here 151

6. The Content Is the Process; the Process Is the Content 175

7. Critical Communitarianism 205

8. Take-Aways 229

Afterword 233

Bibliography 235
 FOREWORD

This is a book about professional PhDs that covers both doing one as a post-
experience graduate student and facilitating one as a professorial supervisor. We
suggest that professional PhDs are different from traditional theses written by
students who have not experienced the world of work; and that they are rigorous,
often empirically powerful and grounded in professional experience. We call the
professional thesis the relevant PhD because of its relevance – to professional
practice, to the applications of social studies, and to doing justice to self and other.
This book includes a theoretical discussion of the relevant PhD – its groundings,
identity and purposes – but the book is also a kind of ethnography of the relevant
PhD. Thus, the ideas are annotated by descriptions, and cases run through many
chapters.
This is a book about the curriculum of PhD study. The word ‘curriculum’ derives
from the Latin for a race or the course of a race. The word has, in its implicit sense,
stayed all too close to its origins and in that sense, we do not want much to do with it.
We write here about the values and intentions needed to write a successful sustained
piece of research that meets the requirements of the PhD. We write in defense of
the university as a place of openness, discussion and speculative thought, which
we will argue is necessary for a democracy. We write as if the values of respect,
intellectual integrity and self/other deference are acknowledge and supported by
graduate study. Of course we know that ‘graduate school factories’ mass produce
conformist theses, supposedly valuable to the knowledge work economy. But we
know from experience that many professionals do their work with devotion, acuity
and insight. Our work has been with such professionals, writing their PhD theses. In
the academic pecking-order the professional PhD is often rather low in the rankings.
We write to claim that professional PhDs defend democracy, and the integrity of
research, and the university as much if not more so than other PhDs do.
The raison d’être of the university is under attack. Current governmental
administrations do not really want to finance critique, freedom of thought, or alternative
points of view. We argue in this book that the professional PhD is a crucial source
of awareness whereby actual practices are made visible and social issues are made
accessible for reflection. The university as a necessary ethical source of respect of
Other, and thereby the firmament for democracy, is what is at issue here. And we write
to assert that the professional PhD makes a very important contribution to democratic
values and practices. This is curriculum as intention, values, ethics and purpose.
With respect to the other, more traditional, idea of a curriculum; the practitioner
PhD as we have known it entailed a first year of four one week workshops. The
first workshop introduced the participants to the faculty, to one another, and to
doing research. Guest lecturers discussed their experiences as PhD students and
supervisors. The intention for doing research was discussed. Explicitly or implicitly,
the social ontology (what is the nature of ‘social being’), research epistemology
vii
FOREWORD

(what can social studies really ‘know’) and the pragmatics (what do researchers
actually ‘do’) of research were discussed. Ample time was built-in to internalize the
(abstract) thoughts presented and for the students’ to share their research ambitions.
In our case, we turned to literature in the second workshop. Each participant wrote
a ‘critical book review’ for presentation and discussion. At issue was what literature
the participants find important, how they read, and what they get out of their reading.
Several guest lecturers discussed what they had been reading recently, what it had
meant to them, and how they were incorporating it into their current research. The
third workshop had to do with theoretical choice: what ideas, commitments and
assumptions are made in research, how do they differ, and what do they contribute
to the research effort? To some degree, paradigms are important here; what Gareth
Morgan called ‘metaphors’ or ways of seeing, or perspectivism, was under review.
Our take-away: How you see is as crucial as what you (think) you see. Guest
lecturers discussed ways of seeing and how they created ways of researching. During
the fourth workshop, each participant presented a research proposal. These were
examined at length to identify their pitfalls and assumptions, as well as potential and
value. Guest lecturers discussed their own research work.
In the second and third years there were two workshops (open to all students
who had passed the first year). One centered on an actual research theme: such
as: ‘the multitude and the commons’, ‘visual and audio research methods’, and
‘the turn to affect’; and the other was organized with another university to share
and discuss different research traditions (in our case, our hosts were the CNAM,
Paris; Copenhagen Business School, the University of Essex and the University
of Leicester). During the fourth and concluding year of registration, most students
chose only for individual supervision, though they were welcome to attend the two
workshops if they wished to.
Writing is a challenge for most students but for those coming with professional
experience, it is all too often associated with filling-in forms, with evaluations and
reports that often promise little good, and with the bureaucracy of accountability.
Thus, professionals often have no voice in their writing; they are reduced to
subalterns within a culture of fear, prediction and prevention. Writing as exploring
what is important to oneself, and not being disciplined by Other, is a big step to take,
and not always a self-evident one. In Chapter One we explore writing as if it can be
in the service of oneself and not the vehicle of some alien or threatening force. In this
way, the choice to write from one’s own beliefs, genuinely directed to one’s practice
and convictions produces the relevant thesis.
In Chapter Two we explore the curious history of ‘relevance’ – a word that in the
1960s pointed to social criticism, reform and change; but latterly has come to mean
‘sellable’. Relevance for us in this context points to professional practice; and there
are different traditions in the study of practice. We explore what is important in
research of practice, and thus what sort of work/labor we are calling for, which leads
to a reinterpretation of the socially engaged concept of ‘relevance’ that we believe is
appropriate in the current social-economic circumstances of crisis.

viii
 FOREWORD

In Chapter Three we examine the role of the university. A PhD is an institutional

artifact, existing in terms of the behavior and standards of universities. Classically,
from Kantian enlightenment, the university is the institution par excellence of free
thought, discussion and investigation. As such, the university is fundamental to
democracy since democracies need universities to explore the possible. But the
democratic university is no longer a self-evident good and some now see the university
as little more than a research and development center run for profit. Since the PhD
thesis is part and parcel of the university’s aims and goals, reflecting its mission, we
examine contrasting definitions of the university and how they define the PhD thesis.
Chapter Four gets to the nitty-gritty of what is meant by a relevant PhD. We explore,
using our experiences, what might be a socially ethical research methodology for
practitioner theses. The classical scientific Mode 1 model is compared to the practitioner
Mode 2 model of research, and in consequence, an alternative Mode 3 is suggested.
Mode 3 places social ethics at the centre of the thesis (rather than as an add-on).
Chapter Five looks to the ‘turn to affect’ and explorative ethnography, suggesting
that they are very promising developments in the facilitating of practitioner
ethnography. The ‘turn to affect’ is not a must for relevant, practice directed research,
but it is perhaps the most interesting development currently circulating.
Chapter Six is our pedagogic chapter. We talk here about thesis supervision
and the role it plays in the creation of the thesis. Almost all PhD theses have a
methodology chapter and (almost) none say anything really about how they were
supervised, even though what gets researched, written, and how it is analyzed is
deeply influenced by the supervision. This black hole is examined and discussed
in this chapter. Supervision often makes or breaks the thesis (or the student) – we
reflect on its practices, psychology, dependencies and ethics.
In Chapter Seven we reflect on the politics of the relevant PhD. We have written
from a social ethical position; this can be called ‘critical communitarianism’. And
the assertion by some radical scholars of the ‘commons’ is a related idea. In this
chapter we position our assertions more explicitly in the present day social political-
philosophical milieu.
And in Chapter Eight we provide a few ‘Take-Aways’ for further consumption.
Between the Chapters there are the Intertexts. These are statements by ex-PhD
students about their experiences. Since they say exactly what they want to say, their
contributions have been juxtaposed as best we could to the chapters, but they were
in charge of their own texts. They were asked to communicate about their thesis
experience; the request or prompt was that simple and open. All the Intertexts have
been read and authorized for publication by their authors.
For students who are a year or two into writing their thesis, reading from start to
finish is a good option. For students just starting their thesis, it may be more helpful
to begin with the Intertexts which record other students’ experiences, then read from
Chapter Four to the end, and finish with chapters One to Three.
Fellow academics will probably read the bibliography first and then will read
pretty much as they see fit …

ix
 INTRODUCTION

WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE

A PRACTITIONER PhD?

THE QUESTIONS

Why write a PhD thesis? Why supervise the writing of PhD theses? These are
difficult questions to which facetious answers would be: ‘Because one can.’ Such
responses reflect the classic answer ‘Because it is there’ to the question: ‘Why climb
the mountain?’ and, maybe, some of the experience is captured there, just as it is with
climbing. But with the PhD, unsurprisingly, there is more to it than that.
A PhD, for instance in the (applied) social sciences, requires the candidate to
write a book of 150 to 200 pages. This is no easy task and some attention to the
reasons for doing so is important. There are potentially extrinsic incentives for
doing so, such as to get or keep a job, to make (more) money or to get promoted.
Unfortunately, for us as academics, PhD supervision often offers even less kudos
than writing one. At many universities it neither counts as teaching nor research. We
know of no-one who ever got a promotion, let alone a job, because they were such
a good thesis supervisor. Ultimately, in our experience, very few people actually
complete or supervise based on the extrinsic motivators.
Let us assume that if you write or are writing a PhD thesis, or you supervise the
researching and writing of such theses, that you want the thesis to be significant
to yourself and to others involved. We could have said ‘relevant’, ‘important’,
‘valuable’ or ‘meaningful’, instead of ‘significant’, but the crucial point is that
researchers and supervisors believe that what they are doing should have value to
themselves and potentially to others. One way to reframe this is to say that a PhD
thesis ought to be of intrinsic value wherein the key players believe in the integrity,
worth and even importance of what they are doing. Of course, one could see the PhD
thesis as a giant piece of homework, culminating in an especially nasty exam. There
are probably moments wherein everyone who has written a PhD has felt that way.
But we assume that one undertakes to research and write a thesis out of involvement,
and that commitment is thus a primary motivation.
Intrinsic reasons for writing such a long manuscript as a PhD thesis or for
supervising a process lasting several years might include: trying to be insightful,
wanting to create something of (conceptual and/or social) beauty, and acting in
pursuit of justice. But, looking at the ‘How to …’ books (Dunleavy, 2001; Marshall,
2010; Murray, 2011; Petre & Rugg, 2010; Phillips & Pugh, 2010), we note an
absence of what we would consider a satisfactory answer to the: ‘Why write a
PhD?’ question. This is not trivial: as thesis supervisors, we have discovered that

1
INTRODUCTION

successful PhD candidates can answer the ‘Why?’ question much better than weaker
(or unsuccessful) candidates. And we think that successful supervision poses the
question more powerfully than does less effective guidance.
Of course, a PhD thesis is always ‘about something’ – from Parkinson’s disease
to artistic creativity, from decision making to contemplation, from gender questions
to plutocracy. Expert knowledge as well as theoretical sophistication are definitely
important. But a PhD is a degree; it is the product of more-or-less organized activity.
It is not just: ‘Write a book, preferably one that is interesting’. A PhD thesis must
stand in relationship to an academic field of study; it is supervised by academics and
it leads to an academic title.
While researchers are supposedly obsessed by their subject matter, and the
research route and methodologies they use, evaluation of thesis writing repeatedly
reveals issues of student/supervisor conflict, personal challenges and even traumas.
Problematic feelings about funding institutions and universities also seem to be
common.
Writing a PhD entails research and writing, but also involves colleagues and
supervisors, individual motivation and crises, contexts and organizational politics.
The thesis writer, we assert, needs to understand him or herself in a context of
thesis-writing and the supervisors have to try to manage that understanding and
context. A successful thesis is not just a book or manuscript; it is also a set of social
relationships, it implies a statement about an organizational context, and it entails a
promise of further work.
Obviously, a PhD can help one to get a job. On a fairly pedestrian level, it offers
the prospect of a professional future. But a good thesis also reveals questions as
yet unanswered and defines an intellectual promise that can only be fulfilled
through more research. Our assertion is that the PhD candidate who understands
their research, and is insightful about the thesis in its context, has developed the
reflexivity needed to make likely the successful completion of the thesis.
This assertion is based on having worked most extensively with post-experience
practitioner PhDs. We think that the demand for self-awareness, research reflexivity,
and context sensitivity applies to other PhDs in the social sciences as well, but this
book is grounded in our work with professionals studying for a PhD.
In this book we will unpack the ‘Why write a PhD?’ question. This is not a
research methodology book–we are happy to leave that to the David Silverman’s
(2010, 2011) of this world. We will address: ‘What does doing a PhD entail?’ and
‘What is it that makes such an effort worthwhile?’ We are convinced, admittedly
based on our own experiences and evidence, that candidates’ and supervisors’ ability
to answer the ‘Why?’ question is crucial to their success (or not).
The professional PhD student is typically someone who has done a applied masters
degree (for example, in Business Administration, Education, Social Work, Nursing,
Healthcare or Public Policy) and has chosen to return to academic study to do a PhD.
As Robert Burgess (1994) has suggested, ‘the practice based, post-experience PhD
is, and will be gaining, in importance’ These are therefore students with practical

2
 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

experience and a need to understand, explain and theorize their practice. We believe
that post-experience PhD students should be respected for their commitment and
knowledge of practice and that the professional doctorate should be seen as a first-
class degree. Bringing together professional expertise and knowledge with academic
standards of inquiry, such a degree should stand alongside or above most existing
postgraduate study. Yet, all too often, the professional doctorate is regarded as
intellectually impoverished in comparison to the traditional PhD. In the UK, part of
this may be due to the on-going prejudice lingering towards the ‘new’ universities
(or ex-Polytechnics), which have led in many of the developments in this area. Yet
more established institutions, such as Durham and Cranfield/Reading have also
delivered such programmes, with as yet only limited acceptance.
Traditionally, the PhD is claimed to be assessed against the standard of producing
an ‘original contribution to knowledge’. But this quality criterion demands careful
examination. A brief scrutiny of the statement reveals the inherent problems of each
of the words. What does it mean to be ‘original’? An ‘original thinker’, according to
the New American Oxford Dictionary, is one that is ‘not dependent on other people’s
ideas; and is inventive and unusual.’ As such, it appears to have little to do with most
PhDs, where much of the initial part of the thesis is spent in demonstrating just how
a research problem can be framed in terms of other people’s work, before revealing
how data can be explained, using one or more existing theories. It has long been
the case that studies which are creative and original, either in terms of structure or
content, are precisely those that the academy finds most difficult to endorse.
What might be a ‘contribution’, opens up similar problems. Such a claim might
make sense when applied to some idealisations of the hard sciences, where the
field may be seen as a monolithic body of work built on natural laws, where each
little crumb of knowledge adds a piece to the growing edifice. The social sciences
and humanities do not, despite the efforts of some who wish their disciplines to
resemble a natural science, readily yield to such a view. In part, this is because of the
thorniest question of all: what contributes to knowledge? Without opening up whole
epistemological debates, or delving into the deeper debates of the ‘Paradigm Wars’,
it is readily apparent that what might constitute ‘knowledge’ within one discipline
(or even sub-discipline) can be speedily despatched as irrelevant within another.
Such points are not new, of course, and writers, supervisors and examiners of theses
within different disciplines have moulded a series of heuristics to skirt such issues.
Solutions include first establishing what is to be accepted as a field of study, and
then resolving what might be seen as valid research. From this, it becomes possible
to establish a set of standards as to what might be a level of acceptable research
and analysis that meets the demands of the PhD. Assessment of the candidate’s
suitability can be seen as ticking off answers to a series of questions, such as: ‘Was
the research framed correctly?’; ‘Was sufficient data collected?’; ‘Was it analysed
within accepted methodological parameters?’; ‘Were the conclusions grounded in
the literature and analysis’; and so on.

3
INTRODUCTION

In this way, it can be seen that the traditional view of what constitutes an
acceptable PhD is, in large part, about anchoring research within an academic
discipline and constantly referring to knowledge within that discipline. The PhD
becomes the learning of specific academic techniques – ways of writing and analysis
that produce a text that is recognisably acceptable within a discipline. Of course, the
terms ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘multidisciplinarity’ are bandied around with great
enthusiasm, but this rarely translates into widespread acceptance by the guardians
of academic excellence (such as Research Assessment Exercise panels), and hence
there is little evidence of it in academic practice. Instead, disciplinary silos are
created where only research and theory that fit within a recognized discipline is
granted credence.
Perhaps surprisingly, even within the professionally-linked schools, such as
business, healthcare, nursing, social work, policy studies, etcetera, this problem
endures. Practitioners have a refreshingly epicurean and eclectic approach to ideas,
drawing upon and applying themes from the social sciences, the natural sciences and
humanities. Whatever works, fits. Yet the professional PhD seems to be becoming
enmeshed in variations of existing battles, trying to carve out and command territory.
There are increasingly strident calls for the development of indigenous theory
that scholars in these fields can call their own. But such calls are misleading and
counterproductive, serving merely to attempt to establish and discipline the study
of practice. A discourse replete with terms such as the ‘rules and demands of the
discipline’ sits all too inconsistently alongside demands that research be productive
and relevant. Disciplining all too often stratifies, separates, mis-organizes and stifles.
Our argument is that just as practice refuses to be limited to one field within which
it can be captured, so to should we look at academic theory and research, to attempt
to describe practice.
A further demand that perhaps gains the most purchase within the professional
schools is that of relevance. Governments, seeking greater ‘value’ from their
subsidisation of research and teaching within universities are pleading for greater
practicality and relevance. As such, relevance is couched in a particular way – that
of meeting the demands of employers, businesses and established organizations –
and it is unsurprising that it has enormous strength in the fields of management
and organization. Yet this discourse permeates the whole academy, closing out
earlier definitions of relevance (such as ‘political relevance’). The PhD has become
embroiled in the ‘relevance’ debate – both in terms of what should be studied but
also as to what might be considered a valuable PhD. In many cases, the PhD has,
rightly perhaps, become more clearly a staging post in the pursuit of an academic
career. It threatens to become an important part of the generation and ossification
of academic disciplines, but at the same time, the PhD is becoming less about
independent thought and increasingly is being commodified.
The goal and effective assessment of a PhD for professional practitioners must
differ from academic clichés, not least because commodification and professional
practice are incommensurate. The professions when commodified cease to be

4
 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

professions and become (what Bernard Stiegler calls) ‘proletariatized’ (2009),

referring to the standardized and factory-like routines of commodified production.
There is a technology of writing a thesis and there are persons and universities that
program PhD writing in a factory-like manner. Theses can be produced more or less
on an assembly-line basis. And just as factory workers are often demotivated by
their work and perhaps better replaced by robots, researchers and supervisors lose in
such programs their independent and creative involvement (if they ever had it), and
perhaps they can better be (at least partially) replaced by intelligent software. ‘Best
research practices’ often turn out to be the least creative and most proceduralized.
The central endeavour of the PhD is that of writing a book – essentially the
book that the student wants to write. It is a book that intends to produce a coherent
statement that can be and is defended by readings and observations. The readings are
drawn from the academy, the observations are drawn from practice. But the coherent
statement – the heart of the book – does not, and is not intended to, solely speak to
academia. It does not have the goal of further entrenching an academic discipline.
Rather, it is intended to speak to practitioners about practice in a theoretically
informed way, drawing upon and rigorously analysing experiences and observations
that practitioners relate to.
In our experience, writing the thesis is not just a necessary chore and supervision is
a serious intellectual activity. Thus, we have to return to the concept of ‘significance’.
What is it that makes the research meaningful? There are obviously many different
possible ways to approach such a big question. In terms of this book, we address
it from the perspective of the experienced practitioner who is writing a thesis and
the supervisor that values post-experience research and researchers. Most theses are
written by very bright (relatively) young graduate students with little or no work
experience. We chose in this book (and before that in our work) for another target
group. We invited experienced professionals to write their theses with us. Almost
anything that had to do with their work experience was a possible theme of research.
We approached the research from an ethical and methodological perspective. Our
concern was: ‘What does it take to write a serious practice-based thesis?’
We did not approach the research from one traditional social science discipline or
field. The research did not have to be sociological, psychological or whatever, but
it did have to be thoroughly engaged with practice and be able to examine issues
of practice with intellectual rigour. Our backgrounds are in management schools,
faculties of education (pedagogy) and in the field of healthcare and thus we too are
grounded in professional schools rather than discipline – based departments. We
were convinced that what is meaningful in practice all too easily gets distorted and
lost when interrogated through narrow research questions. Most real-life problems
are entangled with their social context, revolve around individual questions of
identity, and are enclosed by political-economic factors. To gain a coherent picture
of everyday issues capable of cogent analysis, one typically needs to approach them
in a multidisciplinary manner. Our approach was therefore to emphasize problem-
based research in which the researchers take an issue that they have experienced

5
INTRODUCTION

(and were sure that was important both to themselves and to others), and then attempt
to describe, analyse and craft a response to that problem. In a successful thesis – and
there were many – the intellectual rigor of the research cast new light or perspectives
on the problem. Thus it was not so much that problem-solving occurred as that a
new way of framing (and therefore understanding) the problem was achieved, which
allowed further research and analysis into what to do. We have not so much worked
in an action research mode as in one characterized by ethnographic exploration
and reflection. The description of professional change via direct measures for
improvement was not our first goal, and we have championed new insight and the re-
framing of practice rather than problem-solving or the implementation of solutions.
We have nothing in principle against action research, but we found that students
wanted to delve deeper into problem definitions than is typical within action research,
and we wanted to honour their choice and to see where such research would lead.
The diagnosis phase of action research can, of course, be rigorous but we would
suggest that one of the strengths of action research in some contexts becomes an
obstacle in the type of research that we are advocating. In action research, typically,
the researcher has to engage with the target group, and come to agreement about
the nature of the problem to be studied and what action steps are to be attempted,
before the research gets started. This dialogue can create a shared sense of purpose
among participants but it does mean that problem description and analysis is merely
a preliminary phase that has to carried out before the research can really start and
is thus swiftly consigned to a black box that will not be re-opened. Our researchers
needed several years of ethnographic experience and reading, which they were able
to deploy to generate problem definitions that are insightful, challenging and could
propose something novel. Action research rushes to define the problem that requires
action and does not match the time and energy our students put into the creative
appraisal of what the practical problem might be.
Our experience, that we write about here, is mainly with supervising critical
ethnographies of practice. Fairly quickly, a self-strengthening feedback loop
developed between us and a group of practitioners. The word was out, if you
wanted to study normative professionalism ethnographically towards a PhD, you
were welcome. While the UvH Utrecht post-experience PhD program served as
the laboratory for the ideas and work presented here, we also have links to other
universities, especially the University of Leicester in the UK. And we have been
involved in practitioner-research initiatives in the USA, France and Japan.
This book is, to some degree, an ethnography of doing practice-based ethnography,
but our goal is not to describe the culture or organization of any particular program,
but to reveal how practitioner research can be an avenue for doing a PhD. The
practitioner PhD is not intended to stand against traditional or other alternative paths
to a PhD. PhD study has always been a broad church with substantial differences
across disciplines and between countries. A natural sciences PhD differs from one
in the humanities and with good reason. Differing educational systems have led to
differences in what is seen to be relevant and, just as importantly, what might not.

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 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

Our goal here is to explore what is relevant in the study for a PhD for professional
practitioners.
This does raise a number of substantial issues. There are advantages to models of
PhD study within set fields, which are not going to be realised within a professional
PhD. When discipline-based models mould the student to the system, there is less
demand for engagement by the supervisory team. By contrast, if the goal is to support
the students in the writing of the book that they wish to write, then there is a demand
for dialogue and openness. Rather than the possession of the other, we envisage
Socratic dialogue in which a Levinasian openness to the other becomes paramount.
As this book proceeds, we will return to Emmanuel Lévinas’ ontological ethics,
wherein he argues that human Being is characterized by our being-to-the-other
(1969, 1981, 1998, 2001, 2006a, 2006b). For us, research entails openness to the
other. Research is all about trying to know things about people, circumstances and
contexts. Such human knowing can be full of respect, justice and wisdom; but it can
also be repressive, manipulative and ideologically toxic. We assume that ‘relevant’
research can lead somehow towards ‘good’ research, but this is not certain and we
will investigate this relationship with care.
First, there is the problem of what knowledge is ‘relevant’. A distinction has been
proposed between academic and professional practice (Argyris and Schon, 1974)
or Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994). Academic, or Mode 1
knowledge, supposedly follows the ‘scientific method’, or ‘empirical cycle’,
or ‘hypothetico-deductive reasoning’, while practitioners follow a pragmatic,
embedded, problem-solving Mode 2 approach.
The distinction is important and helps illuminate much of the existing discussion.
But there are dangers, particularly when an academic mode is prioritised above a
practitioner mode. Traditionally, within the academy, Mode 1 knowledge is prized.
Mode 1 or (post-)positivist research tries to make use of quantitative data collection,
with the researcher attempting to be objective; and aims to demonstrate the (lack of)
validity of an hypothesis that illuminates some key aspect to the research question.
Practitioner researchers know a lot about practice but do not think in terms of theory-
driven research questions. Their research motivation is almost always grounded in
lived-experience. They are amazed about something that has happened, or surprised
by what was possible, or horror-stricken by some development. Their weakest side is
theory; they are normally not well versed in ‘high theory’. Their knowledge of post-
structuralism, institutional theory, consciousness studies, or other contemporary
theoretical debates, is limited. Their reading is practice-driven and has to develop in
depth and scope while doing the PhD.
Mode 2 is proposed as the alternative to Mode 1. It focuses on practitioner
knowledge, wherein qualitative data predominates and professional dilemmas or
problems are submitted to descriptive study. In the struggle between Mode 1 and
Mode 2 research, Mode 2 is criticized for its lack of distance from practice and its
inability to be rigorous. If research outcomes have to be validated by the researched,
the research, in effect, is limited to what the practitioners are willing to acknowledge

7
INTRODUCTION

and corroborate about themselves. Blind spots remain hidden from sight. Why would
the researched accept criticism of their professional group that may well hurt their
position? Why let practice be problematized if that will only produce resentment and
perhaps damage one’s professional position? The uncritical acceptance, such as that
by Reason et al., of Mode 2 knowledge, easily opens us to: ‘I am a practitioner, I
know my practice, and thus what I say is true.’ Such a position is perhaps even more
vacuous than those produced by rarefied academic posturing. Untempered embrace
of common sense needs to be avoided. The uncritical acceptance of professional
prejudice, philosophically called (by Edmund Husserl, 1970) the ‘natural attitude’,
leads to uncritical and sloppy thinking. Practitioners are not always right. Practice
is important, familiarity with practice can help one to pose important questions, but
research is about rigor and the questioning of assumptions.
We try here to work with our students’ strengths. They know a lot about their
practice and can point to paradoxes, anomalies and conflicts that they have
experienced. Indeed, such events will often have been the trigger that spurred them
on to undertake a PhD. They will often have good hunches about which aspects of
practice are important and are worthy of further investigation. Often, things that look
like a big deal from the outside may be nothing of the kind to engaged practitioners;
while what initially may seem to the disinterested observer to be no more than minor
change or conflict can, if probed, reveal profound issues. The researchers know
where the bodies are – what important issues lie hidden. Thus our approach can be
seen as a joint project that resembles a detective novel. There was a corpse in the
closet – at first we don’t know whose corpse or why they died or, maybe, even in
whose closet. In order to make sense of what has happened, to structure our search
for clues, theory helps – it gives vital hints about what is to be found and where.
Research gets under way with ethnographic description of practice. The researchers
combined their experience with data collection in situ, followed by more rigorous
theoretical reflection. Comparison of experience with qualitatively collected data,
typically interviews and observation, is pretty much a standard research path in the
social sciences. But it can leave the researcher open to the non-critical stance of
Mode 2 research. In response, we have proposed (just a little bit tongue-in-cheek)
to pursue Mode 3 research. Mode 1 and 2 both assume that research should be
‘objective’. Mode 3, by contrast, highlights the normative significance of what is
researched, since the evaluation of practice has, by definition, to be value-laden.
One can only evaluate in terms of norms, and this leads ineluctably to an ‘ethics’.
Practitioner research starts by addressing the question: ‘Is this good practice?’ which
in turn drives to questioning, why (or why not) and how so? It studies ‘normative
professionalism’ and therefore the ethical assumptions that underlie what might be
good and/or bad practice. It investigates the values that locate practical judgment
and action. It examines how the professional’s ‘authority’ is defined and justified.
Effectively, all professional action has to have an ethical grounding since its
interventions are normative and value-laden. When practitioner researchers feel that
something is ‘wrong’, there will be an ethical dilemma involved at some level.

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 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

It can seem that the norms of practice and the norms of research are in conflict –
and this potential conflict invites investigation and critical examination. Our goal is
to keep both academic and practitioner knowledge in play at the same time. Neither
academic distance nor simple practitioner statements asserting that this-is-how-it-is,
suffice. Practice-based researchers do not, in the first place, look for or at themes
that are solely discipline- or problem-driven. Their concentration on the critical and
evaluative examination of professional practice requires the cross-fertilization of
traditional academic knowledge with practitioner awareness. This avoids the problem
of blind empiricism, while developing the critical clarification of descriptive data.
Rigour in practitioner PhDs requires students to be aware of the decisions they
make and that they be reflexive in their analyses. Theses have to be grounded in ideas.
Authors may defer to the Lévinas-es, Derrida-s and Lacan-s (to name a few of the
fundamental thinkers or creators of theory who appear in these pages) of this world.
PhD students also have to attend to their readers by explaining why they made the
choices that they did, and how they justify them. In their examination of empirical
material and case construction, methodological and reflexive awareness has to be
demonstrated. Students are asked, and have to answer, questions such as: ‘How did
you understand that case, and how did you act upon your understanding?’ Similarly,
students make positivistic and/or realist statements, but they need to be aware that
these are statements, and thus are theoretically constructed. The PhD is about the act
of writing and, in writing, you have to defer to others by explaining what you have
done, which sources you have used, and by offering further explanations.
A PhD thesis defers to the university; it has to answer to academe’s criteria,
precedents and assumptions. In a practitioner PhD the role of theory is different
to that of a traditional PhD, as are the sources. Since the professional doctorate is
not discipline driven, it is not forced to fit the disciplines of psychology, sociology,
economics, anthropology or philosophy, but rather uses them to inform the study. It
does not get drawn into a field but instead looks to combine fields, if sometimes only
that of theory and practice. The rigour, for a book that draws heavily upon fundamental
theory, such as that of philosophy, is not that of a philosophy department, but instead
that of exegesis. The student will be expected to have read and understood the ideas,
but will concentrate on application rather than placing the ideas within a specific
intellectual history. This book attempts to do the same. It is not a sociological text
but is informed by sociology, and seeks to see how social thought might be applied.
What then makes for a good practitioner PhD? We have already suggested that
it cannot and should not be measured against disciplinary standards alone. Instead,
we argue, the heart of the thesis must show rigorous reflection on, and evaluation of,
practice. In so doing, it opens possibilities; and in so doing, shows relevance to other
practitioners. In terms of rigour, the writer must show that she or he understands her
or his own assumptions, textual strategies, authorial persona and the critical tools
that they deploy. The idea of relevance can be used as a counter to academic rigour in
order to evade judgement. In practitioner theses, the reader has to be convinced that
the writer was ‘really there’ – that they have known and experienced the research

9
INTRODUCTION

site, and reflected on how to present this experience. This ‘reality effect’ has to
be purposefully created and intentionally used to make the thesis’ point. Relevance
here, we suggest, has more to do with Kant’s investigation of how understanding is
produced, than with Marx’s analysis of economic politics. The writer needs to know
and to share with us how her or his perception operates both in observation and in
writing. The researcher has to be self-aware: as witness to events; as interpreter of
occurrences, and; as author. It is the researcher’s reflexive excellence that sets him
or her off from non-researchers. Marxist commitment to emancipation or social-
economic justice, however important these may be, does not provide the primary
observational rigour to practice required of the practitioner thesis.
Nonetheless, the theme of relevance that runs through this text can still be
poisonous. It is clear that this type of PhD is not for everyone and that it relies upon
a certain level of exclusivity. If every practitioner were to attempt a PhD in this way,
there would soon be no scope left for originality. For the time being, so few sites of
practice have been critically described and analysed that there is plenty of uncharted
territory for the practitioner PhD.
Practitioner PhDs try to make sense of something. This is partly mundane – the
manuscript has to be cognitively tight and well-crafted – but also more fundamental,in
that writing such a book entails ‘sense-making’: the effort to understand; to analyse;
and to make known. A PhD thesis is not just a task or a test but an effort at explanation,
that is meant to be read and discussed. PhD theses, which only fill space on a shelf in
a professor’s study or university library, or float away into cyber-space, never to be
looked at or thought about again, have only done half their work. Practitioner theses
lead to making a journey ‘from practice to practice’ – they are intended to inform the
practices that they examine. Writing becomes an act of exploration of oneself and of
others, meant for oneself and for others.
Through writing, one exteriorizes oneself in text. Exteriorization is a crucial
means of self-discovery and of identity creation. The writer creates a mirror, through
writing the text, in which she or he can critically scrutinise her or himself. The
text describes what has been observed and allows reflection on the researched and
researcher’s experience. The researcher exteriorizes both the researched and her- or
himself. The researcher and the researched are captured by text, through description,
observation and ideas. Unsurprisingly, then, this exteriorization opens up some
complex ethical issues.
What sort of due, in terms of respect and fairness, does the researcher owe the
researched? Often the researched have never been knowingly exteriorized in text,
and even more rarely exteriorise themselves. It is only because the researcher has
undertaken to do research that a text has been produced about the site studied and the
people in the site and the events that happened there; all of which needs to be linked
with an overlay of critical examination. But the people who appear in the text are not
the same as the people who stay behind at the site – the researcher at the very least
co-creates the identities found in the book. And, in one sense, these are the identities
that endure, for without the researcher, the school studied, the nurses interviewed,

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 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

the police officers observed would, in all probability, leave but isolated smatterings
of indistinct text behind.
Also, in this process, the researcher produces a new self or alter-ego. The thesis
becomes a mirror in which can be seen reflections of the author’s concerns, foibles,
hopes and passions. A PhD thesis is an extended statement, driven by serious
consideration, and its production forces the author to rethink many things, and to
re-examine and restate priorities. Given the topic of a practitioner thesis, this almost
inevitably includes testimony about self and other, society and ethics, values and
possibilities.
This book has to be practice-directed if it is not to fall into performative self-
contradiction. If the research is all about social processes and the meaning of
relationships, then surely we must ourselves take care as to how we consider processes
and relationships as we develop and present our ideas and findings. Thus, since this
is a book about research as relationship, it carries a concomitant demand that it must
itself explore relationships. We do so, amongst other things, by including fairly long
passages from practitioner researchers, where they describe their own experiences.
Our aim is not primarily to conceptually define ‘relevance’ in the practitioner thesis,
or to philosophize about it; rather we seek to illustrate how relevance is being sought
in practice-based research.
We oppose the ‘proletariatization’ of research whereby the thesis becomes a
routine task to be performed according to standardized rules. We argue that we
need to (re-)territorialize research and that practitioner research is one means of
so doing. Done well, research is unavoidably dedicated to community, to place,
and to considerations of relatedness. Yet there is an aporia or unaccounted for, and
unaccountable, hole in our logic. We have produced a book and therefore you are
reading here a reified version of relatedness – a relatedness that you are not truly part
of. Nonetheless, we will attempt to display how ‘relevance’ can be seen as research
that is ethically reflected upon. This requires that ideas are presented as embedded in
context, such as through ethnography.
We claim that what is presented in this book is really the way research can and
has been done – which carries, of course, a realist ‘truth claim’. And as part of
the justification, we will attempt to be responsible in our ethnographic portrayal
of the doing of research. We have triangulated our data between practitioner-
researchers, thesis supervisors and third-parties, such as: books and articles about
thesis supervision, other faculty who knew the research discussed, and on occasion
the researched.
Such an approach excludes auto-ethnography, not least because auto-ethnography
prioritizes the writer’s product over context. We are trying here to produce a book
primarily about the relevant practitioner PhD, not one about ourselves (although, of
course, we are mindful as to what we have already said as to the text being a mirror).
Autoethnography seemingly licenses the author to structure data into whatever
emplotment desired. For instance, Carolyn Ellis’ ‘The Ethnographic I’ (2003) claims
to be an ethnography of research methodology; but she has admitted that the course

11
INTRODUCTION

described in the book never took place, the emplotment was her creation and the
emotional out-pouring between the participants was her emphasis. Ellis’ choices –
such as employing fiction, and putting ‘sentimentality’ above ‘learning’ or ‘social
impact’ – produce a particular outcome but one that strikes a discordant note with
what we see as important in the practitioner PhD.
Context is very important to us. Social research is embedded in circumstances
and intentionality – it is historically and situationally specific. The philosophy
of science, from Walter Benjamin to Paul Feyerabend, from Edmund Husserl to
John Dewey, from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Jacques Derrida, has denounced the
idealised ‘natural attitude’ of the hard sciences as naive, particularly when applied
to a social setting, and has instead insisted upon a critical self-reflective stance. It
makes no sense to act as if there were simply a ‘real’ world out there that is just
waiting to be discovered and to attempt to codify the immutable laws governing its
actions.
This book is not going to re-run the epistemological arguments at any length;
suffice it to say that we accept that text is different from lived social process, that
human perception always occurs in specifically human forms, and that human
consciousness and identity are grounded in language which is context-bound.
Language-based accounts, ours or those in PhD theses, are constructed, fragile and
largely temporary. It is all a matter of relationships; between people, ideas, theories
and values.
Relational thinking focuses on the nature and quality of interactions. Relatedness
has to be described in detail and to be explored with great care. To achieve this,
the so-called ‘turn to affectivity’ is an important ‘move’ since the experienced
quality of relatedness is indeed crucial to social research. How researchers react
to the researched and to their supervisors plays a major role in doing a PhD. PhD
candidates, when asked about ‘doing their thesis’, often start to talk about the
supervision relationship, but that relationship is almost always left out of the thesis
itself (it might, in the most etiolated way, appear in the acknowledgements). Thus,
what seems to be experienced as a key social factor of doing research when engaged
in the process, remains hidden in the final text. We aim to reveal the process of
relevant research and to do that we believe it is crucial to explore the relationships
between the researcher, their supervisors and the university. And ‘affect’, when seen
as involvement, commitment, belief and engagement, plays a key role.
Our book begins with the assumptions and ideas presented in this ‘Introduction’.
It will explore the becoming of practitioner thesis writing. How do the students
develop in common? What norms support them in their work? In what sense is the
thesis relevant? How is the university meaningful and historically significant? What
answers can we give to the ‘Why write a PhD’ question, and why do we think that
the answers are important?
We will address all of this in three stages. In the first, we explore the intellectual
and political relevance of practitioner research. In the second, we develop our
reflection of the relationship between normative professionalism and doing research.

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 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

And in the third, we attend to the personal development that comes with the process
of doing a PhD.

A CASE

Throughout the book we present extended passages wherein practitioner researchers

describe their own work, their questions and ideas. The following composite text
summarizes a thesis writer’s experience. Because this is an ‘Introduction’ and we
want to paint a broad picture of practitioner thesis writing rather than highlight
particular elements, exceptionally in the text that follows, we have used materials
from several students and stitched them together to form a single story. All the other
practitioner texts you will meet are drawn from single individuals.

Doing a PhD was a major challenge. I am and have always been stubborn.
I want to do things my way. I know and I realize that “my way” really is often
profoundly influenced by others, but that is a rationalization. I still feel as if it was
my decision to do the PhD and that I did it in my own way.
I did my Masters at Lancaster University in B & O (Behavior and Organization)
when Bob Cooper [then a professor in Organization] was still there. Bob thrived
on conflict. If Frank Blackler wasn’t a philistine, then someone else was fake, or
another an idiot. Bob liked to fight – he was fuelled by anger.
He shifted our awareness away from surface platitudes and towards examining
the reverse-image of what seemingly happens. Instead of seeing everyday
certainties he taught us to see the hidden assumptions. It really is amazing that
organizations continue day-in, day-out just the same; as if nothing ever happened.
How is this fantasy of normality created and maintained? It takes a lot of work
and energy to not see that this person has been replaced, that another has given
up in despair, or that a whole product-line has been cancelled. The most dramatic
things happen but we seem to prefer to see normality. We have learned to think
in terms of organization. And we are so firm in our commitment to that paradigm
that we do not see change, action and disorder.
Disorganization is everywhere and proximal [close] observation shows lots
of chaos, alteration and uncertainty. So we look far away – we concentrate on
the distal, never seeing what is near to us. Research tells us how not to see what
is right in front of us. It focuses us on abstractions that make society seem safe,
secure, and ordered.
De-deconstructing organization came to fascinate me. I’d learned from Bob to
do deconstruction – to see the artificiality of the ‘text of managing’ and its fixation
on security, order and authority. But deconstructing organization ultimately left
me paralyzed. I was struggling to do anything useful with deconstruction in
the training institute where I worked. I could show trainees – volunteers who

13
INTRODUCTION

would be sent out to South America on sustainable environment projects – how

government policies are often the opposite of what they seem to be. I could take
apart the rhetoric of sustainability and corporate social responsibility, of the big
raw material exploitation firms. I could show that their rules and ethical codes
were ‘laws’ without justice. I could use Lyotard’s famous discussion of native
people’s logic and the différend, or the absolute incommensurability of logics
between native people and European ‘law’. And I could show how native peoples
have no chance of exerting their ‘rights’ because their ‘rights’ do not and cannot
exist in a legal system that rejects their gods, mysteries and native beliefs. But
was that really ‘helping’?
Some members of the training institute believed that they could simply ‘do
good’ and that the native peoples could get back their land and be freed of neo-
colonial political regimes. But I never believed that modern European management
could really help much. The principles and logic of managing cannot deal with
the mystic truths of identity of the native peoples. ‘Managing’ the native peoples,
so that they become wealthy, just makes them hopelessly passive – without
their beliefs and land, they have no identity. Managers have tried to give them
education, health and accommodation, but they were simultaneously denying
them their identity, place and beliefs. European social engineering could only
achieve the opposite of what it claimed to intend. It wasn’t the content of our
projects, but how we planned them that was the essential problem.
I went to Bob and tried to explain – Derrida and Lyotard had become important
to my understanding of the world, but my conundrum was that I was becoming
more and more paralyzed. I could now see even more starkly the problems, but
I now knew even less than when I had started my MA as to how to engage with
the problems, how to intervene, and what I could or should do.
Bob told me to open up more to the ideas, to read Derrida and Lyotard once
again – this time more closely. I left in despair: I did not know what to do at
all. I went to Steve Ackroyd and Collin Brown, and pretty much cried on their
shoulders. They helped me to write an evaluation of the training programmes, and
to compare what the trainees expected, what they felt they got immediately after
the programme, and their feedback after three months in the field.
The trainees wanted a simplified version of the world, where there were
answers to all the questions. Their training had produced a fiction of causality
and order. The South American Indians were exploited, the corporations were
unethically profit driven; the local elites were only filling their own pockets. The
trainees felt that they would go out into the native communities, describe the
native way of life, and thereby produce knowledge justifying native claims for
a way of life that could support their cultural autonomy. But once the trainees
went into the field, if they were at all sensitive, they discovered that there was an
insurmountable gap between themselves and the Indians. They had no idea how
to translate the Indian’s world to their own. The assumption of an underlying

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 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

universal reason, which would allow them to grasp and understand the other, was
denied in practice. Most trainees, once they became field workers, discovered
that their initial ambition was absurd and that their community development
techniques were inadequate.
Then, in the feedback, some said that they had recalled what I’d said and had
started to talk about the différend. I was pleased to hear that my teaching had given
them something with which to survive the shock of the field. My work seemed to
have some purpose. But my crisis in understanding and being able to intervene
simply appeared to have been transferred to the trainees. I could successfully
exteriorize my problem because it really was their problem, as well. I got my
Masters – but I had very mixed emotions about it all. I had developed my ability
to know that I did not understand; is that what an MA is, and should be all about?
I applied to an America multinational as a trainer and organizational
development (OD) programme designer, and got the job. I was off into the heady
world of OD – Senge, dialogue and organizational learning were the catchwords.
Scenario-building was “in” and I became a scenario-building facilitator. But after
five years, the multinational downsized and threw out all internal OD and training.
I could go on doing scenario planning, but it would now be as a freelancer. I
picked up a few assignments and trousered a handsome redundancy pay-off. But
I was bored with dividing the world into twos, to produce two by twos, to create
‘futures’ that seemed far too artificial to me. And the awareness developed in
Lancaster was creeping back to bother me.
I had left Lancaster utterly stymied at the end of my Masters, unable to get
myself out of a black-hole. Since then, in many ways, I had repressed what I
had learned. But now the ideas all returned – scenarios were an example of
the same thought pretensions or logocentricism that I had learned on the MA
to abhor. What we did as scenario builders was repress change, the unexpected
and transformation. We created the illusion that just one more reading of the
text – this time paying attention to figures, predictions and interview data –could
make the unknown knowable. But of course, it missed the inescapable problem
that society and organization are always emergent. We don’t live in a Newtonian
world of clockwork predictability, but in a dynamic one that is endlessly changing
and developing. My scenario work was really just producing mental pacifiers or
dummies.
I had worked on a big project for an investment bank. The scenario that seemed
the most worth pursuing was the one where the bank would destroy itself through
greed. The bank’s risk management amounted to selling everything that was
risky as quickly as possible to someone else. The bank ignored that the financial
system as a whole was being made ever more fragile by such activities. It insisted
on seeing banking as a pea game, where as long as the pea [of risk] was under
somebody else’s shell, they would win. But if we looked at banking as a system –
with all financial institutions linked to one another – we were obviously into a

15
INTRODUCTION

logic where risk was being constantly increased. Someday, inevitably, it would
all go very wrong. My superiors called me in and told my that my hyper-risk
scenario had to be abandoned. Banking as hyper-real, with trading-on risk leading
to disaster, was not discussable. I had to change the scenarios to exclude ‘hyper-
risk’. At this point, I saw that I was really just an instrument for disseminating
propaganda. I had to make the world look logical when I knew it wasn’t. Scenario
building was just too ugly a lie – I wanted and needed out.
I applied to Cornwall University to do a Phd. They were happy to have me as
I could teach undergraduate organizational studies from day one, with lots of the
practical illustrations that undergrads thirst for. I was now a mature student doing
a PhD with a significant teaching load. I still had a few consulting tasks, such as
doing scenario construction for the Boy Scouts, to pay the bills. But now I was
supposed to do ‘research’. I was lucky when I was at Cornwall for there were five
of us, all mature students, all practitioners, and all willing to read and discuss.
I wanted to know how theory could enable me to act rather than just paralyze
me. I had decided to write about WebMind – a proto-artificial intelligence firm
that I had had as a client. WebMind was a well-invested start-up with some $50
million of initial capital. It was a distributed company with management working
at its headquarters in New York, and artificial intelligence experts in Russia and
Brazil. An effect of its distributed structure was that an unusual amount of the
internal communication was by email. People sitting next to one another would
even communicate by email because they’d often want to bring someone else
from one of the other sites into their conversation later. When I had done scenario
work with them, they’d copied me into everything. I had thousands of emails and
I had permission to use and study them, however I wished.
I was convinced that the investors who had put money into WebMind had no
idea what the company was really doing, or what commercial prospects it could
have to earn back even the initial capital, let alone show a return. The scientists
who ran WebMind saw it as an amazing lark – as long as they were having fun,
they were happy. They had no future plans and didn’t want to make any. AI was
a sort of chimera to them – a new and unknowable form of intelligence that was
mystically exciting to pursue. They did computing out of fascination. They were
totally mesmerized by the ideal of AI – of a total machine-based knowledge that
would ‘know’ more than humans.
What interested me was the lack of interconnectedness or of any sort of realistic
relationship between the investors, managers and programmers. The investors
had a fantasy of Big Bucks – headed by the next generation of AI able in real time
to ‘know’ everything on the internet (whatever that might mean), which would
make them rich. The scientists were mesmerized by code – its beauty, simplicity
and unlimited potential. Neither belief was socially grounded; it was all ideology.
WebMind thrived on belief in futures that had captured peoples’ minds and souls
because of the intellectual and/or monetary power that they seemed to promise.

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 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

I was fascinated by how collective belief could be so wrong, illusionary and,

ultimately, absurd.
A key to WebMind was that it had a charismatic leader who, in retrospect,
seems to have been totally amoral. He was a classic geek with bad skin, often
unshaven and apparently unwashed. One of his claims to fame was that he had
met his wife to be in a brothel where the other geeks had brought him after he
had failed so often with women on a non-cash basis. When he re-met her the next
day on the MIT campus – where it turned out she was a fellow student – their
relationship was born. A couple of kids later, he discovered that wealth was an
aphrodisiac and made use of it as much as he could. It would all have seemed a
caricature, if it wasn’t all ‘true’.
What fascinated me was that each person seemed to have been locked into
their own fantasy world of power and success. No one really communicated
with anyone else. There were thousands of emails, but they didn’t show any
connection between the writers, or with the world outside the company. They
were all in geek-language, about mad inventions of computers, code and power. I
let a Professor in AI and Management read the AI stuff; she was amazed. It was all
gibberish. No such AI possibility was seriously entertained by anyone in the field.
Such unwelcome incursions from the outside world didn’t stop WebMind. The
technical leader simply accused everyone else of having closed minds, of being
petty and unimaginative, and unable to see the real possibilities. He claimed to
be able to see the truth in a world of delusion. But how could the whole world be
wrong and only he right? And how could so many choose to accept the illusion?
My thesis supervisor was concerned with what I wanted to make of the data.
The sheer amount of emails made it impossible to claim that any interpretation
could achieve closure. The material could support very different perspectives and
analyses. Did I want to concentrate on New York versus the periphery – opening
up questions as to whether the people in the centre shared an understanding with
those in Brazil or Russia? The constant infighting and rivalries of New York were
not matched elsewhere. The peripherals focused on their own survival. Whatever
madness would come from New York, they knew they had to ‘go with the flow’ to
keep their jobs. They tried to interpret orders from New York in a way that allowed
them to produce something that justified their presence. The social norms were so
different in Brazil and Russia that the two sub-offices never managed to form a
front against New York. They remained subservient and, it seemed, overwhelmed
by how much money there was.
In New York, there were constant struggles for power, funding and favours,
and thus gossip, backstabbing and rumour-mongering prevailed. The CEO loved
to set one group or person off against another. But he, and only he, had the ability
to ‘charm’ the investors – he had the ‘golden tongue’ that promised gold mines
and they believed him.

17
INTRODUCTION

Who or what did I really want to study? Was it the CEO’s velvety touch and
seductive role? Was it the various programmers in New York and how they
submitted to being pitted against one another? Was it the relationship between
the centre and the periphery? Was it the self-delusional role of the investors
who could and should have brought in outside advice? What was it that I really
wanted to know, and who was ‘I’ that I had that particular knowledge need? Did
I want to learn about project management, AI, hyper-reality, the choice to not
communicate, or something else entirely? My supervisor kept hammering at the
key issue: ‘How do you define your knowledge need, and why do you define it as
you do?” I had worked for WebMind. I had, in bad faith, condoned the illusion.
I knew that with conversation analysis, I could verify the verbal and
communicative terror of the CEO. With thematic analysis, I could identify the
norms and values of the developers. With interviews, I could go back to several
of the key players to study the self-denial and failure of the investors. There
were numerous possibilities, what were my criteria of choice? It is not that one
perspective or another was ‘better’ than all the others. Each perspective answered
to some slightly different interest or need. The ‘data’ had many possible faces or
identities. I would have to be responsible for the perspective I chose.
Repeatedly, my supervisor called me to task. I had to choose what I wanted to
analyse and understand. I was in danger of showing a lack of respect, focus, and
depth towards the material. I needed to do justice to what I examined; and ‘doing
justice’ cannot be achieved by just rule-following. Cookbook methodology, or the
blind application of research techniques, was unacceptable. Research techniques
require care and skill; but even more so, they have to be chosen. Every email,
interview or observation was not a nail, and I was not expected to only use a
hammer.
I chose the ethics of relationship as my theme, and Lacan and Levinas became
my key theoretical sources. It was a painful choice because I had not acquitted
myself well in my dealings with WebMind. I had been just as hyperreal and
artificial as all the rest. My relationships with others had been simulated. No
acknowledgement of Other had occurred. I had practiced interpersonal and
organizational irresponsibility.
I assumed that Lacan was right and that the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ are a relationship
of the one and the other, i.e. of various persons, aspects of personality, and forms
of dependency and relationship. Lacan defines the fundamentally complex and
multifaceted socially constituted ‘self’ relationally. And Levinas defines an
ethics grounded in the respect, acknowledgement, and presence to other that
I had lacked. My supervisor brought me (at a conference) into contact with John
Roberts [a professor of ethics and accountability] who became an important
contact for me in my defining of my work. Slowly I identified the crisis I had
handled so badly. And with the advice of my fellow PhD students and the faculty
advisor, I started to write about the breakdown of ethics I had experienced.

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 WHY WRITE OR SUPERVISE A PRACTITIONER PHD?

Ethics has to do with relatedness. Responsibility is in one’s rapport to others.

Others (as in Actor Network Theory) can be computer codes or AI algorithms;
Others are also the people who fund one, or one works with, or who form one’s
intended audience. Crucial to WebMind was that it was a folly with no Other. No
one took any Other, whether it be scientific, human or social, seriously. Everyone
accepted self-enclosure and the ‘truth’ they made for themselves. If there was
no sociability, there was no accountability, and no responsibility. WebMind was
so many monads all enjoying their fantasies of grandeur. The fantasy cost some
people fifty million dollars before it crashed. Finally, some consultants shouted
– ‘The Emperor has no clothes’. Not because they were any more ethical or
concerned with Other than the rest, but because they were afraid that if they didn’t
shout, they could become liable for the losses.
Denial of ‘Other’ – that is, of every ‘other’ – led to disaster. Other is the
principle of diversity and variety – otherness disrupts the notion that there is
‘one truth or knowledge’, and forces people to acknowledge incompleteness and
complexity. In the ethics of complexity the Other can be the difference that makes
a difference. In the multiplicity of relationships, history and change, any element
or moment can have a nonlinear effect on the rest. WebMind had produced an
idée fixe – an insane assertion of will or hubris over complexity, possibility and
otherness. Towards the end, it probably was in bad faith in that it was visibly
exploitative, narcissistic and fundamentally egoistic. My and others’ Faustian
deals with WebMind had, at the time, enthralled me and them. The illusion of
unlimited success and boundless wealth had overwhelmed all other ideas or
emotions. I wrote about greed, pride and self-destructive narcissism. Troubling
for me, the CEO seems unchanged and totally unrepentant, while the financers
have gone on to even bigger losses and frauds. Because I had chosen to write a
PhD, I was concerned about ideas, communicating and others. The différend of
WebMind had overpowered almost everything in its path.
What had I found at Cornwall? There were others who were eager to talk,
reflect and debate with me. And it was a very open discussion. I was fascinated
by the perversions of WebMind and I had been seduced by its toxins. In the
thesis, I showed how pride and imagined power had overwhelmed everything
else. The losses were not borne by the principal players – they did not suffer from
WebMind’s collapse. Ultimately, ordinary taxpayers picked up most of the bills
as it emerged that the fifty million had come from a bank that later had to be
nationalised. It seemed that the more narcissistic you were, the less you were hurt.
Now, after completion, I am still pursuing ideas about the possibilities of
relatedness. I am less stubborn now – well both less and more. I value relatedness
and cooperative work much more than I used to. Intimacy requires self and other.
The autistic world of WebMind seduced, enthralled and alienated. If stubbornness
means the one-sided pursuit of one’s own identity-needs, it is a very dangerous
thing. But if stubbornness can mean being committed to a socially complex

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INTRODUCTION

perspective, where doing justice to other is acknowledged and taken seriously,

then I am even more determined than I used to be. The paradox or aporia of being
determined to acknowledge Other, which requires the combination of openness
and commitment, formed the reflexive rounding off of my thesis. It remains a
theme of enormous concern to me.

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 CHAPTER 1

AS IF WRITING CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

At a certain point, more or less every doctoral student just wants to get their thesis
finished, wrapped up, out of the door, and gone. At first blanche, this appears merely
a pragmatic response intended to put an end to several years of work and intellectual
uncertainty, to be able to finally shed this burden. A thesis is a lot of work, often
taking a long time to complete and, in a culture dominated by a theme of speed,
where everything is supposed to be becoming faster and faster, reflection, care in
expression, and thoroughness are exceptional. These, however, are just the qualities
needed to complete a thesis.
It is at precisely the point at which the thesis really starts to become interesting
that students seem to find it most important to end the process. Our belief is that it
is only late in the process that the ideas and writing become most challenging, both
in regards to the empirical material and the uses of theory. We invite you to imagine
that the thesis resembles a snail’s shell. It is a house that one takes everywhere
with one and it offers protection and security. It is a safe haven and an enclosure to
withdraw into. But it is not something the snail can see, observe and critique: one is
inside the shell and can only look from the inside out, not the outside in. And this is a
significant problem. To complete the thesis, one needs to get outside of it and look at
it as if from a distance. One needs to be able to see one’s assumptions, to recognise
blind spots and limitations. Shucking the shell therefore offers both the possibility
of shedding the burden that the student has been carrying around for years but also
of seeing it from outside for perhaps the first time. The snail metaphor also works at
another level. Snails are seen both as slimy and repugnant and as spicy and delicious.
They are vermin and/or delicacy, depending upon the context and perspective. In
traditional French cuisine, snails are served in their shells, smothered in garlic butter.
But snails are a pest that ruin farmers’ crops and horticulturalists’ gardens, and snail
fever (bilharzia) is a dangerous childhood disease, common where water is not
sanitised. It is as if snails are essentially ambiguous and cannot be reduced to one
aspect.
This ambiguity is also revealed when looking at the PhD as if from a distance.
Looking from the outside-in can be called ‘exteriorization’. One’s text serves as
a mirror to oneself – one sees one’s own world, ideas, and values in what one
researches and in how one chooses to do the research. This view is potentially
illuminating but also has perils, for the researcher can get lost in endless regression
in a whole series of as ifs, such as ‘I see myself in my research’ and, ‘In how I see
myself in my research, I am confronted by myself’. It is as if the research has
become hopelessly and utterly self-absorbing. Every thesis is to some degree about

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its writer’s struggle, identity and passions, but a careful path has to be trodden that
identifies and examines these themes without letting them become the sole point of
the PhD. Of course, within many traditions, these issues do not have to be confronted
at all: there are many textbooks that define whole series of research models and
techniques that researchers may unquestioningly follow. Research techniques have
been so thoroughly defined and described that computer programs have been made
to do the research for you. From SPSS to Atlas, research is reduced to a computer-
assisted activity. At its worst, research appears to be the mere collecting of data
for computer-processing: i.e. one can undertake computer assisted interviewing and
submit it to data analysis software. Researching becomes a set of procedures that
have been defined and mechanized. The researcher seemingly just has to work on
the assembly-line to get results. Research here is not a communicative relationship
to be lived, explored and reflected upon; it is simply automated. But mechanizing
research misses the point. It may produce statistics and corollaries, but it will not
answer to experience. It is an ‘externalization’ of research where almost nothing is
left of researcher autonomy, individuality or uniqueness.
Research that unthinkingly lets exteriorization take over is not, we would argue,
really research at all. No one is actually studying something, since there is no
searching for meaning or significance. Unexamined hypotheses, sloppy thinking
and a mechanistic approach to research, lead to pseudo-rationalization. The data
leading to pseudo-rationalization merely repeats (and re-confirms) ‘common-sense’
prejudices or ‘normal science’ clichés. Statistical relationships may be produced,
but they are not theoretically grounded, critically questioned, or explored by a
rigorous mind. We contend that research needs to entail questioning, analysing and
reflection, and observation needs to be held up to a reflective intellectual process of
investigation. Research does not just entail seeking out endless lists of correlations,
but demands that relatedness is questioned for significance and purpose. Research
cannot provide understanding if it knows nothing of its own assumptions and ignores
its suppositions. When research is automated, it loses its human identity and ceases
to be a living process of knowing. It becomes a shell. Safe, maybe, but closed off
from the world and impervious to it and all its challenges and opportunities.
By contrast, good research opens up possibilities through rendering experience
into text. Texts that explore identities and explore controversy are based around
questions such as: ‘Should children be taught in this way?’; ‘Are the elderly well-
served?’; ‘Are ethical consultants ethical?’; and ‘Do accountants account properly
for themselves?’ Such issues change by being described, examined and analysed –
that is via ‘externalization’. They are problematized and the hitherto routine is made
examinable and questionable. Previously unremarkable daily habits that seemed
self-evidently appropriate become issues to be examined, where themes are debated
and practices are questioned. Practitioners often are none-too-pleased with the effect
that such research or externalization has on them. What had been self-evident ‘good
practices’ are suddenly opened up for criticism, and unquestioned assumptions are
exposed to examination. Externalization into text makes questioning seem natural,

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 AS IF WRITING CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

which then creates possibilities for change, by revealing alternatives that can invite
innovation.
But research can also be put to repressive ends. Practice, when investigated,
can be broken down into individual components, which can then be routinized and
bureaucratized, with professional discretion reduced to ticking off actions against
check-lists. Externalization is fraught with questions of freedom and restriction. Will
it lead to more repression and limits on action, or will it reveal new possibilities
and open practice to (more) creative options? Text can lead to more rules, more
routines, and more regulations. Writing may deaden processes and kill relationships,
smothering them in rules and protocols. This is not intrinsically malicious: dry text,
setting out simple and clear instructions by which duties can be discharged, may well
appeal more to many people than the sometimes frightening uncertainties of being
held accountable for individual decisions.
Text can also be liberating; encouraging voice and identity formation. Awareness
can be stimulated by holding a mirror up to self and other. Writing is political. It can
strengthen power and authority, justifying rules and controls; but it can also encourage
grass-roots practitioners to gain a voice, to take initiative and to take control of their
own affairs. Writing creates identity. How and what the writer describes counts.
We have known descriptions to lead to cries of: “Is teaching here really so bad?”;
“Are therapists actually so opinionated?”; “Do mothers have nothing to say about
their children?”; and “Are bankers always so dishonest?” The ensuing debates can
be controversial and influential, showing that research produces more awareness of
identity, where there was less; it performs a political act that enables some, frightens
others, liberates sometimes, and terrifies once and a while. The effects of research
can be unpredictable. Some careers have been destroyed and lives ruined by research
texts, while other individuals have become more secure, some work sites have been
improved and creativity may have been strengthened. Research theses can have
something significant to say and readers can gain by taking time to study a thesis.
But theses can be controversial and even destructive.
Latterly, work has become increasingly seen as ‘performative’ (and research
clearly can be seen as work). Performativity entails the maximization of an input/
output relationship and sees efficiency as a good unto itself. An efficiently written
thesis would entail the best result for the least effort, suggesting that research can
(and should) be streamlined and degree success rates improved. More people will
complete their degrees faster if there are better rules and structures in place – and
individual error and ineffectiveness can be reduced through a better managing of
the research and writing processes. The slew of training modules, assessment and
examinations at many universities, demonstrates that this process is well advanced.
However, the danger is that what is being researched, and why, takes a backseat
to successful and rapid completion rates (which figure in various tables by which
universities’ performance is measured). Desired output is the key criteria and whether
the researcher, the researched, or the reader learn anything becomes less relevant.
What is important is that a text is produced, on schedule, that meets the formal

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CHAPTER 1

demands of the graduate school. This is a world of degree factories. Theses are
produced against pre-defined norms at the fastest possible rate and previous criteria
such as the search for knowledge (including that of oneself) are seen as unimportant.
Performativity therefore can be seen as encompassing a series of mechanistic and
anti-individual assumptions. One critique might be a reversal of this, arguing for
the unicity of individual research and a philosophy of personal development. But
this, unfettered, becomes a kind of narcissism, uninterested in the social world that
gives context to the research. It therefore seems that the celebration of the creative
individual, where there is little regard for social values, is just as undesirable as
intellectually blind performativity, where there is little individuality or creative
identity. After all, we argue, research should inform and engage with shared
understanding and common awareness and neither extreme will meet those criteria.
Many theses are published (if only as articles) and there is some pedagogical
writing about thesis writing, but deeper self-reflection about researching and
writing is exceptional. Malcolm Ashmore’s The Reflective Thesis (1989) and Gary
William Rasberry’s Writing Research/Researching Writing (2001) are two obvious
exceptions. Ashmore pushes authorial reflexivity to an extreme. The author who
is aware of the author, who is aware of the author, has lost connection to the wider
world, since a research text is not the same thing as a self-reflexive novel or poetry.
Research assumes shared social positions. In social studies, others are observed,
experiences shared, and existence is investigated. If the Gordian knot of reflexivity is
not cut, representation only represents representing. Forcing the reader to follow the
author through an endless maze of representations may initially appear erudite and
intelligent but ultimately, in its abandonment of engagement, it becomes vacuous.
On a very different tack, Rasberry invited his students (and, by implication, us the
readers) to enjoy writing. For non-writers or students who are afraid to write, his
effort to draw us out is impressive. Our reflection on thesis writing assumes that
we can avoid Ashmore’s traps, and that our writer’s blocks do not require serious
attention.
For us, the most illuminating text on the thesis as text is Jacques Derrida’s self-
reflection about his own thesis writing. Derrida investigated writing, textuality
and language. He studied the relationships between writer, reader and written, and
between the one text and the others. Already in 1957, Derrida registered to do a PhD,
and in 1967 he re-registered a second time; but it was only in 1980 that he submitted
already published works with an introduction, and received the degree. His self-
explanation has been published as “Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis” (2004). His
starting query was: “In short, is there a time of the thesis?” (Derrida, 2004: 113).
A thesis establishes and marginalizes, asserts and denies, conforms and flees.
It has to be intelligible and to explore the not (yet) intelligible. Looking from the
outside in: if it is not intelligible it will not be accepted, and if it does not explore
the not-yet-intelligible, it will not be an ‘original contribution to knowledge’.
Looking from the inside out: if one just goes where one has already been, or
perhaps even worse, where many before you have already been, what is the use of

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 AS IF WRITING CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

going there? A thesis is all about “going where … (one’s) path leads one” (115).
But what makes the path worthwhile? And why should the university reward that
path with a degree?
A thesis is a “very particular type of ideal object” (116). It is all about inscription
and traces. The thesis claims to be some sort of record of events, circumstances
and relationships. Belief in the positive and/or emancipatory potential of examining
life is a requirement for doing a thesis. Otherwise, the writing ends up being self-
inflicted agony. If the researcher does not believe in the socially positive value of
creating her or his text and thus in text as a vehicle of valuable self-reflection, then
the researcher is entrapped in a process that she or he does not trust or believe in.
The thesis writer is, in effect, charged with embracing shared concepts and theories,
in an effort to make individuation and social events understandable. Ultimately, the
thesis writer has to assume that human understanding is possible and that it can
be ethically purposeful. Put otherwise, the enlightenment effort to understand, to
attempt to apply rationality to observation and thereby to achieve understanding, has
to be accepted.
But at the same time, goals of individuation, unicity, and particularity have to be
embraced. The thesis may not simply be a summary or ‘review article’; it has to be
an ‘original contribution’. Writing a thesis always entails the erasure of prior texts,
of raw data, of quoted sources, and of what has been read and put aside. A thesis has
to state, argue, assert, defend and make claims. The writer’s doubts, meanderings
and serendipity are reigned in. To a certain degree, one can reflect on oneself as
author, but an idea has to be presented, a thesis or assertion has to be avowed. Logic,
thought, mind, and a research claim are all expected.
The rules of reading, reflection and writing, which Derrida propagated, denied
prioritizing order, rationality and regularity. He wanted to understand the specific
text as a trace of activity, embedded in circumstance. He saw text as relationship,
which necessitated responsibility and lived ethics. For a long time, such a perspective
was not acceptable in a PhD thesis. And thus Derrida, for a long time, did not and
could not complete.
As long as the thesis had to assume the universality of a logical approach, Derrida
had to wait. At the crux of this waiting was Derrida’s criticism of ‘logocentricism’
or the tendency in Western thought to see logic as a key quality of reality and to
acknowledge circumstances only if they could be rationalized. But there may be
no sufficient reasons for events, or perhaps too many sufficient reasons. Derrida
insisted on seeing explanation as a possibility and not an inevitability. He prioritized
occurrence, relationship and circumstance, above reason, logic and correlations.
There is no certainty that reality follows simple laws. Circumstance may be
what it is, with many explanations, numerous possibilities and a fleeting identity.
Descriptions of events indicate possible relationships, networks of connections or
systems of meanings. But none of these possibilities is exhaustive or sufficient.
Sense-making can be thought of as unlimited and endlessly dynamic. Analysis
may point to innumerable relationships, each replete with various possibilities and

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CHAPTER 1

opportunities. The researcher has to choose from all the possibilities – failure to
make a choice, to narrow down and exclude, would mean that only gibberish would
be produced. Writing requires making conscious selections; it is an ethical process of
accepting and rejecting amongst all the possible statements of relationship.
But at what point does a written text become a thesis, and how? For Derrida, it is
the point at which the necessary textual choices have been made, and that they can
be seen as justified, and are open to criticism. But this opens up a difficult question:
how can the author choose her or his own justifications? Can the writer write what
they believe in, want to defend, and is convinced is warranted? On the level of
content, one may be able to say almost anything in a thesis, but its rationalizing
form is what Derrida was questioning. Via its form, the thesis is inscribed into
power hierarchies and disciplinary orders, demanding accountability. Thesis writers
effectively have to acknowledge that they respect the assumption that an ‘order of
things’ has determined how they structured the text.
Derrida doubted whether this principle of hierarchization permitted him the space
he needed to write his thesis. The institutional grants degrees, but it also demands
that the writer conform to its assumptions, structures and formats. Derrida feared
that the production of the thesis made the author speechless; that is, the university’s
universal(s) intellectually immobilize the researcher.
The machinery of academe requires that the thesis writer submit to the norms of
publishing, job-interviewing and academic career making. Junior academics have to
present themselves as trustworthy researchers – that is, as orderly scholars who tidy
up loose ends, abstain from wild speculation, and hold no truck with excessively
alternative explanations. They must not venture ‘beyond the pale’.
Genuine responsibility requires remaining outside of these oft-unexamined rules.
Finally, in 1974, Derrida decided that a voice from inside-out could be effective.
The role of an academic with a PhD could be a “joyous self-contradiction” (128);
that is, he could be academically acknowledged and theoretically indeterminate,
inside academe and outside of predetermined thought. He believed he could inspire
researchers to see what is possible, and to critically reinterpret what had already been
written. The thesis could focus on one’s own possibilities of thought, responsibility,
writing, and communication.
Unlike Derrida, rather than attack the concepts of ‘logocentricism’ or ‘knowledge’
head-on, we choose to take a byway by asking how research is or can be ‘relevant’.
This sleight of hand makes our task more approachable and less philosophical. We
have asked ourselves, and are asking you, what do we (you) think is relevant or
personally, ethically, and socially significant in a PhD thesis? We think that the
researcher’s and reader’s sense of relevance is much more understandable and
approachable than are discussions of text and ontology, or of representation and
epistemology. We concur with Derrida’s basic insight: the form of the thesis is
important and may be more repressive than its apparent content. Does the form,
indeed, allow for the exploration of self with other, for freedom and independence,
and for care and relatedness?

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 AS IF WRITING CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Post-experience PhD candidates, in our experience, write a thesis because they

have something significant to say, and realize (however intuitively) that an issue or
problem can be explored through a full-length book, which entails a broad scope
of thought and reflection. A long manuscript makes demands on the writer (as well
as on the reader); it has to address complexity, deploy theory, and display subtlety
throughout. A short essay or article does not make comparable demands on the
writer’s ability to sustain an argument, to question assumptions and/or to parlay
objections. The form is therefore crucial to the content. The thesis demands that the
writer sustain a question, a point of view, or a directed and motivated examination
of an issue or theme, over many pages. This demands staying power and relentless
focus; a discipline that is a major challenge for most thesis writers. To write a thesis
in the (applied) social studies, you have to assume that the form will advance your
thinking and understanding, as well as that of your readers.
Though Derrida criticised ‘logocentricism’, he often wrote at some length. To
seriously explore the implications of a ‘position’ – a specific and concrete place
in society, a thought-out perspective, an economic commitment, a spot in team
sport, a role in sex – takes many words. Multifaceted descriptions and thoughtful
examination are complex.
David Boje (2007, 2008, 2011) has interpreted Derrida’s train of thought to
suggest the idea of ‘antenarrative’ or short, often disjointed, texts of practice. Boje’s
‘antenarrative’ is a play on words. The text is an ‘ante’, in the sense of being a
bet, or a raising of the stakes, occurring in relationship to sense-making and shared
(or not) understanding. The writer makes a wager with the reader that she or he
can convince the reader of the justice of her or his perspective, interpretation and
conclusions. Equally, the text is written after-the-fact; the ‘ante’ comes from the
events and occurrences that it seeks to inscribe. The issue is if the ‘ante’ – that is, the
text version of existence, suffices, convinces and illuminates. Is the text something
that writers, readers and bystanders can be satisfied by?
The author has to be aware of the limits of textual explanation. Order is fragile,
temporary and often artificial. As Bob Cooper (1986) has insisted, disorganization is
far more common than organization. Too often, the thesis implies that humanity and
society are or should be well-ordered systems of equilibrium and/or of hierarchy.
Derrida wants to describe and explore, but also to respect change and indeterminacy.
Derrida’s goal is ‘enlightenment’. But he does not see ‘enlightenment’ occurring in
closed systems, rigid structures or clockwork models.
Goals in writing a thesis may include, for example, growth in awareness,
achieving depth of discussion, or the concentrated pursuit of an issue or idea. The
thesis assumes trust in the significance of thought and reflection. But how in our
contemporary world, can one have confidence in thought, writing, discussion and
text? The spirit of the times seems to provide no such assurances. Economic and
political conflicts seem to support ever more irrationality, seen both in narrowed
perspectives and violent advocacy. The ability of individuals to rise above their
insecurities and material needs seems to be limited. The researcher is an individual

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CHAPTER 1

in a world that seems more attune to social media and shared instantaneity than to
careful, long-term work. The assertion that the PhD thesis can be relevant – that is,
genuinely important or significant in the contemporary world, demands justification.
Post-experience students often have a notion of what they want to study –
typically drawn from an event that they have found emotionally important in their
professional life. There is no obvious common strand; it might be an event that
they saw positively, an occasion that had negative consequences, a circumstance
where they were been agents of change, or an experience where they felt relatively
powerless. Whatever it may be, the overriding feeling is that something was
important; that there is something in this that is worth the investment of several years
of study in order to bring it to light. Understandably, as professionals who have been
working outside higher education for several years, such students do not come with a
clear proposal delineating a research subject, appropriate theory and methods – they
arrive with an idea of what needs to be done, and perhaps a few tentative ideas about
ways of looking or theorizing. Although they see completing a PhD as an important
part of developing their understanding, they rarely see the actual thesis text as crucial
to their understanding of the problem.
It is only at the end of the writing process that the true value of the thesis as a text
is realized. This is when the writer, confronted by the written, starts to think about
their commitments and beliefs. Researchers mostly become self-aware once they
have produced a rough draft – i.e. only after their assumptions and ideas stare back
at them from the page of their work. In the beginning of the writing process, the
researcher is almost always focused on the Other – on situations observed, problems
described, attitudes categorized, theories applied. Researchers tend to discover
themselves only after they have read-up on the literature, started to write up early
descriptions and undertaken some initial theorizing. Then, and only then, can the
writer start to ask questions about their own identity. Most participants do not arrive
as fully-fledged researchers and thus cannot, to begin with, describe themselves as
researchers and ask what this might mean. Only by becoming a writing observer,
and an intellectually informed commentator, do they earn their way to questioning
themselves as researchers. And it is at this point, where the researched and the
researcher have become thinkable, that the most creative work takes place.
Just when the student feels that she or he has started to master the skills of
witnessing and reflecting on the thesis’s subject matter, and the student starts to
feel some security in the researcher role, a new challenge arises of examining and
reflecting upon how one enacts the researcher role. Having become unconsciously
competent in the researcher role, the demand arrives to become consciously
competent in that role. This new demand meets with resistance. The student is finally
comfortable with him or herself and feels that he or she is performing successfully
and suddenly new demands are made.
It is the achievement of meta-reflection that makes the research rewarding and
creative. It is the awareness and self-reflection of the researcher in regards to the
researched and the theory utilized, which opens new vistas for the readers. This last

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self-reflective phase is the one that future readers of the thesis often learn the most
from. It is true that we had the privilege in the Dutch system that theses are always
printed as books and made available for reading, with the expectation that they will
be read. In mass production PhD systems, where the focus is on completion rather
than content, no such readership is created – the electronic archiving of theses might
make them technically accessible but does not create the same event of communal
reading. Our researchers look forward to a readership and this certainly helped
to sustain their commitment. Even if book level publication itself is impossible,
some sort of annual yearbook of thesis précis or derived articles can help create or
maintain the presence of an audience, which we feel is necessary for what has been
accomplished.

Take the example of M, a student who, at the time of writing, is nearing the
completion of her thesis. With a background of managing charity interventions
around the world, and with a position as a policy-maker in an institution providing
end-of-life care in Holland, she has been concerned as to why decision-making in
such organizations over what obviously are life-or-death matters, seems so utterly
banal and superficial. She has read widely and deeply before settling upon two
seemingly appropriate sources – Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whose
writings inform her study.
She has examined the transcripts and reports of policy meetings at her
institution as the main site for her research. It is not hard to see how, in a rather
ironic twist, Arendt could inform on the ‘Banality of the Good’, while Heidegger’s
proselytizing for ‘Being’, in Being and Time, could lay the foundation for a theory
of existential engagement. No doubt, a workable, if somewhat sterile, thesis could
be produced along these lines. But, given the level of passion that brought her
onto the programme, such an outcome would seem oddly flat.
The most important part of the thesis still seems missing – for as yet, M has not
spoken of her own role within her Pooterish world. The decision-makers in her
study did not enter the policy meetings uninformed; rather M and her colleagues
provided them with briefing papers from which proposals were drawn and
outcomes predetermined. The briefing papers obviously had a role in creating the
banality that she finds such a problem. Is the choice of researching the decision
making as something, at a distance from herself, an ethical choice, given her
complicity?
In addition, the choice of Arendt and Heidegger, when matched up against
her research topic, throws up some uncomfortable allusions. Arendt’s phrase
‘the Banality of Evil’ is always linked via Eichmann to the Holocaust and
the extermination camps. Uncomfortably, despite the massive difference in
conception, there is a connection between the finality of hospice care and that
of the camps. Do the themes of good and evil and banality form a link between
contemporary healthcare and Nazi solutions? Does the emancipatory ideal of

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Being in Heidegger, where existential Being is in conflict with mere being-in-

the-world, not feed on this?
The choice for Arendt was intuitively profound. Arendt wrote against
Heidegger, attacking his concept of Being and its respectless-ness for everyday
existence. Arendt, correctly we would claim, understood that Heidegger’s
thrashing of quotidian being opens the way to fundamental disrespect for the
living Other. For Heidegger, only Being counts, the nitty-gritty of most existence
is thought of as so much degraded circumstance. Arendt insists on the value,
respect and humanity inherent to all living, and not just for Being. Arendt’s
vita activa is being-in-the-world. It repossesses the everyday from Heidegger’s
dismissal of lived existence.
M’s critique of what she saw in the hospice organization as senseless meetings,
silly discussions, and banal decision-making, opens a fundamental debate. If the
meetings really were banal, as many quotes from those meetings seem to amply
illustrate, how do we understand this? Are we witnessing a breakdown of the
democratic process? If the meetings exist to discuss identity, strategy, funding
and (future) activity, but all of this seems superficial and irrelevant, what is
wrong? Is there an inability of the leadership to bring crucial issues to life? Is
there an inappropriate form of organizing that we could better be rid of? Are the
so-called decision-makers living in a bureaucratic fog of pretension, which is
really irrelevant to the work of the hospices?
Is it a problem of organization? As soon as humans order activity and discuss
it, do they strip it of any fundamental significance? And since the researcher had
herself been a policy-professional, who helped to write the background papers
and co-produced the measures to be discussed, how was she co-implicated in the
process she seems to denounce as the thesis-writer?
She thought that her thesis was about the banality of organization but there
is no description of organization anywhere in her text. What she describes are
meetings of the national association of hospices. Her complaint may be much
closer to Arendt than she realized. She thought she had set out to follow a classical
Weberian theme in how the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’ stifles authenticity and
participation in anything it rules. But actually, she has not examined how the
proposals were prepared or operationalized.
She has demonstrated that the national association of hospices has been
unable to make its ‘democracy’ meaningful. She has put the failure of democratic
discourse, and the inability to make the ‘good’ evident, on display. She shows us
a failure of civil society where the community is unable to produce a rewarding
or authentic shared discourse about hospices and their work.
How should we understand and interpret this failure? Does it force us back
into Heidegger’s camp, where ‘angst’ for death reveals Being and fundamental
insight can rarely be shared, and is profoundly individualized? Perhaps the
meetings provided a necessary repression of death as a crucial theme? Was their

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superficiality needed to be able to do the work of the hospices? Or were the

meetings really a banal betrayal of that work?
Is the original assumption of the researcher (and that of Arendt) right, that work
should not be banal and that existential depth in interaction is the only possible
way to do justice to the Other? Did the researcher too easily assume that Being
and being could be re-joined in the work done by the hospices? How, thus, does
the researcher finally seek closure in the themes she has so powerfully evoked?
It is at this point, now that she has realized that confronting these issues is
essential for the success, both personally and academically of her thesis, that M
really starts to say something important and emotionally gripping about work,
and her relationship to it.

To do a PhD, one has to write. Announcements of the ‘death of the author’ (Barthes,
1967) have not made that task any easier. Barthes rejects the link between personal
biography and text, insisting that the text needs to be understood on its own terms,
and that those terms are shifting, dynamic and complex. Texts exist in relationship
to other sources and interpretations and have to be understood ever anew as
(con-)text – that is, as circumstances and writing that come together in meanings,
understandings, ideas, images and fantasy. Barthes insisted that focusing on the
author as ‘self’ puts the emphasis in the wrong place. In the case of M, it is not
what she felt and thought that is important, but whether a breakdown in the ethics
of civil society has occurred. Whether M was a mediocre, good or even excellent
policy developer is not the issue, but what is crucial is by what sort of ethical process
can and should a hospice organization be held to account. This is a significant and
interesting question.
In the thesis, M had to ‘exteriorize’ her research theme. What does it mean to us,
the readers, that the meetings she studied are so profoundly banal? Writing produces
cross-textual or inter-textual dialogue – ideas are borrowed from others, informants’
words are set down on the page, and all the diverse research materials are drawn
together into some sort of coherent whole. Writing a thesis draws upon many types
of relational and textual processes. Summaries of other texts, descriptions of research
sites and participants, correlations and speculation have to be sufficiently stabilized
and made consistent enough for text to cohere. But as we have noted, Derrida feared
that coherence is itself a danger, and that the search for stabilisation and consistency
would make the thesis misrepresent occurrences and the others studied.
Barthes focuses on the authorial ‘I’. There has to be a ‘red thread’ of meaning and
argumentation that runs through a thesis, giving it order. But the authorial ‘I’, in its
consistency, often seems far too knowing and wise. The thesis can produce apparent
standards of knowing and insight that are utterly unrealistic and undesirable. The
thesis can become a vehicle of false certainties and apparent arrogance. For Barthes,

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the uncertainty and doubt, typically rendered as the research problem, should not be
denied, and the chaos of context and analysis should not be banished.
The personal identity or ‘self’ of the author is traditionally not the same thing
as the persona who holds the book together. Barthes directs us to the techniques
and dilemmas of textual organization and to the dangers of creating a counter-
productive authorial ‘I’. Writing is seductive, but even a svelte text can achieve its
power through false certainties and simplification. As the professional thesis needs
to integrate the personal or authorly, and the textual or writerly, it has to be carefully
crafted. Barthes insists that the combination of readerly and writerly is tenuous and
troubled. Too often authors, in a search for authority, give in to the temptation of
claiming more wisdom and a firmer grasp on truth than they could possibly possess.
Their authorial ‘I’ seems ‘God-like’, in that a disembodied voice seems to orate
words of wisdom from the heavens. But the credibility of the practitioner-researcher
is grounded in experience and, from that, is linked to their humility and an ability to
limit their knowledge claims. A good practitioner thesis does not make exaggerated
claims or pretend to superhuman wisdom.
Barthes’ critique also points up one of the reasons why writing a practitioner
thesis is so difficult. Thesis research and writing is a communicative and textual
process that is difficult to complete while maintaining full integrity to both sources
and readers. In addition, the degree is granted to the person of the writer – not to any
of the others that have participated, however indirectly, in the production of the text.
The PhD student claims the authorial ‘I’ to get the degree, and has to step-forward
in person to claim the degree. Yet Barthes claimed that the conjunction between self
and persona is fragile and often falls apart. In a thesis, where the persona is fairly
strictly precribed, exploding the juncture threatens the very principle of the PhD
degree.
Ultimately, M was awarded her degree, but was never able to adequately explain
the attraction that Heidegger had held for her. Arendt wrote to reject Heidegger’s
overwrought existential ontology, convinced that in a just and humane society
that daily relationships counted (Arendt, 1963, 1998, 2003). Existence rather than
ontology, and being rather than ‘Being’, should be prioritized. M reversed that order.
She saw the banality of organizing in daily practice, and the Being of fundamental
truth in caring for the dying. But she never explored, explained or justified her
choice. She let Heidegger take responsibility for the fundamental choices and let his
words speak for her. That way, she had no problem getting the degree, but she did
not really address or explore the fundamental dilemma that she had exposed in the
thesis.
On the other hand, only a few, very radical PhD theses have attempted under
influence of Barthesian theory, to question their authorial assumptions. What
justifies or supports the writer’s (self-)identity as developed in the text? For instance,
where does M’s ‘nausea’ (to use Sartre’s term) towards quotidian practice come from
and what does it imply? M has not worked at ‘bed-side’ with the dying; so why did
she exalt a practice that she has not experienced? How grounded and realistic is

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M’s celebration of hospice work and revulsion at bureaucratic routine that orders
that work? Was part of the reason for the success of the thesis that M manipulated
our (or her) fear of death, in order to leave us open to alternatives, creating a space
where her intellectual depth stood out more impressively? Of course, if M had
radically exposed such doubts in her text, her thesis would have become extremely
controversial. The thesis would look increasingly unstable, if the contradictions
were revealed. By laying bare the relationships of text to truth, and self to insight,
and failing to close the circle, she would then have left herself open to the challenge
that she did not “deserve to get the degree.”
The challenge originates in the PhD thesis as a necessary marriage between
researcher, texts and contexts. The PhD is all about the making of an author, in a
world that increasingly denies the possibility of any such making. Turning to the
French semiotic-psychological theoretician Jacques Lacan, we can further clarify
our position (Aoki, 2000). Lacan (1966) spoke of the imaginary, the symbolic and
the real. The authorial ‘I’ or persona is in the imaginary. Authorial identity or self-
image is imagined – from the Latin imaginarius: to form a mental picture of and to
oneself. PhD thesis writing requires that the candidate learn to see her or himself as
the author, as a person who is authorized to speak, and as a source and/or interpreter
of meaning. It is for most, a big psychological step from student (present participle
of studēre: to strive after, to learn) to author. The thesis has to be written and a
symbolic artefact has to be produced. There must be reading. The researcher has to
first read about the subject studied and, more quixotically, for the thesis to exist as a
thesis, it has to be read. But for Lacan, reading is not a simple process:
1. Reading “passes through the “Other” and thus reading makes the reader different
from her/himself;
2. Reading is grounded in division and dialogue. In other words, one never reads
alone; and
3. Reading is never direct, but is rather a practice always mediated by theory. (Aoki,
2000: 352; based upon Shoshana Felman, 1987).
The text or the symbolic flows out into relatedness, and returns as an identity
changing activity. But above and beyond the symbolic, there is the real, which
is what one strives to write about. The real always escapes complete capture by
the imaginary and the symbolic, since it is the uncanny, the too-much, the living
inescapable energy and passion of being. While we have emphasized the imaginary
(the authorial ‘I’) and the symbolic (writing, reading and textuality), the thesis, for
Lacan, needs to be in the service of the real. Without the real, research is dead and
deadening. But access to the real is always indirect and representation of the real
is always partial and incomplete. Thanks to the real there is always more to study,
other facets to explore, and life to investigate.
Of course, there is a simple escape route from the real and it is one that is very
often taken. One can choose for populist common-sense – my data speaks for
itself, my text is transparent, my research methods are obvious and well-trodden,

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and therefore all my conclusions are self-evidently valid. But, as ever, the call to
common-sense is misplaced, for the assumption of any self-evident intelligibility
of theory and writing is unwarranted. Good research is not just a manifestation of
common-sense that merely needs clarity to make it visible; it requires an argument,
thoughtful questioning and analysis. If research could really be reduced to simple,
rule-bound instrumental procedures, why would it take years of study and hard
work, and personal investment and challenge, to write a PhD thesis?
Thus, PhD theses are all about ‘other’-ing; that is, becoming anOther voice, self
and identity. By reading, observing and discussing, the PhD researcher is moved
to see, feel, consider and reflect differently. Writing a PhD thesis is a process of
identity change. Having to relate to many others, often being uncertain what that
will bring, and put in a situation where relationships really count, makes for a
potentially explosive and ultimately threatening position – one that can generate
potentially radical outcomes. Unsurprisingly, this has caused conflict with some
firmly entrenched views and over the last few years, and has played out violently in
North America against a background of identity politics and culture wars. The con-
text – including all the texts around the researcher’s text, can make the committed,
engaged, ethical work that we advocate very difficult.
Writing the thesis and getting the degree is the context. Borrowing from the
dictionary, we can see why this makes sense – the Oxford English Dictionary
describes ‘context’ as ’The whole structure of a connected passage regarded in its
bearing upon any of the parts which constitute it; the parts which immediately precede
or follow any particular passage or ‘text’ and determine its meaning’ . As such, the
word appears to encapsulate the idea of both ‘the whole’ – that which surrounds the
particular – and the idea of ‘with text’. These distinctions have oft been remarked, and
a notable exploration comes in the work of Peter Dachler and Dina-Marie Hosking
(1995), who remind us that ‘text is always in mutual relationship with a context’.
While it may be helpful to distinguish between ‘text’ and ‘context’, they are
mutually interrelated: text implies reference to context and context already contains
text (Culler, 1988; Vaassen, 1994). However, we can disaggregate some of this
through a brief examination of the construction of the term. Initially, we might see
context as coming from the compounding of com ‘together’ with texere ‘to weave’.
The participial stem gives us textus (something woven) the meaning of which
evolves into ‘style, tissue of a literary work (Quintilian)’ (OED) and subsequently
into text: ‘The wording of anything written or printed; the structure formed by the
words in their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as written’ (OED).
Yet the etymology of the word ‘context’ is different, in that it predates the
agglomeration of context as con-text or ‘with text’. The word has its roots in the
Latin contextus, the participial stem of contexĕre ‘to weave together’ (OED) – a
formulation that precedes the emergence of the text. Context is about assembling
and uniting different strands, and through the construction of relationships between
them, creating something new. Context, then, is always about relationship and
integration.

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The meaning of context that we now take for granted in academic labour –
the intellectual, cultural and organizational surroundings and background to
one’s intellectual output – is relatively recent. Previously, we might have talked
of circumstance, in its now more obsolete meaning, of that ‘which surrounds
materially, morally, or logically’ (OED). Yet such circumstances have now become
circumstantial, matters that are ‘adventitious, accidental, incidental or unimportant’
(OED); and these are critiques that may be levelled at any research that does not
stand squarely within the objectivist or positivistic paradigm. So context matters, as
does the context of context.
In the context of this book, context can be both seen as ‘with text’ and as ‘weaving
together’. And as we have indicated in this chapter, creating and problematizing
this double meaning is one of the key challenges of writing a thesis. From Derrida,
Barthes and Lacan, we have stressed the complexity of the self to text relationship,
and insisted upon not taking it for granted. But authorial responsibility can be
shirked, leaving textual complexity to overwhelm meaning:

This is a thesis on self-organization. According to the logic that will be espoused

(of self-organization), the organization is brought into existence to lead to a
movement and moment of self-organizing creativity – but in that moment it
crashed. Okay – understand that. Period. Where to begin?
The executive two-year MA design course was ran by means of organ()
sing – Deleuzian experimenting machines produced situations of interception,
interruption, deviation, dis-connection and irritation. The task was to identify
with the task. But 1 – one, eye, ‘I’ – can all be mistaken, for the curriculum self-
organized around the absence of the first person; but it crashed.
CO(M)POSITIONING was an avant-garde Masters program in visual and
social creativity. The glossy brochure claimed to teach MA students how to
co-position organizations via theories and practices of communication. CO(M)
POSITIONING claimed to be a composing organization – that is, one that
produces new sounds or melodies, encompassing and furthering alternative
identities and purposes by being self-organizing. But CO(M)POSITIONING had
a cynical side – faculty referred to ‘compost-ing’ – that is, the reducing of identity
to excrement. And the cynical side got stronger as the teaching and research
seemed to get more and more predictable.
I am your narrator, who says ‘I’, though I am not always involved in the line
of flight. Voided interrelations, forgotten in-betweens, unjustified recollections.
I was hired to facilitate a major curriculum experiment for CO(M)POSITIONING.
My ability to relate to the self-developing hyper-reality, dipped in and out of con-
text. Where am ‘I’ when the ‘noise’ babbled, pretended and overwhelmed?
A new culture of creativity, whereby innovative design would reassert itself
as self-organizing was promised. Teams with five MA students and one faculty
member were formed with the assignment to create something apart and new.

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Each group undertook a different project – some aimed at producing new service
concepts, some focused on alternative political arrangements and some were
dedicated to experimental image creation. The groups met one week per month,
with all groups both working on their projects and taking part in a presentation
of one project. The sessions can be perceived as an interlace and an intertwine of
threads that tied everyone together. The program connected through a multitude
of observation points: mine, each participant’s, the project groups’, the guest
lecturers’ – multilayered, uncombinable, disconnected, irreconcilable – the ‘self’
in self-organization is overwhelmed, lost, distraught and confused.
The finale was scheduled for a weekend in May. All the groups would come
together to create something new, important and valuable. It was agreed that a
multimedia reportage of the weekend would result. Process and product, ideology
and culture, would be documented. The course had prepared all the groups to
innovate, with a voice of their own, and an individual style of working, and with
creative energy.
How do I put myself into these social systems? The systems organized
themselves; systemic and solution focused interventions led to (in)difference
but I’m not interested. Which difference will make a difference? I thought mine;
I was the irritant propelling the instability.
But when all eight groups came together on the appointed Friday morning, they
just looked rather blankly at one another and seemed unable to create anything.
A meeting ensued wherein the weekend’s goals were endlessly discussed, but
nothing happened. The eight groups then split up into three clusters, along the
lines of the cleavages between (i) new services, (ii) political engagement, and
(iii) creative visual design. Friday morning degenerated into an endless meeting;
Friday afternoon, the one group criticized the other. The differences did not
produce creativity and energy, but suspicion and stagnation. The more paralyzed
the groups became, the more they cried for leadership. But when I said anything,
I was told that I did not understand, that I was not helpful, and that I should keep
silent. Stagnation (re-)produced organization.
The experiment had failed. It did not create new creativity-culture, reaffirming
the principle of event driven identity. Instead of affirming the creative power
of communication, CO(M)POSITIONING was characterized by recriminations,
insecurities and a feeling of failure. A big fight ensued as to whether the students
should or should not get their degrees.
My evaluation is merely a set of conceptual self-understandings. Self-
organization is a shake of the Luhmannian cards; my own practices continue;
the MA doesn’t. 1 am following m(eye) construction of scientific and social
facts that are referred to as self-organization. 1 want to describe m(eye) real(ity)
production. Through self-organization, self and other loose track of one another.
It is all a thought experiment; the MA was so much pop culture – exaggerated,
over-done, hyper-real and false.

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In this thesis extract, the writer disavows any responsibility for the MA program
he ran. He distances himself from its learning results, from the organization he
worked for, and from the very text we are reading. Self-organization supposedly
will organise as it will. The irritant can try to provoke and attack, but it probably
will have few chances of success. The thesis is self-admittedly intellectual Pop
Art: commercial consulting and training concepts such as ‘creativity’, ‘virtuality’
and ‘experimenting machines’ are allowed to run wild. And the rhetoric ultimately
crashes. The production of difference will or will not happen, but the refusal of
the author to ‘stand and be counted’ is evident. He refuses responsibility for the
pedagogical experiment, for the curriculum results, for the students’ behaviour, for
his own interventions. His ‘I’, ‘1’, ‘eye’ shouts for attention and may make enough
of a statement, however ambiguously regarded, to get looked at. The ‘author’ is
not in control since he undergoes the process with a textual persona that tries to
be cleverer than the reader. It all works as a collection of text-effects that mock
seriousness but these text-effects are real, as the words let the text roll on.
M’s text looks serious, philosophical and well wrought, but it avoids most of the
issues that it seems to address. The thesis just quoted above is up-front about its
dilemmas. Responsibility has been avoided and meaning sacrificed to a speculative
thought experiment. The second thesis is far and away the more honest of the two,
but probably also far more irritating (and not always in the way that the author
intended). The first seems to make sense; it appears to be ‘serious’. Only with
careful analysis does one discover that it avoids many key issues that could usefully
have been explored. The second shouts its slogans out good and loud: meaning is
jeopardized; earnestness is mocked; and the assumption that things make good sense
(logocentricism) is sneered at. Because the second writer did, elsewhere in his text,
address the ethical lacunae of his own position, we believe he deserved the PhD he
received. But by flaunting the customary seriousness of the authorial ‘I’ he made
enemies. (By contrast, almost no one noticed that M had not gone the full distance
in her thesis by not explaining why she believed that the meetings were banal or
that the hospice work was existentially profound.) Derrida was right – form easily
overwhelms content. If the text looks serious but is not, it is accepted. If the text
looks dangerous and is, it is at risk.
Realizing that we have a lot more work to do to clarify the self to other, and self
to text relationships in the thesis, let us conclude with a successful thesis candidate
analysing the career that his thesis opened up for him. Indeed there is a lot more to
be said about the context than we can include here. Here is his testimony:

THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF DUTCH ACADEMIA

Being involved in higher education in the Netherlands these days is somewhat

akin to watching Nero play the fiddle while Rome is burning; although everyone
involved knows that they should look away and call the fire department, the sheer

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absurdity of the current state of affairs is so mind-boggling that it is difficult to

actually do so. Besides, even if one were to make that call, it would only lead to
the realization that the firemen aren’t answering the phone but are instead merrily
pouring gasoline on the fire.
It used to be different. Not too long ago, a degree awarded by an institute
of higher education in this country could be seen as a seal of approval, a
reassurance that the person holding it possessed the intellectual qualities and
capabilities required to rightfully call oneself a doctorandus, the title awarded by
the universities to its graduates. Nowadays, to have graduated from an institute
of higher education allows one to call oneself ‘Master’, the EU-sanctioned
successor to the educational throne. Unfortunately, unless one happens to be a
‘Master of the Universe’ (or MU), the title of MSc, MA, LLM or so on is no
longer a guarantee of anything beyond the individual’s ability to pay their tuition
fees. The only alternative, for those who still believe in the ideal of education, is
to take refuge in the last bastion of academic integrity: the venerable Doctor of
Philosophy.
What might be going on in such a small and fairly boring country that warrants
the aforementioned admonitions? What is causing the academic edifice to
crumble? The answer to said questions can be found below, where I outline the
various forces conspiring to overturn the ivory tower.

The first problem is unfettered access to higher education. It is well documented

that the twentieth century was the site of fundamental reforms in higher education
in Europe, especially where entry into the halls of academia was concerned. This,
in and of itself, is by no means a bad thing; affording those who possess the
qualities and qualifications required to partake in university life, the possibility to
do so, appeals to our society’s, sense of fairness. What is problematic, however,
is how admittance has gone from an individual possibility or opportunity to what
can best be described as a collective prerogative.
Under the guise of ensuring the continued competitiveness of the Dutch
economy, the Dutch government has, at the start of the 21st century, expressed
the wish that half of the work force should hold a degree in higher education.
To this end, different measures have been put in place to facilitate students’
transition from vocational to higher education. Most, undoubtedly, call such a
pursuit enlightened, egalitarian and perhaps even idealistic; I call it unrealistic
and plain old dumb, for it completely ignores the sheer impossibility of attaining
the goal, due to the social, economic and cultural composition of Dutch society.
One needs only to take a cursory glance at the latter (or, alternatively, watch any
single episode of the Dutch answer to Jersey Shore) to understand we are dealing
here with a case of wishful thinking at best, and downright folly at worst.
Notwithstanding said objections, students have been pouring into the halls of
higher education en masse, often spurred on by their parents (who, it should be

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noted, in most cases haven’t got the foggiest idea as to what goes on in these halls
in the first place). Though it is difficult to fault parents for their desire to want
the best for their children, the best might not be the highest attainable goal in this
case. A lot of students run the risk of punching above their weight here, which
will result in dissatisfaction, demotivation and, ultimately, high dropout rates (not
to mention a shortage in all kinds of crafts- and trades-men).
Faced with such a large influx of new students and unable to turn them away
at the gates, the response of the establishment has been fairly predictable and
highly disconcerting. Over the past decade, the bar has been gradually lowered in
order to allow more students to meet the criteria for graduating, thus ensuring a
steady supply of ‘not quite’ qualified individuals. This situation has been further
complicated by another government-induced development, which conveniently
allows me to move on to problem number two.

The second problem revolves around the financing (or, rather, the lack thereof)
of the system of higher education in the Netherlands. Although Dutch politicians
have always proclaimed their commitment to fostering and sustaining the Dutch
knowledge economy and the resulting need to ensure the quality of our system
of education, the reality has been quite different. Faced with ever-increasing
pressures to balance the national budget, successive governments have either
frozen or reduced spending on education. Combined with the developments
that were described in the previous section, this has brought about a situation in
which institutes of higher education have to do “more with less”;. educate more
students with less resources (in the Netherlands, education is primarily financed
by the government). Here, too, the response has been quite troublesome.
To mitigate the effects of their shrinking budgets, both universities and
hogescholen (the latter resembling the British new universities) have been
looking to the East to bolster their finances. Whereas tuition fees are set at
reasonable rates by the government for both Dutch and European students, no
such legislation exists for students from beyond the European borders. As such,
students from outside of Europe can be asked to pay tuition fees that are twice
or trice as high as paid by their European counterparts. China, in particular, has
become a prime market for recruiting new students, thanks to the existence of
a large number of relatively affluent families that want to give their children
access to the opportunities afforded by a proper degree from a institute in higher
education, but are unable to send them to such an institute for various reasons at
home.
On paper, such arrangements might seem like a win-win situation for all
involved, via the realization of the much-lauded benefits of cultural diversity. In
practice, however, the situation is quite different. Where the best and brightest
students that China has to offer are concerned, the situation is quite simple:
they either stay at home and go to one of the country’s few top universities or,

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alternatively, are snapped up by the American and British elite institutions who
are vying for them as well. Those who are not so lucky and by implication neither
particularly good nor moderately bright, end up going to other countries, such as
the Netherlands. Once here, it becomes apparent that they, more often than not,
cannot properly express themselves in English, notwithstanding the fact that they
had to take an exam before being admitted to the programme (the problems with
Chinese students and entry exams have been well documented). The problems
this creates in the classroom, both for them and their European counterparts, are
obvious.
Contrary to what one might expect, however, these students are not deterred by
their lack of progress. Blissfully unaware of any cultural differences (or at least
pretending to be so), they make the effort to obtain their credits by quite literally
hounding the faculty. It should be noted that this is compounded by the fact that
their countrymen quickly absorb the newcomers into the existing community and
socialize them by educating them on the various successful ways of grabbing the
necessary levers. Seeing the economic value these students represent and wanting
to ensure the steady supply of ‘fresh meat’ in the future, administrators are all
too often more than willing to accommodate these students by lowering the bar
under the pretext of cross-cultural sensitivity, putting the lecturing staff in a very
difficult position indeed. The topic of faculty brings me to the third and final
problem I would like to address.

The third problem can best be described as Anglo-Saxon fetishism. The influence
exerted by the American way of academic life on the sciences and the resulting
pressures on other countries to conform is known to all but the most isolated
academics. The response to this development has been quite varied. Countries
with well-established traditions of their own, such as Germany and France, have
been able to largely resist said forces (depending on the field in question). Dutch
academia, however, has responded in typical Dutch fashion by succumbing
to these exogenous demands. It has bent over backwards to try and adopt an
American style and the corresponding criteria for assessing the output generated
by faculty. Well-known examples of such criteria are an increasingly narrow focus
on a limited number of journals for publishing academic papers, the imperative
to publish more often and the adoption of tenure track systems for new faculty.
At the same time, a second, more insidious development has taken place.
Facilitated by, as well as partly due to, the imperative to ‘publish and perish’, Dutch
universities have been invaded by what can be labelled as academic mechanics.
These individuals, unlike their predecessors, do not have an intrinsic interest in
scientific discovery but instead view participating in the scientific endeavour as
affording them the opportunity to have a career. They are technicians who have
mastered a particular skillset (generally in the field of statistics) that allows them
to perform the same trick over and over again, turning science into the academic

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equivalent of a shell game. Their choice of topic or discipline is solely based on

strategic considerations, such as the opportunities it affords them for applying
their skills. Affinity with the field itself does not factor into the equation or comes
a distant second at best.
The consequence of the preceding development is the production of knowledge
that can best be described as the academic equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey:
poorly written, lacking imagination and, at the same time, in high demand with
the ‘top’ journals. As a result, they are not only able to occupy positions at their
institutes that allow them to set the agenda for future research but also to obtain
grants to further pursue their unimaginative lines of inquiry. In doing so, they
help perpetuate the status quo by relegating (promising) alternatives to the fringes
of academia and further depriving them of access to critical resources.

Faced with these developments, any sane person immediately understands that
the current state of affairs cannot last forever. At the same time, faced with these
developments, any sane person can readily imagine why Nero decided to play
his fiddle instead of picking up a bucket to help put out the fire: sometimes, it is
necessary to let everything burn to the ground before you can begin anew. Let the
music play!

The Doctor

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CHAPTER 1

INTERTEXT ONE

Cees Grol: A successful thesis candidate

Writing a PhD was a wonderful experience. It was my more-or-less ultimate

attempt to organise my thoughts on what I have done in education. It was a
way of reflecting on everything I have done so far. When I was young, sixteen,
maybe even younger, I left the church because I thought I had to organise my
own thoughts. I thought that I’d be organised once I was be fifty, but then I found
I wasn’t organised at all. So then, I thought that maybe the PhD might be a way to
organise my thoughts. What I like is that it made me even more confused. But it’s
excellent; it gave me new ideas, new insights, and new possibilities. To be more
specific, I don’t read texts in the way that I used to. Now, when I read, I relate the
text to other texts, many other texts. And in addition, I relate the texts to my own
thought, as well as to what I’ve read before. I then see other layers of significance
than what I have ever seen before. It’s the same when I talk to people, I hear
more between the lines, between what is said and left in silence, and between the
sentences than I had ever heard before.
When people talk about the way they deal with their clients, or how they teach,
I focus on the power relations that are implicit in what they say and that’s what
I start to discuss with them. Not for myself, but to provoke discussion. For my
wife, the focus on underlying power relations was very difficult, because I started
to explore them with her as well. It has been enormously enriching, to read and
question so much.
Once I’d read Baudrillard, I saw Baudrillard all over the place in my daily life.
For instance, in the institutions where I work. I am always laughing when I see
a document and I think that it is just a very bad copy of hyper-reality. But this is
reality. Lyotard always reminds me to try and make small stories that challenge
the meta-narratives. Derrida always reminds me to deconstruct what I hear, and
to make it into another story.
I’m in to complexity of organisations and social life, once you see social life
like that; you see it as never before. It’s always incomprehensible, you are always
aware that you are only a little bit of it, but it is enjoyable to rub a chalk mark
out and to study it. So studying, reading, discussing and thinking brought me a
lot, both personally and professionally. The personal side is that I have gained
courage in my thinking, by acknowledging that life is incomprehensible. It’s a
very challenging thought, it makes me relax. Professionally, it brought me a lot, for
instance, going beyond the surface narrative into the story and its indefiniteness.
You can see stories as standard protocols, but you can also understand them as
incomplete co-creations that are unending, relational and participative.
Narrative for me was starting to become merely a means to an end. There
were so many formulae; so many standard narratives. Then, I read David Boje

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and he challenged all that. I started to think that narrative wasn’t just a means to
get to an end. There are stories everywhere, in every moment, not only in words,
but also in objects and semiotics. Openings students to think about the omni-
directionalty of stories and narratives can be very challenging, it makes my work
more valuable for me, but also I can see when students start to reorganise their
thoughts, especially when they are asking themselves what ‘meaning’ has to do
with story-telling and narrative.
My thesis supervision was, for me, excellent. For several reasons, one is that
the two supervisors are so different. And that made it very valuable. Peter Pelzer
always tunes in to your thoughts and tries to give you more air. He’ll never make
a harsh comment like, ‘That’s rubbish’ Of course, some of the rough drafts I know
were rubbish. Nevertheless, I had to write it like that for a while, because that was
my way to get it right.
My other supervisor was more direct. In Dusseldorf, it was excellent to hear
the two supervisors discussing my work. Both of them were talking about what
I was doing. That gave me a lot of new perspectives on my work, and at the
same time, it was very moving because I felt I was being taken seriously. Two
professors discussing the value of what I had written. So I liked it very much.
The supervision was good. And the advanced workshops were stimulating. The
professors presented their own work. You feel empowered when you are their
audience; not a student being told the ‘truth’, but an audience asked to consider
and offer comments on new work. Looking into the kitchen of research was
invaluable. It gives much more than the thing itself.
There was no pain and trauma. I know there is supposed to be, but I loved
every minute. The worst moment was when my initial research proposal was
rejected by a faculty board, but even that stimulated me. It was so clear that
they wanted to mould me into a standard recipe. During the proposal phase, a
mediocre Professor of education wanted to mould me into a standard cookie
cutter shape. There was nothing there attuned to my thoughts; and there was no
willingness to let me be myself. How I wanted to develop did not count. Being
moulded is not my way of doing research, no exploring; exploring is always
about trying, making a new move, experimenting with another direction, or at
least having the opportunity to go in another direction. In this particular case, I
was put in a mould and it wasn’t a mould that fitted me, so when they rejected
my ideas I knew that it was alright, that I was going in the right direction. I liked
to work relationally with participants. So no, there were no traumas. In fact, from
time to time, when I seemed to leave the world of daily phenomena and routine
behind, and sometimes that happened, I had a feeling of ‘flow’, which was very
nice. I was curious where my process of exploring was going. I got the space to
develop and to investigate.
My most difficult moment was when I had collected masses of data and
information, and I wanted to break it down for analysis. It was almost physically

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difficult, to cut all the notes into loose paper strips, and then to (re-)construct
some sort of ‘meaning’. It was not the cutting itself, but the constructing of
something from what you had almost completely destroyed, that felt so risky.
That was a moment that I badly needed inspiration, and that was also the moment
that I needed music badly. Without music I would not have had the courage or
the energy to make a new whole story out of the materials I had literally cut-up
and had scattered my data around me. I think that was the most difficult, but
also the freest moment. Once I realized that it was an issue of emplotment, then
I knew what I was trying to do. The most exciting part was when I realized that
I had collected alternating views, and then I decided, once more, to deconstruct
my story, to construct five storylines, woven into one whole. That was the most
exciting moment, it was wonderful. I started to laugh, I guess from relief, because
then I knew what direction to go. That was quite exciting and nerve-wracking,
because I was not sure that it would be a success. Would it be presentable? But it
was a nice moment.
I guess the most significant criticism of my work may have come from Jack
Whitehead, possibly I had captured the absurd reality of policy makers and their
rhetoric, but had forgotten the kids. In other words, I had deconstructed the
process of policy discussions and policy implementation, but I hadn’t come up
with a solution. From my text you have to fear that nothing will change. All the
administrators, bigwigs, and authorities will just continue with their deaf men’s
dialogues. I have thought a lot about that criticism. Also when I was writing
the thesis, although the theme was ‘appropriate education’, I deliberately did not
involve the children and I deliberately did not do some kind of action research.
For a set of reasons, the most important, I think is that I was so overwhelmed by
the commitment of the people who were talking to me, that I felt called upon to
represent their stories as richly as possible. Then almost at the end of my thesis,
when I was reflecting on it, I found out what I had discovered was the incoherence
of the discourse.
It was Discourse, with a capital ‘D’. Discourse with a small ‘d’ is the
practitioner’s discourse, and discourse with a capital ‘D’ is the policy discourse
and the theoretical discourse. I think that the practitioner’s discourse, with a small
‘d’ should add to the Discourse with a capital ‘D’. It’s more or less what Lyotard
claims. But then I was thinking, influenced by Derrida, that nowadays I have to
write the small ‘d’ in font 24 (d) and the capital ‘D’ in font 8 (D). My first chapter
is about my hope that one day the discourse with the small ‘d’ will be larger, or
more important, than the Discourse with the capital ‘D’, but then you first have to
see the Discourse with a capital ‘D’. Too often Discourse is Doxa, but the listeners
do not want to, or are not able to, know the difference. My contribution is to bring
the distinction between doxa and dialogue to life. The politicians, I don’t know
if they are willing to hear me. I know that the participants who contributed to my
research were very eager to read the book. And they liked it very much. I don’t

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know whether the book will have much influence, I can’t imagine what happens
to a policy maker reading my thesis. Will they recognize their practice? Can they
transform it at all?
We must not forget that I began the study because the Ministry of Education
had announced that its ‘appropriate education’ policy had to be formed bottom-
up instead of, as is usual, top-down. But their bottom-up was the government’s
bottom-up, but not the participant’s bottom-up. I should like to contribute to the
practitioner’s bottom-up approach.
But can I really have so much trust in practitioners? I wonder. I have been
thinking about that as well. The problem then is that you can find yourself using
a very populist discourse. You have to, and that is a contradiction; you have to
organise a discourse with a small ‘d’, where the ethics is taken fairly seriously
(although, of course, this is a capital ‘D’ admonishment). The ethics towards the
children, the ethics towards the parents, the ethics towards education, live as ‘d’
but become ‘D’ as soon as they are studied, represented and discussed. It is an
ethical discussion and dilemma. Education is for all of us, I think the way it is
ruled is awfully rigid. It could really gain by becoming more flexible, but you
can not be flexible about your ethical grounding. You have to take the ethics
very seriously, otherwise the participant’s discourse, with a small ‘d’ will be lost,
declared a waste of time. So we have to be very serious when it comes to the
pedagogy.
Ethical pedagogy is not self-evident in our world, and that makes it very
complex. That’s why I think that this type of explorative research that I have
carried out should be done more widely. Hopefully, not only by the practitioners
themselves, but also by the policy makers, but I don’t know if they have the will.
I gave a copy of the thesis to one policy maker, who did not know my work or my
ideas. He looked it over and he laughed. More or less ridiculing it.
Of course you can ask if, by trying to make the text ridiculous, he was being
ridiculous. But he did not realise that. The idea of looking at the book and then
not taking it seriously is problematic. I show policy happening; I show its daily
rhetoric and empty speech. They may want to say that I can do this or that, or
that I have to do that. But they are responsible for what they are doing. I can take
you directly to the responsible place, where policy is a process of becoming, and
implementation is just starting to emerge.
Determining my responsibility as a researcher was a key issue for me. That
was my leading question, after I started to realise that I was really interested in the
stories of the policy makers, teachers, administrators, consultants etcetera. How
do I requite my responsibility to do justice to the richness of all the stories? Once I
create a written portrayal, I have to follow-up, but how. That’s my responsibility. I
have to find a way to follow-up on my work. I have to do it, because the researched
put a lot of energy (and also hope) into the fact that they were being heard. They
were talking very intensely from the moment the interviews, or should I say

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conversations, began. They even got some hope out of it, so I have to follow-up. I
have to make the outcomes known in my own educational field, but also to policy
makers.
There is a responsibility to the researched, but also to what was said. I think
it’s not about right or wrong. I feel responsible for the richness of speech; people
have to evaluate for themselves what is right and wrong. I am not saying that
I don’t have some opinions about some of the arguments, of course I do, but that
falls outside of my textual strategy.
I did not want to be accused of playing the ‘god trick’, where the authorial ‘I’
is a sort of God that declares what is good and bad, interesting and irrelevant, etc.
No, that was not my goal. I left the church when I was sixteen. My ambition was
to capture the heteroglossia and to present it well. Since I have known Bakhtin’s
heteroglossia concept, I see the world otherwise. Difference is everywhere, it’s in
every moment. I am intrigued by that, and in how to present discursive difference.
It’s also a question of doing justice to other. I like the Russian novels Bakhtin
refers to. I am always amazed by the fact that the authors were able to show the
inner thoughts of the characters they develop, and to portray the differences in
how they are positioned. In my book, I made the characters, I made the situations;
if God is the creator, then I was the God. But not when it comes to the arguments.
That God trick I did not play. My characters make arguments that I heard in the
field.
As for the PhD, I recommend it to everybody, but I know that you have to have
quite some endurance to complete. I’m very enthusiastic and I hope it comes
across from my text and thesis as well.

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 CHAPTER 2

RELEVANCE: FROM POLITICS

TO SELLING, AND BACK AGAIN

The term ‘relevance’ has a very charged history within academia. In those writing in
the tradition of 1968, relevance refers to critical emancipatory research that responds
to the needs of the oppressed and fights alienation. This ‘relevance’ combines ideas
from Freud and Marx. Human subjectivity, with its fears, limits, and contradictions
is recognized, as are the pitfalls of economic exploitation and capitalism. Depth
psychology and Marxism are of course uneasy bedfellows, and ‘relevance’ is here a
fairly unstable concept.
The term pretty much disappeared in the 1980’s, to reappear in the 1990’s and
early 2000’s to mean sellable. Relevant research had become research that someone
is willing to pay for. Because someone is willing to fund it, evidently it has value.
Relevance had shifted 180 degrees in its socio-political resonance. It had once
celebrated researcher independence and social commitment, and was critical of
economic power, if not implacably opposed to it. Ironically, it became a criterion of
success bestowed by those very same economic powers. In this book, we are trying
to recuperate the term and ultimately make use of it as a key quality of ‘critical
communitarianism’, positioning it closer to where it was forty year ago. In Chapter 6,
we develop the concept of ‘critical communitarianism’ further.
How ‘relevance’ came to mean the very opposite of what it once meant has
been explored by Boltanski and Chiapello (Fr 1999, UK 2005). They argue that
critical ideas championed by the political left are often reversed and put to use
in the market. Counterculture and anti-establishment values are transformed into
a ‘lifestyle’ for sale. Research as socio-political engagement has evolved into the
‘entrepreneurial university’ offering ideas for sale. Relevance has thus gone from
protest to product. But this is not the whole story, for relevance is still contested
terrain; it is defined in terms of different competing interests. Researchers, funding
bodies, politics, corporations, social groups, and other stakeholders are all involved,
and the arguments play out along several different dimensions.
One such dimension is the argument over rigour and relevance, which is reflected
in the wider distinction of science and practice. Calling for more practitioner/
researcher interaction often implicitly assumes, as Bartunek (2007) sometimes does,
that the outcomes will take care of themselves. But it is important to pay attention to
how the ethical and political goals of the encounter are determined. Often, the issue
of goals is glossed over, with vague exhortations for improved attitudes, resulting in a
call for “better, reflective practitioners” (see, for example, Starkey & Madan, 2001).

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Although, at first take, this sounds attractive and plausible, it disguises deeper issues.
The so-called methodological divide between ‘scientific research’ and ‘practitioner
knowledge’ is often but the surface manifestation of a much more fundamental
schism: that between an assumption of a shareholder focus on profit maximization,
and a commitment to the communitarian values that make up civic society.
Of course, research is relational. But the issue is whose self-interest dominates the
relationships and how? Both ‘neo-conservative’ (often shortened to ‘neo-con’ and
more typically termed neo-liberal in Europe) ideology and ‘(re-)territorialization’
are relational, but not in the same way. Neo-con ideology assumes that the rational
self-interested individual is the crux to all relations; (re-)territorialization assumes
that shared care for the self is at the crux of matters. The difference is fundamental.
Research can (re-)territorialize in that it can set up the preconditions to experiencing
places, events and communities. Research can assert and confirm shared identity;
demonstrating shared choices and collective opportunities. Research, through
contributing to the process of identifying issues and options worth discussing and
acting on, can be called ‘relevant’. Insofar as democracy requires debate and choice,
relevant research co-produces some of its key preconditions. If a society is no longer
sensate, it cannot have a democracy because discussion and decision-making will
not function as conscious shared processes.
Relevance as what can be sold – as the motor of the knowledge economy and its
goal of unlimited economic growth – sees free discussion, speculative reflection and
thoughtfulness as ‘soft’ and unproductive. And, since they are unproductive they are,
de facto, a waste of time. Relevance as an expression of commodification only values
research in so far as it leads to greater GDP, made up of higher profits and representing
economic success (however partial). Commodification may be able to fill our homes
with consumer goods (or at least those of us still sufficiently within the system to
pay for them) but, not inadvertently, it leaves the mind empty. Research dedicated
to furthering consumerism – or economic growth alone – destroys intellectual work
as an expression of social and political freedom. Commercial research institutes
may further marketing and consumption, or develop other economic efficiencies but
they are neither interested in, nor will they produce, democratic conditions and their
prerequisites.
The relevant PhD, as we conceive of it, represents a situated democratic
community. It occurs at a specific place and involves actual persons who meet and
discuss. It (re-)territorializes research by linking research to shared values and to the
democratic development of reason. Such research takes the quality of relatedness
very seriously and questions how the research community relates to Other, whether
they be outsiders, the researched, or society at large (Levinas, 1969, 2006b). The
relevant PhD is characterized by shared circumstances where there is discussion
and dialogical investigation, leading to the weighing of alternative courses of
action. It is rigorous in its methodological respect for others, and addresses self and
other as carefully and respectfully as possible. The shared research effort is what
‘territorializes’ it.

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 RELEVANCE: FROM POLITICS TO SELLING, AND BACK AGAIN

The relevant PhD involves researchers, the researched, supervisors and contexts
(such as universities, research centres or research sites) in an exploration of
relationships and circumstances. Relevant research, as we use the term, attempts to
identify key lived issues and to explore their possibilities. In this book, we describe
relevant PhD projects, their communities, and results. Our goal is to show research
as (re-)territorialization dedicated to democratic respect for Other. We aim to make
our descriptions coherent enough so that at the end of the book you will have a
clear idea of what a relevant PhD is and what it is like to engage in one. The book is
more an ethnography of the relevant PhD than a cookbook; but by now, it will be no
surprise to you that we think that research cookbooks probably do more harm than
good. They leave out what is vital; namely, the social and ethical engagement with
relevance. It is our goal to represent the relevant PhD to you in a manner that invites
participation, reflection and action.
In effect, we are trying to combine PhD study with the Greek ideal of the scholé
which was a place of free reflection and shared thought. The effort to reinvent the
scholé is not particularly new. Everything from Robert Maynard Hutchins’ college
(University of Chicago, circa 1940) to Michel Onfray’s l’Université populaire
de Caen (contemporary) (see: Onfray, 2007) has shared this ideal. Key elements
typically include freely chosen participation, a focus on life as it is lived, and the
putting of reflection to work to try and understand self and other. Such efforts tend
to be (at least partially) deinstitutionalized, to see making a contribution to society as
very important, and aim for communicatory integrity (via respect for each person’s
contribution and/or voice).
Relevance has often been entrapped in the so-called conflict between science and
practice, or rigour and experience. Practice is claimed either to lack relevance or to
lack rigor. To make matters even worse, rigor and relevance are often claimed to be
incommensurable, although, of course, it is not impossible to lack both. Underlying
such claims are a series of assumptions surrounding the notion of a scholar-
practitioner divide, which almost precludes meaningful research into practice.
In the extreme, ivory-towered academics pursue theoretical studies of increasing
irrelevance, while practitioners fail to master or understand the prerequisites to
scientific study. Academics and practitioners, so the stories go, do not speak the same
language, do not, nay cannot, listen to one another, and have little sympathy for one
another. Advocates of rigor or of relevance become two warring camps characterized
by “brutal identity warfare,” marked by “tribal boundaries [within which] tribe
members ignore those outside … each academic is forced into membership in a tribe
and/or sub-tribe to survive …” (Gulati, 2007: 777–778).
The social, rhetorical and political structures of what might be described as the
‘rigorous tribe’ have been probed within the sociology of science (Knorr-Cetina,
1999). The rigorous tribe supposedly believe that theoretical consistency, the logical
derivation of hypotheses, unbiased data collection, and representative and reliable
measures, form a well-trodden and self-evident path to certainty and knowledge,
and that such methods should be applied to any enquiry into professional practice.

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Admittedly, practice may be trivial or pointless, research may not provide any new
insights, and investigation may be totally alienated from professional reality, but
by following the correct steps and repeating the necessary mantras, research is
‘scientific’ and thus ‘true’.
On the other hand, ‘relevance’ has its own problems. It can be short-sighted
and shallow, as witnessed by the deluge of articles and case studies valorising
former colossi, such as Enron or the Royal Bank of Scotland, as examples of
business success. Practitioner consensus can be sloppy, incoherent, inconsistent and
ahistorical; promising quick-fixes grounded on fads. For instance, practitioner calls
for reductions in bureaucracy may, when implemented, simply condone greed and
even effectively facilitate fraud.
There have been many, oft repeated, calls for greater relevance in research to
make it better serve practice. To give an indication of the wealth of material making
such demands, Alferoff & Knights, 2009; Anderson et al., 2001; Bartunek, 2007;
Empson, 2007; Evered & Louis, 1981; Gagliardi, 1999; Ghoshal, 2005; Gulati,
2007; Heth & Heath; 2007; Huff, 2000; Kieser & Leiner, 2007; Knights et al., 2002;
Knights et al., 2007; Lorsch, 2008; Mohrman et al., 2001; Ouchi et al., 2005; Rynes
et al., 2001; Schoen, 1983; Schultz & Hatch, 2005; Schapiro, et al., 2007; Starkey &
Madan, 2001; van de Ven, 2007; van de Ven et al., 2006; and Weick, 2001, are but
a representative sample. The most common theme is to call upon researchers and
practitioners to enter into dialogue, to form joint networks and to be co-researchers.
Better still, more productive relations and communication are seen as a potential
solution. If only everyone could display mutual respect and just see the best aspects
of the other, then problems would supposedly evaporate. As such, this might be seen
as a ‘soft’ position, where solutions can be achieved through informed compromise.
By contrast, the ‘hard’ position wants to fundamentally reshape the identities of the
protagonists, be it the researchers or practitioners.
In the ‘soft’ position there are many differences of approach, although most
stress that relational scholarship is required to unite researchers and practitioners
via dialogue (Bartunek, 2007). In particular, the difference between behavioural
research and practitioner research is explored. Action learning or research, and the
practitioner-as-researcher, are embraced. Within the history of organization studies,
many first- (for example, Lewin (1952), Mayo (1977) & Simon(1948) and second-
generation scholars (thus, Argyris (1964), Bennis (1966), McGregor(1960), March
and Simon (1960) and Schon(1984)) produced descriptive work based on practice.
They used case-studies and ethnography, and demonstrated that close attention to
what their subjects did could produce valuable practical knowledge. Their focus
was on issues such as the complexity of business and organizational systems in
terms of their internal organization, the interpersonal skills needed for success, and
relatedness to technological, competitive, cultural and economic environments.
Because these researchers started from the position that organizations were complex
systems, no effort was made to reduce behaviour to simple laws, and mechanistic
analysis was eschewed.

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But such gentle and sympathetic enquiry was not to last. For instance, Jay Lorsch
(2008) is scathing when noting how attention to the contingent nature of leadership
has been supplanted by a search for general principles and theoretical prescriptions.
The abandonment of considered and open examination of practice can be seen across
the social sciences. Part of the problem Lorsch alludes to is the increasingly dogmatic
assertion and acceptance, that research should be ‘scientific’. In this, research is
demanded to aim for discipline-specific theories, applicable to all circumstances,
amenable to ‘testing’ via methodologies derived from applied mathematics. Lorsch
is not slow to point out the incoherence of such generalizations. A lieutenant in
charge of a platoon of soldiers in a war zone clearly faces very different leadership
challenges to those of a CEO of a global corporation employing 50,000 people.
Both might be leaders, but by emphasizing the different situational contexts, the
relevance of a generalizable leadership theory to practice becomes opaque. However,
elements of an abstract, generalized theory are not without a certain utility: they have
been gleefully seized upon by some practitioners. Lorsch points out that the term
‘leader’ actually helped some ‘managers’ to re-label themselves and thereby to earn
more. Similarly, the New Finance that emerged in the 1960s was characterized by
deductive theory and mathematical models, and advocated greater recompense to
senior executives (now, of course, leaders), in order to align their interests more
closely with shareholders. Unsurprisingly, such calls met little resistance from those
who benefitted from the largesse. Such limited interaction with a particular sub-set
of management aside (see Harvey 2005), the mission of using academic research
to inform practitioners, with dialogue essential in such attempts, has largely been
abandoned. Lorsch argues that a tolerance for pluralism, especially one that would
allow for the use of explorative descriptive work, is needed for researchers to capture
elements of the world of work, which would enable them to speak to managers.
However, others have suggested that the problems lie elsewhere. Bartunek (2007)
wonders what exactly it might be that the researchers and practitioners could actually
say to one another. Through a detailed examination of the required “implications for
practice” paragraph at the end of papers in The Academy of Management journal,
she finds that most are perfunctory and the articles would probably be better without
them. Most papers are not really about “What to do on Monday,” but attempt in a
decontextualized way, to understand “the big picture.” The articles are not about
things of concern to those concerned as to what next week might bring. What
underlies this disconnect, she suggests, is that both parties lack the will to engage
with the other. Academic researchers do not really want to understand the world
of practitioners – it would require developing in-depth relationships with practice.
Bartunek doubts whether researchers are really ready to make that investment.
She identifies structural problems that militate against such involvement: senior
academics are sceptical about close relationships with practitioners and will cast
such proximity as an “illegitimate affair” (2007: 1329). She suggests that the same
disdain may also be present among practitioners. As a consequence she pleads for
a two-track strategy: let scientific research done, in its search for the bigger picture

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and general principles, where it has no concern for practice; but alongside, open
practitioner and researcher discussion, which enables both to ‘enter into each others’
worlds without needing to cast their own worlds aside’ (2007: 1330).
Engagement, practical credibility and involvement are crucial to relationships of
practitioners with their clients, but they do not form part of the language of most
academic articles. Scholarship that aspires to relationality requires being accessible,
thoughtful, and delivering insightful feedback. It entails “inquiry from the inside”
that can only be fostered by long-term relationships between the researched and
the researchers. Alferoff & Knights (2009) argue that such research is possible
and that practitioner-academic partnerships flourish in solution-oriented thought
and investigation where there are common goals and interests. Bartunek (2008)
suggestion of ‘Insider/Outsider research’ works along similar alignments of purposes.
This does not mean that researchers need or should share typical managerial
concerns with improvements to productivity, performance, and profit (although, of
course, they may wish to do so). There is a substantial critique of such managerialist
research; see, for example, Alvesson & Willmott, 1996; Clegg & Ross-Smith, 2003;
Grey 2001, 2004. But, there are a multitude of issues important to managers and
researchers alike, beyond the clearly managerialist concerns. Just to give a few
disparate examples: organizational violence as seen in work-related suicides in large
industrial conglomerates; professionalism typified by professionals’ failure to attend
to clients’ best interests; poverty characterized by the entrapment of the working
poor with full-time jobs not paying a living-wage; and the environment, where
issues are endlessly stymied by short-term financial priorities.
Partnerships are needed among those willing to engage on both sides. Of course,
some people will be totally cynical, narcissistic, and are irredeemably corrupted,
but many are looking for long-term solutions and learning opportunities. There are
problems that can be shared, enrolment or commitment to action is possible, and
mobilization and involvement does occur. Problem-solving networks are possible,
although no guarantee of successful practice or even desirable outcomes. Cooperation
can be manipulative and (at least in our eyes) ideologically destructive. For instance,
Ouchi’s (Ouchi & Segal, 2003) advocacy of radical decentralization as a means
of improving school outcomes, drawn from research with practitioners, served to
redefine policies away from child-directed pedagogy with its emancipatory norms,
to achievement-directed entrepreneurship centering on budget responsibility.
There have, of course, been many efforts made in good faith to escape relevance/
science, practitioner/researcher dualism, and to redefine ‘relevant research’. Lewin
tried to reconcile social relevance and research rigor with his claim that ‘there is
nothing so practical as a good theory’. Schön’s (1984) ‘practitioner research’, Argyris’
(1964) ‘actionable knowledge’, and Polanyi’s ‘tacit knowledge’ (1962) all attempt to
define some sort of relevant research. They all try to avoid unproductive ‘either/or’s,
such as science versus practice, learned scholarship versus popular dissemination.
Instead, they emphasize the struggle and importance of trying to get on with one’s
work. There is a strong pragmatist bent to this work. Relevance is problem-oriented

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and engaged. It produces reflective work undertaken in dialogue with practitioners

and their clients. Dilemmas between critical and commercial, practical and thorough,
narrow and broadare pragmatically avoided. But, too often, ethics are hidden in a
number of key terms, such as “successful,” “better,” or “reflective,” none of which
are adequately explored. Situated priorities are called upon to be negotiated, agreed
upon and acted upon, but they are rarely analysed in depth. Broader priorities remain
unquestioned:
“Relevant research” is not something a scholar does on the side. It takes courage
to step out of the thorny road to relevance, and it takes cheerfulness to truly
enjoy and sustain the journey and the laborious interaction with the real world
of organizations. Yet if you commit to speaking with people in practice about
your work and force yourself to formulate and undertake research that also
matters to them, at the end of the day, who knows, they might even listen. As a
consequence, although no one may notice, you just might help those managers
change our world for the better, even just a bit. (Vermeulen 2007: 760)
Thus the goal of engaged research is to help, ‘people at the helms of organizations
[…] in order to create wealth and, at the end of the day, a better world’ (p 759). The
idea that wealth is created by people at the helm of the organization, that should
accrue to corporations, and which will lead to a better world, are apparently in the
quote, self-evidently true.
Relevance supposedly will accrue to more effective scholar-practitioner
interfaces (van de Ven, 2007), or to action learning results (Carr & Kemmis, 1986;
Kemmis & Tracey, 2007). But none of this actually transcends or resolves the split
between research rigour and successful practice. The pragmatists attempt to manage
the tensions between researchers and practitioners within the world as it is. They
try to avoid any difficult examinations of first principles or confrontation with
the theoretical dilemmas that professional schools typically face. Does healthcare
research really try to know what ‘care’ is, or just to produce appropriate human
resources for the healthcare industry? Does the business school question capitalist
practices and ethics, or just reproduce managerial attitudes and assumptions? Does
the school of education examine the fundamentals of ‘human learning’ or just turn
out fairly unskilled low-paid teachers? Pragmatists accept the either/or of critical
social science versus practice as given, and try to manage or avoid its undesirable
consequences.
They often justify their own actions in terms of research and training outcomes.
In part, such a strategy can be successful: lecturer-student dialogue and cooperative
researcher-researched investigation may indeed garner better results than teacher-
student antagonism, or research without genuine interaction with the researched.
However, the underlying problems of the researcher/researched dichotomy are not
really hereby being addressed.
The most sophisticated neo-pragmatist theory of relevant research has been
proposed by Schatzki et al. (2001). It is a ‘turn to practice’ drawing both on

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Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘rule-following’. From

Heidegger comes the idea of ‘throwness’: that is, humans are ‘thrown’ into a pre-
existing world that will also continue after they are dead. Individuals do not have
the possibility of choice before they are thrown into this world, nor do they have the
option of detaching themselves from on-going worldly activity to consider existence
from the outside. They are ‘being-in-the-world’. From the outset, the individual
is in the midst of events, circumstances and activities; awareness entails making
sense of experience. The world is one of involvement, relatedness and happenings.
Consciousness is always of something – in effect, of practices.
Heidegger understood everyday existence as within sites of involvement, activity
and practice. He asserted that although being absorbed in the world was indeed part
of existing itself, it was only once the individual was able to see the inauthenticity
of such existence, that authenticity in Being was possible. ‘Dare’ – care of others,
of things, and of the possibilities of existence, provides the existential window on
Being. Care, it is claimed, is crucial to any truly relevant ‘turn to practice’. But the
status of the everyday is ambiguous; in ‘throwness’ are we not lost in the nitty-gritty
and unable to experience Being?
From Wittgenstein comes a focus on the concrete rules of existence – what exactly
are the practices that characterize ‘being-in-the-world’? What conceptual rules,
assumptions and skills are necessary to sustain the everyday world, as we know it?
Something as mundane as a supermarket seems to be a simple enough thing, but the
systems of production, logistics, economy and labour required for it to open every
day, looking always the same, with shelves well-stocked and seemingly ready to
receive customers, are numerous and fabulously complex. The rules that make the
everyday possible are similarly vast and multifarious. Research is needed to examine
the practices constituting the society within which we live and to appraise the ready-
to-hand world of daily existence.
The praxiological encompasses concrete circumstances and routines rather than
ideas and values. The focus on practices blocks radical scepticism since it is the
examination of the world as it is. When trying to understand such practices one has
to deal with material objects and people, routines and habits, circumstances and
immediate goals, and one does not try to grasp the nature of life or the purpose of
existence. The study of daily life requires a consequent quotidian acceptance of its
normative order, and not the raising of deeper ontological or metaphysical questions.
The combination of Heidegger and Wittgenstein is alluring. Practices are defined
as situated and corporeal; they are about how we get on with life. Therefore they do
not depend upon theorizing from first principles – for example, there is no need to
assert self-interested individuality.. Thus, the ‘turn to practice’ need not be enveloped
by the presently pervasive ‘neo-con’ ideology, which assumes the primacy of
rationally calculated action, although such a turn still faces the risk of being deemed
inappropriate within a system where adherents of neo-conservatism increasingly
have all the levers of power. The turn-to-practice, with its focus on ‘care’ and ‘rules’
leaves room in which to doubt the prevailing ideology of rational self-interest.

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Furthermore, the study of practices neatly skips the tautology of having to first
assume what one supposedly is then going to explain. First principles of order
supposedly are not needed to define how persons, objects and organizations are
structured. In the ‘turn to practice’, order just is, and shared practices just are. Neither
individuals nor their choices, nor the societal, nor ethical norms, are primary. Shared
practices change, evolve and adapt. In these changes, the micro and the macro are
linked, co-evolutionary and inter-related. Neither psyche nor society needs to be
seen as primary. Everyday existence is prioritized, since relationships of practice
are events of social activity that define everyday circumstances. And it is not what
we think about daily existence, but what we become as we participate in day-to-day
circumstances, that counts. Consciousness is a product of social practices, rather
than the other way around. Economic production, linguistic practices, and social
conventions produce consciousness.
The study of practice reveals the relational dynamics of hyle (matter or stuff),
as well as of mind and society. Sites of practice are where organization, in all its
complexity, occurs, and where action and coordination can be seen. Researchers
need to investigate sites of practice to ascertain how they ‘work’; and to identify
how activity, community, order, and employment are realized. In this way, rules of
being-in-the-world relating to work and power are revealed. Practices are concrete,
actualized and immediate, making them site-bound. This means that although there
are generalizable aspects to the rules of being-in-the-world, how they become
manifest at any specific site is not posited to be generalizable. Thus the research is,
at least in part, site-specific, engaged and undertaken in relationship to the Other.
The ‘turn to practice’ has led to some interesting ideas. For instance, Whittington
(1993, 1996, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007) has called for the study of strategy-as-practice,
reversing the traditional order by placing goals and purposes in the back seats behind
the procedures and routines of doing strategy. Strategy as a practice then does not
have to be justified or legitimated, but instead acknowledged as something that just
exists and needs to be described. Strategic management has a long tradition of asking
the question, ‘What should company x do?’ and enrolling diverse tools and concepts,
such as portfolio matrices, industry structure analyses, diversification, innovation,
mergers & acquisitions and core competencies, to help furnish an answer. Strategy,
‘turned-to-practice’ asks instead, ‘How does company X do y?’ The nitty-gritty of
organizing through budgets and planning, meetings and micro-politics, becomes
much more visible.
The absence of a fore-grounded general theory of society or of mankind, coupled
with a lack of generalization, means that there is recognition and attention to the
unique circumstances of individual events and organizations. From firm to firm, from
situation to situation, there will be differences. What is required is site-specific study
– effectiveness is not just deliverable through general principles but requires attention
to myriad local complexities. Strategy is no longer identified with determining what
should ideally happen, it becomes the skills and ability to make things happen in situ.
Strategy is redefined, more to entail “discernible patterns of actions arising from

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habituated tendencies and internalized dispositions,” than “deliberate, purposeful

goal-setting initiatives” (Chia & MacKay, 2007: 217). Questions of success and
efficacy do not go away, but they are recast. It is relevant how people ‘satisfice’ local
circumstances. Do they possess and really make effective use of the skills needed?
Schatzki, as the leading philosopher of the ‘turn-to-practice’, asserts that practices
“ensure relatively stable, non-overtly violent human coexistence” via pragmatic
regimes of action (Schatzki: in Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina & von Savigny (eds.), 2001).
In other words, ‘bundles of activities’ making up practices, maintain the daily social,
organizational and political order. The ‘turn to practice’ is thus normative and
profoundly value-laden in how it affirms the politics of the status quo. When we
consider that (particularly in the UK) organization studies emerged (or at least was
given a huge shove) from Labour Process Theory (the Marxian analysis of economic
and class conflict), the move to the pragmatic functionalism underlying the ‘turn-to-
practice’ is a big step. Research undertaken under the turn-to-practice banner is not
politically radical. Its outcomes typically involve ethnographic descriptions of how
conduct is enacted, work is performed, and organization is produced. The goal is to
analyse the achievement of local order.
Schatzki calls upon the analysis of practice to follow a tripartite scheme, attending
to ‘language, work and power’, which he terms ‘sayings, doings and relatings’.
Ethnographic studies within this framework explore practice on the basis of these
three dimensions. At any site of practice there will be ‘talk’ (communication, informal
organization, understandings), ‘rules’ of action (the requirements, guidelines and
regulations pertaining to ‘what is to be done’) and goals and commitments (what
Schatzki calls the ‘teleo-affective’ dimension of relationship). For Schatzki, all three
aspects are characteristic of practice.
But the demand for the tripartite analysis of practice reveals its Achilles heel.
Defining the ground rules for analysing practice requires substantial meta-reflection
and analysis. How does the turn-to-practice define what we call ‘relevance’? Why
and how is the conceptualization of practice significant? We believe that lived or
situated practice is important because it is a key aspect to self to other relatedness. We
do not study practice for practice’s sake, but because it is a window on interaction,
on democracy, and to the Other. We study the qualities of lived relatedness and
specific manifestations of sociability. Relevance for us has to do with the quality of
relationship and connectedness, and not primarily that of organizational or economic
success. A turn-to-practice that focuses on goals, speech and rules, seems too narrow
to us. In our experience, practitioners want to question goals, examine contradictions
and lacunae in speech, and challenge or even change the established rules. Site-
based research in the ‘turn to practice’ may question managerial or professional
effectiveness, and address whether communication and organizational principles
cohere, but it has little or no grounds for radically questioning or critiquing practice.
Its relevance remains too narrowly pragmatic.
Turn-to-practice theory largely ignores individual and group intentionality.
Individual and shared purposes, or the ‘will to …..’ (power, justice, well-being,

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flourishing, or what-have-you) is largely ignored. Practices are situated and habitual,

but are not examined reflexively. Sense-making or meaning-creation are portrayed as
just another (dimension of) practice. Although no individualist ideology of rational
calculated action is assumed, no other concept of purposiveness takes its place.
The ‘turn to practice’ can analyse agents and their actions, and examine how
society responds to such actions, and it can investigate agents’ awareness of these
responses. This examination of ‘act, interact and double-interact’ potentially can open
onto the study of self-awareness and reflexivity. Thévenot (Thévenot in Schatzki,
Knorr Cetina & von Savigny eds, 2001) has grasped this possibility and has tried to
develop a way of examining practice-based action taking account of human purposes
and values. He maintains that action in everyday life is essentially purposive.
Humans act in pursuit of the ‘good’ or out of notions of ‘justice’. Practices hinge on
justifications and thus are not normatively blind and merely ‘success’ driven. Actions
are explained, understood and justified. Making-sense and vindication are crucial to
the sustainability and effectiveness of social practice. Practice must be ethical or it is
not stable, sustainable or worthwhile. Thévenot’s inclusion of ethical purposiveness
as a crucial characteristic of practice is characteristic of relevance in his thought.
But we have to note that Thévenot ultimately reduces ethical purposiveness to just
another dimension of the practice of ‘fairness’, severely limiting the normative
quality of practice.
Gulati, in his critique of the polarization between science and practice-directed
research, has begun to develop a way out of the science/practice divide by referring
to a “normative model of research” (Gulati, 2007). Unfortunately, he is rather
imprecise about his definition of ‘normative’, let alone what might be meant by
a “normative model of research”. In lieu of what could be a vibrant contribution,
he prefers to try to smooth troubled waters by calling for counselling, dialogue,
tolerance and mutual respect. Despite whatever goodwill there may be for building
bridges, they will not solve the relevance/rigor divide. We can only transcend the
difference by leaving the dichotomy behind. The problem is essentially the same as
the mind-body divide in philosophy, or that of structure-agency in sociology; once
you assume the split, no matter how hard you work to try and resolve or diminish it,
it remains inherent to your position. You can try to ameliorate or soften the duality;
but once posited, it functions as your point of departure. We believe that the answer
has to be sought in denying, transcending, or abrogating the dualism, and not in
compromising, softening, or pretending to ignore it.
Stephen Kemmis, who is a long-term advocate of action research, has reinterpreted
the ‘turn to practice’ to make it less dualistic (Kemmis & Smith, 2007). He has
revised the research triad by incorporating philosophy from Pierre Hadot. Hadot
(Letiche & Moriceau, 2012) saw philosophy as a preparation for life. He argued that
in ancient Greece, philosophy was not about theory for its own sake, but attempted
to address how one ought to live: searching for a more flourishing, virtuous and
just life. Philosophy had the tripartite structure of logic, physics and ethics; each
intended to assist in finding direction to different aspect of what might be meant

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by living a better life. Logic was meant to help one to think more clearly, and to
avoid self-contradiction, tautology and sloppy reasoning. Physics taught respect for
nature, awareness of the use of materials, and what we might now call ‘ecology’.
Ethics encompassed justice, fairness, acknowledgement and respect. To live well,
one needed to combine all three dimensions.
One can reinterpret Schatzki’s ‘saying, doing and relating’ in terms of Hadot’s
‘logic, physics and ethics’; and this is what Kemmis (2007) has done in creating what
he terms ‘critical action research’. Such research, he claims, offers possibilities for
the transformation of: (i) activities and their outcomes, (ii) persons and their (self-)
understandings, and (iii) social formations in which practices are embedded. Kemmis’
‘relevance’ as transformation is in marked conflict with Schatzki’s prioritization of
stability. Also, of course, it is possible to define relevance via Hadot’s philosophy
without the intermediate step of the ‘turn to practice’. For instance, later in this book
in Chapter 4, we will focus on ‘normative professionalism’ and ‘Mode 3’ research.
Indeed, practitioner research informed by Hadot is rich with possibility, not least, as
acknowledged by Foucault, who reinterpreted it as ‘telling truth to power’ and ‘care
of self’ (1986).
Kemmis focuses on discursively, ecologically and personally sustainable action,
and practitioners’ ‘place-based’ efforts to realize these. Being ‘place-based’ requires
researching one’s own professional relationships and actions from a position
of engagement and involvement. Relevance involves attention to self to other
dynamics, and to their context. It leads to self-reflective ethnography, scrutinizing
relationships of work and communication, both political and personal. Such an
agenda transcends more narrow foci on social engineering or organizational
development, which has permeated much action research. Research informed
by Kemmis is not primarily dedicated to practical efficiency or managerial
effectiveness; Kemmis has taken Hadot’s challenge seriously to find and develop
ways of living better.
But even Kemmis’ work seems strangely context-free. And from Schatzki
you would never even dream that there is an economic, social and political crisis
surrounding us. The turn-to-practice seems to find practice relevant enough, but
tends to define practice in a manner wherein the conflicts, challenges and threats
of everyday life are all absent. The urgency of economic crisis and of unsettled
times cannot be felt in turn-to-practice texts. Practice seems focussed on success
stories and solutions to problems, not on quandaries, unresolved predicaments or
indeterminacy. Ars Industrialis (Association internationale pour une politique
industrielle des technologies de l’esprit) is the social thinker Bernard Stiegler’s
attempt to study practice (Stiegler, 2008). He explicitly tries to (re-)territorialise
research. His focus is on ‘context’ – i.e. enquiry occurring in specific grounded
places; and ‘with text’ – that is, serious thought, reaching its apotheosis in writing,
which enables the community to reach some of its goals. We believe that such an
emphasis on relation and context, even when realised in somewhat different ways to
those of Stiegler, offers a valid model for what a relevant PhD should strive for. But,

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before delving more into our own thoughts on what such a model might look like, it
will be helpful to explore Stiegler’s concepts.
For Stiegler, the contemporary social-economic crisis is a consequence of
having reached the limits of the consumer society (Stiegler, 2012). Asset-satiated,
over-capitalized, rich post-industrial societies, he argues, no longer produce ‘real’
demand as the essentials of life and production are more than adequately provided
for– and the hole (in demand) at the heart of capitalism can only be skimpily
covered up by ever more intrusive marketing. At the same time, natural resources
are increasingly depleted so the cost of extraction is rising. The combination of the
erosion of ‘real’ demand and the constraints on natural resources are the foundation
of crisis.
The analysis borrows strongly from Paul Jorion and particularly the ideas
expressed in Le capitalism à l’agonie (2011). Jorion weaves sociological and
anthropological insights with those garnered from his experience as a trader to
posit causes (and perhaps resolutions) of the crisis starting in 2007. Jorion departs
from versions of classical Marxism by suggesting that the socio-economic system
is characterized by conflicts between at least four groups, on two distinct levels.
There are investors (those with capital), senior managers (encompassing not
only higher management, but also including entrepreneurs and others who utilise
capital), middlemen (‘shopkeepers’ or distributors, but also ‘knowledge workers’
and those who work in service distribution) and salaried labour. The first two and
the fourth group dominate the production sector; the third group play a major role
in the secondary market place of distribution and of services. As you will see, the
third group, including ourselves as researchers, teachers and knowledge workers, is
increasingly powerless. The first two groups have gained hegemonic power, forming
a political and economic oligarchy capable of setting the social agenda.
All four groups compete for a bigger piece of the primary market place of
industry and production, and their relative power positions determine how well they
do. According to Jorion (2003), since the 1980s, through stock options and bonus
systems, managers have become more closely identified with investors. Prior to the
1980s, management wanted their companies to be successful, rendered in terms of
producing more and delivering greater revenue; investors were focused on dividend
yield. Both were, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on the long-term best
interests of the company. Since the 1980s, in an unholy alliance between economic
theory and financial practice, both investors and managers have become more
oriented towards returns from short-term share price performance, and less focussed
on the long-term health of the enterprise. As a consequence, the third and fourth
groups, have become ever more precarious, marginalized, and economically weak.
In the boom years of 1980-2000, members of the third group thought that ‘knowledge
work’ protected them and that they were in a strong position. But since 2000, the
reversal has been fast and intense. Jorion argues that shifts in the fundamental power
balance of societies, such as we currently see, always entail disruption and conflict,
as potential winners and losers seek to protect their positions.

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Jorion analyses the contemporary (as we write) economic crisis. At its heart he
asserts is the question as to why are banks, country by country, going broke, and
why are governments bailing them out? Jorion argues that the crisis is economically
understandable: there is a surplus of capital but no political-social will to direct
it towards investment and production. The banks, continually injected with fresh
funds from government, are no longer interested in using that money for productive
investment, preferring potentially higher gains from speculation. At the same time,
as cash is liberated for the banks, the rest of society has to pay for it through savings
made via austerity measures. As society continues down this path, industry remains
unable to invest in research and development, reindustrialization and production,
thus unemployment continues to increase and the position of the employed becomes
more precarious. And in consequence, the financial woes of government worsen
and its powers to affect change become more curtailed. Theoretically at least,
government could (as it did in the 19th century) pass laws to dissuade speculation,
such as by declaring that losses made in speculation cannot be recovered in a court
of law. But there is no political will to do so. Even economic policy could be bent
to direct funds towards investment – a systematic politics of middle range inflation
(4 to 5%) would make productive investment more attractive than holding capital in
savings – but, again, there is no political will. Government is left in a position where
it merely attempts to shore up the growing imbalances in a series of ineffective
bodges, unable, and perhaps unwilling, to effectively oppose the negative economic
spiral.
Jorion explains this apparent lunacy through a theory derived from depth
psychology. It is the agony of trauma, powerlessness and denial that is the root
cause. Human health, well-being and even life itself, in most of the population, is
being denied by the dominant economic aristocracy. Their wealth has nothing to do
with their ability to consume; their accumulation of capital is driven by a blind drive
to control, possess and have everything that they can grasp, in order to hide what
they can never have. Even oligarchs suffer disease, despair and die. One can seek
immortality through economic power, but such efforts are doomed to fail. And the
fear of failure drives one all the harder to accumulate even more.
Indeed, the rich and powerful are insatiable. They do not want to share any of their
gains, even when this would not involve personal sacrifice. Jorion contends that the
powerful deny (and probably hate) the powerless because they provide a constant
reminder of the loss, weakness and defeat they fear. But this denial leads to an
irrational and repressive economic order. Everyone, including the very rich, would
be better off in a stable society with full employment. For the elite, the investment
in new technologies, services and processes could bring more wealth and prestige,
but at the same time, it would force an acknowledgement of impermanence. Such
an acknowledgement seems to be too scary a prospect, too large, and too truthful a
sacrifice. Those who have the wealth that they could choose to invest are locked into
their denial of life’s nature, unable to surmount their agony. And thus, we all suffer.

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Jorion provides a possible explanation for aspects of the contemporary world. His
analysis oscillates between the psychological and the social. It potentially ‘explains’
what drives the economic elite to so ferociously pursue wealth, even when the
money yields little or no ultimate value for them. And it explains how the agony
of the elites is at the heart of the current crisis in capitalism: employees, labourers,
proletariat, unemployed, the subaltern, or disenfranchised are not to blame, but are
victims.
Jorion’s explanation potentially opens up a series of further questions. Are
neuroses and denial characteristics of the rich, rather than of the poor? Is Marx
entirely wrong in that labour is not defined in opposition to capitalism, but is simply
just one group whose weak power position makes it relatively ineffective? Has the
rhetoric of shareholder value become a pervasive ideology that has irrevocably
changed management’s self-identity, alienating it from long-term organizational
commitment? And, most fundamentally, is there a current culture of agony, which
blocks coherent discussion and analysis of our problems?
Relevance entails making the situation speakable and opening debate about
circumstances and their significance. It assumes that knowledge, insight and
reflection can be purposeful. Relevance in the university (see the next chapter) is
inherently open to questioning, doubt, revision and alternative positions. Jorion’s
effort to produce a renewed combination of Marx and Freud seems (at least
partially) convincing to us. But we want to keep discussion open and explanations
forthcoming. Relevance refers to ideas that address lived circumstances, asking key
questions and potentially contributing to the answers.
Research that describes concrete human action in context has a significant
chance to be relevant. Such description is what a PhD thesis can, at its best, achieve.
Most PhD researchers do not begin their research with a question where theory
dominates. For instance, the researcher of one thesis was concerned as to what effect
the constant threat of out-sourcing had on IT personnel. His underlying assumption
was that employees would feel betrayed, angry and rebellious because they were
living in permanent danger of losing their jobs (or at least of having their terms
and conditions dramatically altered). In short, the researcher believed that he would
find elements of emerging class-consciousness, in work that was increasingly being
‘proletarianised’. But the ethnography revealed no such thing. The IT workers lived
with and accepted, their weak power position. That they were not able to control
their own labour was self-evident to them. That they might be able to, or indeed
should, oppose their labour contract, never dawned on them. Despite their precarious
position, there was no hint of any emergent collective opposition. The workers, in
a way similar to the analysis that Jorion presents, depicted their income and job
insecurity as an inevitable result of the existing power relations. The owners of
the business were indifferent to the details of the marginal costs and benefits of
outsourcing, and ignorant and uncaring of the risks to the employees involved. That
is perhaps not surprising, but the research found that the employees did not expect
the owners to be well-informed or concerned. Outsourcing was cynically regarded

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as managerial game-playing – an effort to ‘score’; that is, to prove oneself by

emphasizing a focus on profits. Although outsourcing had little or no real economic
value, it was driven by managers’ whole-hearted acceptance of the need to pay lip-
service to the mantras of shareholder value, regardless of actual outcomes. Since
the benefit was so clearly negligible, the managers in the end merely proved to
the investors how limited their vision was. Labour became even more passive and
further entrenched in its self-image of weakness. The overall picture was one of a
series of dysfunctional and harmful relationships, with a net effect that aggregate
value, represented by the sum of employment and returns to capital, was shed in the
industrialised mother country. Describing all of this posed many questions. Labour
passivity and apathy was striking, as those threatened with outsourcing were beyond
caring. As long as the focus on consumption could be maintained, the next car,
vacation or major purchase, remained the horizon of their concerns. Their attitude to
work was itself ‘proletarianized’ – work was seen as merely amounting to so many
thoughtless assigned tasks for which one takes little or no responsibility. Society was
conceived of as a shopping mall; life’s rewards were to be found in consumption.
The researcher had to admit that his assumptions about IT workers had proven
wrong. Pride in their work, identification with a social class, involvement with the
organization (or even as a group with technical acumen) were glaringly absent. The
researcher had to admit to himself and to his readers, that the IT workers studied
were a very different group than he had thought they were. The evidence actually
came closer to Stiegler’s analysis than Jorion’s.
Stiegler does concur with Jorion’s analysis of the depletion of ‘real’ demand
in rich societies. But whereas Jorion sees this as a symptom of the contemporary
agony of capitalism, Stiegler sees marketing itself as the principal underlying factor.
Stiegler’s key concept is that of the ‘pharmakon’: the substance that is both medicine
and poison. Used metaphorically, the term points to the inseparability of contrasting
actions: creation and destruction; thesis and antithesis. In this, there are echoes of
Schumpeter’s concept of ‘creative destruction’.
Marx argued that capitalist development leads to diminishing returns: any industry
yielding high profits will have more productive capacity directed to it, producing
falling profits and ultimately over-production. For Marx, this leads inexorably to
crisis, which can only be resolved by intensified exploitation of raw materials and
labour, and/or the development of new markets. In so doing, future more extreme
crises become inevitable. Schumpeter took the sting out of Marx’s argument
(though ultimately he shares with Marx the assumption that capitalism carries
within it the motor of its own destruction) by suggesting that ‘creative destruction’
was inevitable, as capitalism revolutionises economic structures, and destroys the
old to make room for the new. Development and change drive past successes (such
as textiles or shoemaking) out, and enable new industries (IT, electronics, biotech)
to take over.
Stiegler embraces both arguments: the capitalist economy destroys its own
successes, creating crises, and is a source of renewal and technological creativity.

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He calls this double-edged sword of destruction and creation: the pharmakon.

For him, the current economic crisis is the most recent iteration of the creative/
destructive forces of capitalism. Following Schumpeter, he views capitalism as an
inherently dynamic, economic system: it may grow, change or collapse, but stability
or equilibrium is impossible. Either there is growth or crisis; and each period of
growth and crisis is driven by different technologies and/or sectors. Heavy industry
(steel and railways) was replaced by consumer goods (autos and refrigerators), and
then electronics (TV and computers) and services (financial & human services)
kicked-in.
Stiegler, in common with many other commentators, argues that since the
1970s, the industrially developed world has seen withering investment in industrial
production. Greater returns were to be extracted from financial speculation, fuelled
by innovation in new instruments (such as derivatives), than via investment in
material or service production. Even new products or services failed to promise
sufficient returns, and thus research (both fundamental and applied) was cut back. The
diminution of investment in the ‘real economy’ led inexorably to deindustrialization.
Without renewal, via new physical and social technologies, stagnation is inevitable.
The period from the 1970’s to 2007 was still one of growth (although less than
from WWII to the 1970s). But it was predominantly economic growth driven by
speculation, which was multiplied by and dependent upon debt. New streams of
personal credit were developed, averting crisis both by keeping consumption going
and ensuring that the public was sated with consumer goods and services. But, as a
consequence, personal and governmental debt soared, with inevitable repercussions.
The initial part of the financial crisis – centred on the banking and insurance
sectors – was grounded in speculation and on leveraged debt. Since the fall of Lehman
Brothers and the subsequent government propping up of failed financial institutions,
speculation has zeroed in on governments and currencies. In their attempt to avert
catastrophe, governments have acceded to the demands of speculators and embraced
austerity politics. Thus, the de-investment in future products and services persists.
Things that might serve to provide a core for a future economy do not see the light
of day. The politics of cutting back on education, research and welfare, proceeds.
What remains of production is more thoroughly exploited, increasingly shifted off
to low-wage and low-rights economies, and there are less jobs left for the masses in
the industrialized nations.
So far, little in the analysis is unfamiliar to anyone following the crisis. But Stiegler
goes on to claim that the destruction of social studies research is part and parcel of
the speculative agenda. For those speculators who increasingly hold the reins of
power, and for those of us who, however inadvertently, do their bidding, research
is only purposeful if it serves to validate speculation or, even better, builds bigger
and better tools to aid speculation. Research that seeks to explore the conditions of
well-being and community, is an anathema. For Stiegler, relevant research is always
anti-capitalist and inherently and profoundly political. Anything driven by a concept
of an ‘economy of contribution’ – i.e. one of shared work, contributory mutual

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relationships, and that is sensitive to the quality of relatedness and communication,

is by definition anti-capitalist.
Stiegler fears that the contemporary phase of capitalism has an enormous ability
to fixate minds on the unrestrained consumption of goods and services, despite the
deleterious effects of such consumption on the physical and social environment.
Here, however, he takes a markedly different angle from Jorion. Where Jorion
places the problem in the psychology of the rich, Stiegler adopts a more sociological
explanation. He focuses on the particularly malign effect of marketing – that is,
the development of dissatisfaction with current possessions and the subsequent
exploitation of needs created solely in order to sell more and yet more.
A culture of continual material malaise may serve to keep commerce going
(albeit maybe only in the short- to medium-term), but it does neither individual
nor society any good. In this, Stiegler stands in a tradition that runs from Thorstein
Veblen’s critique of conspicuous consumption to more recent analyses, such as
Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and Naomi Klein’s No Logo and
The Shock Doctrine (1999, 2007), which highlight the manipulation of the public by
big business through marketing.
Stiegler departs from many contemporary writers in that he posits that the
contemporary social-economic crisis is understandable and explicable, thereby
breaking with the postmodernists who would brand any single explanation as a ‘grand
narrative’ suspect of being totalitarian, reified and destructive. Stiegler believes that
there is a viable alternative. He tackles head-on the theory of the simulacrum, arguing
that modern social knowledge is not radically ‘virtual’ or hypothetical, fantasy-
like, or merely a realm of possibility. Baudrillard defined ‘hyperreality’ as so much
advertising-promoted mythology, sustained by popular culture and a ‘philosophy’
of greed (1983, 1990, 1994; Letiche, 2004). Baudrillard argued that hyperreality
(or the marketing society) destabilizes irretrievably the meaning of self, identity
and ‘truth’. Contemporary culture, it was claimed, is saturated with brands, clichés,
instantaneous stories and all sorts of materialist diversions, which appear more real
than anything ‘real’. Hyperreality entails the substitution of substance by flimsy
marketing tricks. Surfaces and appearances, trends, styles and objects, replace ideas,
beliefs, and commitments. The only escape Baudrillard saw for the consumerist
culture was individual flight. By embracing hyperreality and moving imaginatively
faster than fashion can, one could try to stay one step ahead of the avalanche. Stiegler
is no less concerned with the effects of consumer culture than Baudrillard, but he
rejects the individualist escape route. Instead, collective understanding and action
remain his hopeful alternative.
The consumer society, Stiegler argues, generates an ever greater desire for
what is, in effect, for our own self-destruction. For Stiegler, the only solution to
contemporary social and material destructiveness is to be found by looking beyond
the limitations of the capitalist economy. And here, he alights upon human sociability.
People in contact with one another, in intimate, personal and social forms, are
capable of generosity, affection, empathy and justice. All of which are things that are

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underplayed or irrelevant in a society that prizes consumption above all else. Stiegler
emphasises the mutual relationship between society and sociability. The nature of
sociability determines what kind of society can exist; just as society co-determines
the possible forms of sociability. Neither the person nor the society can be seen as
primary.
If in sociability, people together are to be wise, worthwhile or beautiful, they
have to relate dynamically, directly and personally with one another. Everything that
distances one from direct involvement, participation and mutuality of regard, works
against justice, limits the human scale of existence, and frustrates satisfactory social
arrangements. In this, Stiegler differs substantially from Jorion. For Jorion, in the
contemporary society, the other confronts us with our collective inability to succeed
in life; in Stiegler, the other is a potential point of positive reference.
Hanna Arendt’s philosophy of practice has already been referred to in this book
(1963, 1998, 2003). Her distinction between labor, work and action, illuminates
the conflict between Jorion and Stiegler. Jorion sees a society dominated by labor.
Labor provides for the basics of human existence: it is profit and pay-driven, and it
goes wherever the money takes it. Labor is extrinsically motivated – one labors to
be able to consume and not for any intrinsic meaning. Stiegler focuses on ‘work’.
Work is about providing a world ‘fit for human use’: it is human endeavor, chosen
and developed to achieve goals, purposes and well-being. Action encompasses
freedom and plurality. Freedom is more nuanced than the negative libertarian mantra
of freedom from others and of individual choice, which is so pervasive in current
discourse. Freedom here is the freedom of action, or the ability to bring something
new into the world. Plurality, too, is a more interesting concept than that normally
found in political theory. For Arendt, plurality is the recognition that distinction or
individuality and equality, are intrinsically interlinked. It is only though complex
networks of relationships with equal others, that individual distinctions can be
enabled. Via work, action is possible. When labor dominates, action is stymied.
Stiegler believes that academic action in the university has nearly been ended,
and that work has been replaced with labour in much of academia, particularly within
research. Academic action, in the sense of the possibility of bringing something
new into being, is not required of academic staff – rather they are called upon to
repeat the nostrums of the past, or to legitimate, with praise and publication, current
business and financial practices. The suggestion that individual success might rest
upon networks of equal humans, no longer fits in a world where entrepreneurs and
CEOs are able to wrest vast rewards. Work seems at risk. Research has increasingly
become a question of chasing money – and labour is what exists to earn money.
Labour cannot deliver the conditions for a society fit for humans. In response,
Stiegler has founded his scholé where he invites others to come to work with him.
It is not just in the university that labour dominates. Even so-called progressive
politics and think groups now only seem able to couch their arguments in the language
of labour. Rather than being able to set out a vision for society, they champion
consumption levels, especially those of the working class or the poorest. However

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justified their claims, there is here no vision of work. And, as the appropriation of
profits has intensified in many sectors, labour itself has become increasingly scarce.
Where possible, it is automated out of existence as technology replaces labour with
computers, robots, and intelligent materials. Where labour cannot be technologized,
it is simply outsourced. Even though labour can be seen as intrinsically unsatisfying,
its demise has not been matched by any increase in what Arendt called ‘work’ or
‘action’. Rather, all three activities of our being-in-the-world have been diminished.
Stiegler attempts to champion action, while paying attention to the need for
work in society, and he directly opposes only considering labour as relevant. With
Ars Industrialis, he is attempting to create an academic community that is socially
contributory and possesses communicatory integrity. That he has to do this outside
the purview of traditional academia is telling. He takes his inspiration from the
commons movement, and particularly that seen in the open code movement in
computing, perhaps most recognisable in the Linux operating system. (Wikipedia
similarly is an open resource system or a technology-based commons.) Underlying
Stiegler’s project is a simple formula: create a platform for contribution and invite
everyone to use it, as well as to develop its means of production.
This is potentially an inspiring vision, but along with much other commons
advocacy, it can seem overly idealistic. For example, Stiegler’s model has no real
developmental strategy – the underlying model can be seen as fundamentally laissez-
faire (much as the original model of Wikipedia). But this raises contradictions, as a
laissez-faire society is about winners and losers. In Stiegler’s scholé an intellectual
elite gives papers and takes the lead suggesting, ultimately, that in Ars Industrialis,
only highly skilled survivors really are in a position to contribute to the research
community. And while Stiegler is all too aware that the ‘war of all against all’ is
increasingly our social condition, and that it does not evoke the best in humanity,
it is hard to identify where the sites are, which might lead to cooperation, shared
creativity, or innovative interaction.
Stiegler wants a cooperative, contributory, society of creative innovation, but
just wanting will not get you there. How can you develop people so that they are
able to make more fundamental contributions? This takes considerable work and
(intellectual) discipline. Work carried out over the long-term is needed to develop
a focused mind. And this, we suggest, is in part what the relevant PhD is all about.
Stiegler wants his lived community to prevail above the alienated mass culture that
surrounds it. For this to happen, the group has to read, observe, think, discuss and
write. The implicit promise is that one can rise above, or perhaps cut through, the
hyperreality of appearances by witnessing and discussing, analysing and knowing.
Against this ideal stand powerful forces. Marketing succeeds through the
‘proletariatization’ of the population – passive labour forgets to work and knows
little or nothing about action. This highlights a distinction between material and
immaterial labour: people who are not in command of their own capacities, who do
not create their own practices, who do not use skills and expertise in their activities,
fall back into alienated beast-like labour. They do not think. Thought, reflection or

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mental acuity has no role in their lives and they are therefore easy prey to the trends
and fashions of the consumer society.
Stiegler asserts that proletariatization constantly gained ground during the 20th
century. The distinction in his thinking between ‘technics’ and ‘technology’ plays
a key role here (1998, 2009, 2010d). Technologies are standardized, protocolized
and are based on an idealized model of industry. Direct human action and knowhow
have been replaced in industry by machines; the workers have been de-skilled as
intelligence is extracted from the persons and captured by machines. Where artisans
once stood, there are now robots and computers. Stiegler calls this ‘proletariatization’.
During the industrial revolution, production was transferred from highly skilled
craftsmen in control of the whole process of manufacture to simplified tasks in
conjunction with machines within factories. Since the 1980’s, the same principle
of proletariatization has been applied to the service sector. Teaching, accounting
and banking, medicine and veterinary medicine, engineering and architecture, have
all become standardized and computer supported, and in many cases, deskilled.
Such technologies are ‘adopted’ into the workplace; that is, they are introduced by
management and have to be accepted by those upon which they are imposed. Humans
are subsumed to machines as living labour is controlled by machine knowhow. Work
done in the past is now encompassed in a computer program and determines the
situation in the present.
Stiegler opposes ‘technology’ with ‘technics’. Technics is an ancient Greek term
referring to the artisan and artist. In technology there are rules of action and principles
of execution. Technology answers to preset standards and defined guidelines or
precedents. Technics are improvised; they entail the specific artisan reacting to a
concrete circumstance. In technics, there is a unicity of materials, conditions, and
context. Technics requires ‘adaption’. The divide between technology and technics
comes from Aristotle, where technology is seen to be superior to technics. There are
truths or principles basic to technology; there is only improvisation and bricolage
in technics. For Stiegler, the divide is the opposite, technics are alive, involve co-
creation and the acknowledgment of otherness (Stiegler, 2010).
Stiegler champions technics as a response to contemporary hyper-capitalist,
consumer society. Consumerism is based upon efficiency and optimization, which
are principles close to and amenable to technology. In a consumerist society,
standardization is a clear accepted route to efficiency. Economies of scale – the
economic power to acquire technology and then to deploy it in the most efficient
ways – generate competitive advantage. Mass customization – an apparent paradox
– is achieved via short cycles of technologized production, or by using technologies
that can apply a bespoke veneer over a standard core. Genuinely individualized non-
standardized production cannot keep up or compete qua price.
Technics or artisanship is slow while technological or automatized production is
fast. All of which feeds into the contemporary consumer society, which has become
ever faster in its creation and destruction of demand. Mass media and marketing
have produced continually ever-shorter spans of attention. Stiegler argues that the

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ever greater momentum being build up means that eventually consumer society must
whirl beyond psychological control, with the consequence that all human desire is
progressively deadened. The onslaught of new products and services leaves humanity
unfeeling and blinded to difference. But difference is essential for desire, for the
recognition of otherness and ethics. If people cannot experience difference, then
attachment, love, motivation and engagement all collapse. The technology-based
society threatens to become a social-psychological disaster because motivation
cannot function when human emotion and solidarity are precluded. It also can be
seen as a society where it is no longer necessary to think for oneself or to have the
mental skills needed to act.
Intellectual content in work has increasingly been repressed, both by computers
that do the hard work of calculation, and through establishing protocols that
diminish the need for considered thought. Independent opinion, individual judgment
and attention to cause and effect have been marginalized. But, without independent
ideation, there can be no citizenship (in the fullest sense), or role for considered
opinion, or democratic choice.
For Stiegler, the mental prerequisites to freedom are in severe decline, perhaps
even threatened with disappearance. But there is a possibility for an answer: people
acting in thinking relationship to one another, bringing together the relational
and the individual. Here, again, we see a connection with Arendt; for her, action
was dependent both upon freedom and plurality – that is, or complex networks of
relationships between people. It is the relationship of the one and the other that
Stiegler writes and works to promulgate, with the aim of furthering community and
creating platforms for serious cooperation.
From Stiegler, we take two points. First is the importance of relationship;
meaningful thought is not achieved in isolation. Stiegler puts this into practice
through Ars Industrialis, a participative model emphasizing the development of
thought as a relational process. We go further, perhaps, in arguing that relationship
is essential in research. The performativity of research is connected to the context
of its production. What also emerges in Stiegler’s thought is the importance of the
research community. Of course, it is possible for outstanding research to emerge
in the most unlikely places with a researcher forging a lone path; but in general, a
robust community, committed to free and open exchange and critique, is more likely
to provide the context in which inspiring research can germinate.
The importance of context leads us back to relevance. Relevance requires the
ability to describe events (context) and to provide interpretations (con-text) that drive
us to reflect and consider. The centrality of thought and considered deliberation is the
second point that we wish to take from Stiegler. PhD research entails a commitment
to try to not just to describe but also to understand, and this requires knowledge,
theory and reading. Intellectual work takes time, effort and persistence.
Summing up, no matter how ardently researchers and theorists strive to brush ‘either
relevance or rigor’ under the carpet, it continues to seep out, hopelessly re-entangling
them within the mire. In large part, this is because once you engage with relevance

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versus rigour, or derivatives thereof, then it becomes impossible to avoid restating

and re-engaging with the divide. Admittedly, the explanations and understandings
produced by practitioner research may turn out to be partial, incomplete, limited
or perhaps even sometimes downright wrong. But the commitment to practitioner
research is itself important: there is, here, a potential dedication to understanding
and to sharing that understanding. The desire to see, feel, appreciate and understand
is crucial to practitioner research – without it, research just does not work. We
believe that social studies research requires a commitment to relate to Other and to
context. It is grounded in relevance or the desire for Other, for commitment, rapport,
bonding, belonging, awareness and (shared-) futures. The community of work is a
key aspect to the relevant PhD, wherein the shared disciplining of self, thought, and
investigation are purposeful and the economic crisis at the beginning of the 21st
century may have made this all the more relevant..

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INTERTEXT TWO

Vincent Pieterse: Writing the Outsider

For me, writing entails not knowing beforehand what I want to write. Whilst
writing, I find out what I want to write. This does make it difficult as sometimes I
stare at a screen for hours without writing anything. I have a plan when I start to
write, but it disappears soon after I start. The writing goes all over the place, but
during the writing itself, I finally manage to find enough structure so that in the
end it all seems to fit together. But during the process, it’s very chaotic, both in
my mind and on the paper.
I found out that when you, as a professional, working in a professional
environment, start to do a PhD, people start looking at you as an academic. Which
means, that you are no longer a professional, you are not seen as part of the practical
side of your job, anymore. That was my colleagues’ idea, their image of me. And,
on the other hand, for the academic world, you are still a professional, and not
yet an academic – or at least not a real academic. This means that you are sort of
in-between. This I discovered during the process. It’s also an issue for yourself.
When you work in the company, in my case, a management training institute,
which you are researching, your attention drifts more and more to the research. I
started taking notes during meetings. I divided the page with a line. The left half of
the page was for the stuff I needed to do in my job as a professional, the right half
was for things of research interest. I soon found out that the dividing line moved
more and more to the left, creating more and more space for the research interests.
In the meetings, we discussed projects and the content of the projects. For
instance, we had to decide how to deal with proposals for clients or how to run in-
company programs. We would decide on how to build programs in those meetings.
Actually, during the PhD process, I found out that the content of the programs did
not really interest me at all. They were really unchallenging and always more or
less the same. But the process of decision-making, the language people used to get
their way, and how they dealt with one another, that became a lot more interesting
than the projects. Going to the meetings was much more interesting for finding
ideas for my PhD, than actually for the projects that were being discussed.
I started to observe other people in the workplace, almost as if I was an
anthropologist or an outsider. And I think that they could feel that. And that
probably made some of them angry, but they didn’t show it. Maybe they were
insecure. The more I was progressing with my PhD, the more they felt insecure,
because I was the guy with the knowledge, the academic knowledge. So if they
proposed something, and I had a counter proposal, they sometimes said: ‘Maybe
that’s of academic interest, but that doesn’t matter here and now.’ But that was
also interesting for my research, which probably made them more insecure.
Really everything had become ‘academic’. Clients have a need or a question, and
we have to meet the need or answer the question. The answering of the question has

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to be practical – it has to be a program we can teach to whatever part of the company

they want to have it taught. For instance, there is a crisis in a company because they
have merged some business units, which has produced conflict. All the managers
were fairly young and their styles of leadership don’t fit together at all as a team.
Nor is the match to the employees they manage adequate. They don’t communicate
with each other. So how do we provide them with a program for these managers to
learn to communicate in a crisis or a change situation? They have to communicate
to the CEO, but also to their employees. So you have to build a program that would
typically last three or four days, including evenings. There is a sort of structure
that we always used for this sort of question. Bringing in critical or organizational
insights, because I have read something about it, made it all much more complex.
My colleagues would see it as just one more case. They would ignore the branch,
the economic context, or any organizational peculiarities of the organization.
I would try to introduce the context, real change requires understanding the social,
technological and economic environment in which one is working. But context
makes the question more complex. Training supposedly is not about the context,
it’s about this one question that the client has, and how we deal with that question.
Bringing in the context doesn’t help us to arrive at a quick-fix answer. How do
we frame the question if we bring in complexity. We weren’t equipped to provide
programs based on complexity. It should be simple, SMART, and all those things.
So attention for the context didn’t help in building the program as quickly as
possible. That’s most of the time what happened. Bringing in something different
than we were used to do was seen as a problem.
The so-called training professionals wanted was just to keep doing the same
things over and over. We always said that it was ‘an innovative program’ but
what is actually was innovative about it? That was a dilemma, because innovation
would force us to reflect on our own actions and that was seen to be ‘difficult’.
‘Difficult’ is not desirable. I may have been an outsider before I began the PhD,
but only after I started the research, did I start to speak up. Before, I might have
thought all these things, but I hadn’t the language to say them. I always thought,
‘What’s innovative about this program?’ this is what we’re doing all the time. But
I didn’t say it. Now I had the ability to make the comparison and the language to
speak up. So, in my mind, I didn’t feel I changed, but for them I changed; because
now I could think out loud. Before that I didn’t do that.
For me it was not possible really to do a PhD and to stay a trainer. Research
made me more reflective and self-reflective. I’d learned to keep looking at the
context, to keep asking questions, to keep looking for things that weren’t being
said. I looked for the narratives behind the rhetoric. The participants liked what
I was doing. They really thirsted for insight. But my training company and my
fellow colleagues didn’t like it. I suppose, they felt threatened.
You can see my thesis as an exercise in ‘killing the father’. The thesis rotates
around the charismatic, fairly intellectual CEO of the training company. He has

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now, after I’ve finished my thesis, been fired. And the replacement is far worse.
I think that the process of him getting fired started about halfway through my
PhD, and I think that nobody at that time had read any of my articles or chapters.
It’s interesting, though, that he, before he was fired, bought about 185 of my
[completed thesis] books, to give to clients and colleagues. He gave the books
away at the New Year’s reception, to our clients. So although the training institute
didn’t pay at all for my book, but in the end, they sort of paid for it.
In the book, I deconstruct the training organisation and show which stories it
is recycling and exploiting in its false claims of uniqueness. And the organisation
gives this book as a gift to its clients! My explanation is that the CEO knew by then
that he was going to be fired. We didn’t know, but he did. He has a special position
in the book. It’s a PhD where he is mentioned a couple of times, even mentioned
as a management guru, so it gives him a kind of special position. He called it a
milestone in his professional career that a book was written about him. In the books
that he gave away, he included a letter from himself, writing that he had known that
I was doing the research, but that when he read the book, he was struck by lightning.
It made him think about his professional career and gave him a lot to think about.
Could I write a PhD and survive in the present business model of the training
organisation? Not during the current economic crisis as it has affected that
organization. The old CEO wanted to be ‘professorial’. He was known for
bringing what appeared to be new ideas to the marketplace. OK, he was really
merely a populariser, and not a deep thinker, but still he wanted to be identified
with ‘new thinking’ and he wanted our organization to be ‘avant garde’. His
replacement just wants to make money; ideas are ‘sausages’ to be sold, and if they
do not sell fast enough, one just gets rid of them.
Did I have a brilliant career coming to me, except that I made the fatal flaw of
doing a PhD? Was it really the deadly sin? I don’t think I could have had a brilliant
career there. Maybe it could have been a brilliant career, but not for me as a person.
I started doing the PhD because I wasn’t convinced at all by the stories that we were
telling our clients. So I could have kept on telling stories I did not believe in and
had a brilliant career, but it didn’t match with me as a person, if you can say that.
Was doing the PhD difficult for me? There is a side, of feeling that you have
to do it all yourself. No one else writes the thesis for you. It cost me a lot of time
to connect with the academic text. My irritation and frustration was about the
way we acted in the training company. I was able to find academic texts to help
me describe, analyse and deconstruct how we trained. And that made what we
did look ridiculous. But it was all text, outside of me. It looked in the early drafts
like it was all outside of me. Of course, I used Boltanski and Chiapello as a foil
to criticise the buying and selling of ideas; and the Dutch poet Vinkenoog as a
device to defend authenticity. These are texts that I used in my text. So that made
it possible for me to keep some distance. These were interesting ideas. They fitted
very much with the way I saw things, but I was still using their texts in my text. If

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you talk about the turn to affect, you have to talk about me in the text, it was my
emotion, and that came very late in the process.
My faculty supervisor had told me several times that I was hiding too much
behind the texts of others. In the beginning, it was necessary for me to write that
way, but, in the end, you have to face up to yourself and to your responsibility.
I knew that a much more explicit connection had to come between myself and
the ideas, but for a long time, I didn’t know how to do it. Suddenly, there was
a moment; something was triggered that made it possible for me to make the
connection and, finally, it was my text. Admitting that I really was ‘killing the
father’ played a big role. I felt a little bit embarrassed doing that. I finally admitted
to myself that I really was doing it. There were consequences, but I felt fine with
them. Probably that was the trigger. Admitting it to myself.
The relationship to the university and to the faculty supervisor felt like a
partnership. I was very comfortable during the first year of the required workshops.
It felt like a welcome release from my daily work. It felt like I was escaping all
sorts of restrictions. So there were two different worlds. I think the supervision
made it possible for me to understand and come to grips with the two worlds.
Defending the things I wrote down required that I explain, explain and explain
again. Why did I use this, why did I use that? The faculty played an inspiring
role. Talking about my project with different professors was illuminating. That
probably was for me the most important part. Talking about my research and
defending why I had written down this and not that, was revelatory. In the end, it
wasn’t possible to hide anymore. I felt that way. It was because of the supervision,
so I think it was a partnership. It was partly my text, but also partly the influence
of supervision, but in the end, I made the decisions.
I had some dinners with other participants. It was dinner at one fellow participant’s
place; everybody cooked. It was a great dinner and then we start discussing our
research, which actually wasn’t a discussion of our research, but was more or less a
discussion of a book someone had read that was interesting. But that could be any
book, as long as it was sort of connected with their research. It stayed there. Never a
discussion about other books or connecting the discussion to one another’s research.
It was a sort of book club. It was of no help in framing or doing the research. It
didn’t help me at all. In fact, fellow participants were often a hindrance. They were
not focussed enough for me. Over and over again they changed their research goal.
Or they stayed in the same texts, repeating over and again the same analysis. And
then they panic, wondering how they are ever going to finish. Several participants
wanted to market themselves to an employer, to other consultants, to whatever
with their thesis. That makes the task just too complicated in my opinion. I found it
difficult enough trying to do justice to what I saw, to myself and to others, without
having to think all too much about ulterior motives. It is already difficult to get that
click where the text becomes yours. And I think it is crucial to the success of the
text that the reader believes in the authenticity and genuineness of the project. For
instance, one fellow participant wrote pages and pages about Foucault, which he

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was reading. But he had no idea how to rhyme it with his profession as consultant.
And he half wanted to defend his profession as a consultant and trainer, but Foucault
of course did not help him at all to do that. A thesis is not a marketing tool; trying to
sell yourself in a thesis hopelessly muddies the research.
If you want to hold on to performativity as your basic philosophy, you cannot
write a PhD thesis as I did. Wanting to make your work more efficient or effective
assumes that you accept the goals and traditions of that work uncritically, and work
onwards from that position. But that was not my goal. I wanted to understand the
existing performativity and I arrived with mistrust, suspicion and doubts about it.
I did not want to assume practice but to critically inquire into practice. I arrived
with irritation about the performativity around me. Blind allegiance to routine
seemed to me to destroy what learning is all about and thereby to delegitimize us
as trainers. I wanted to find out what was wrong and why it seemed that our work
as trainers no longer was successful. But in the first place, I wanted to help myself.
I wanted to find, or to re-find, a sense of integrity and aliveness in my work. I felt
stuck. I saw doing what I was doing for another twenty-five years not as a brilliant
career but as a living hell. It just did not make sense or make me happy.
Writing the PhD was my way of dealing with the rhetoric of management.
Lots of us know that our language is somehow false, but we find it very difficult
to pinpoint what is wrong. We often only know the language of business,
management, consumerism, and the quick-fix. We feel uncomfortable, there
is some vague sense that life ought to bring more than just another fast car,
expensive suit, or business success. There must be deeper content than what
capitalism provides. And then there is the shock of learning that professional
success depends on superficiality. Depth is professionally fatal. I was paid to
maintain the surface level and not to look beneath it. Two workshops in and
I realized that. The professors and what they had us read made the point.
Of course I was a successful management trainer. And now I am an ex-
management trainer with a golden handshake that will last me another year or so.
If you were to advertise my career line to potential students, I think you might
have some difficulties. I’ve gained in insight and knowledge. My way of looking
at things, talking to others, discussing how things are, has changed dramatically.
Did I pay a high price? I am professionally somewhat in limbo. I have to re-create
my career. Yes, the price probably is high. It’s high, but is it too high? Ask me
right now, ‘No’. But if I haven’t found a job in three years, and I have to sell my
house and so on, maybe I will feel different about it.1 But for now, it gave me a lot
of knowledge and insight, which if I had never gained I have missed a lot. I didn’t
know all of that when I started, but that is how I see it as I look back at it now.

NOTE
1
Happily, by the time that this book was written, some 6 months after the interview, Pieterse’s
employment situation already looked much better.

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 CHAPTER 3

THE ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY: DEMOCRACY

VERSUS ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Relevant practitioner research does not depend on the university for its existence,
but the PhD does. Almost all universities define their relation to the PhD thesis in
terms of it making an ‘original contribution to knowledge’. But when does ‘original’
become theoretical anarchy or banal sterility, ‘contribution’ merely mean following
the well-travelled path by imitating other contributions, and ‘knowledge’ simply
suggest a questionnaire with derived statistics? Geoffroy de Lagasnerie (2011) has
written a sociological account of the contemporary university, claiming that almost
all contemporary creative French thought of the last fifty years has occurred more in
opposition to the university than thanks to it. From Foucault to Derrida, and Bourdieu
to Lévi-Strauss, the great innovators in sociology, anthropology, and philosophy,
all worked outside the university, since the professors within abhorred change and
creativity, doing whatever they could to keep it beyond their walls.
Derrida (2001, 2002) wrote about the university ‘as if’, that is, ‘as if’ it
fostered relevant research. He explored the university ‘as if’ it represented the
best of cooperative, shared investigation. He suggested the university as the place
where anything can be thought and said. Thus, rather than examining the existing
institutions, he advocated a space where attention to relationship would hold sway.
The university, as we now know it, is an institution born around 1800 and
accompanied the creation of the modern nation state. It was meant to embody the
enlightenment belief in rationality and reason, to strengthen the democratization
of the state, and to allow newly valorised, speculative and reflective thought. The
radical development of the notion of investigation is to be found in all of these.
Intellectuals were encouraged to question how social existence should be organized
and what were the criteria for a just society. Change and progress were seen as
important and valuable, rather than dangerous and divisive; no more so than when
Darwin’s theory of evolution was heralded both for its scientific insight but also for
the way in which it seemingly established change and development as natural and
necessary. At a time of great social change and scientific discovery, the university
became the place for defining and investigating a range of emerging possibilities.
Political theories were disputed, social-economic structures and technologies were
debated, new scientific laws were proposed and proven, jurisprudence was discussed
and histories revisited. The university was the place where this could happen, mostly
without violence.
The university provided a forum for radical exploration of human possibility, in
the sense of going to and investigating the very roots of what that might be. Where
society was to go was questioned; what was to be done was explored; and why
specific choices were made was delved into. While such fundamental questioning of

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possibilities and reflection thereon were being developed, the university fulfilled a
role as one of the primary resources for democratic society.
Of course, universities ‘as are’ are unlikely to measure up to such lofty ideals
and unsurprisingly their day-to-day operations are complex, with attachments to
thosegoals compromised. Some universities appear to be little more than training
centres, earnestly striving to turn out an educated (but preferably uncritical) work
force, ready to be employed by successful enterprises in today’s ‘knowledge
economy’. Other universities resemble factories for research, churning out the
commoditized techniques and practices, needed for modern marketing and
social control to function effectively and, as such, are a reflection of Stiegler’s
technological commodification. We see practitioner PhDs more as an aspect of
technics – a craft product of complex artisanship. But even here, commodification
shapes how academic work is done; with repercussions for researcher identity and
the relationship of research to its context (Bernard Stiegler, 2008, 2009).
Research, once commoditized, is just another product that can be knocked out
and sold. Researchers can have no more choice as to what they will research than
workers at Ford’s River Rouge plant had in which model car they would produce.
Research goals and methods are predetermined and people can be hired to fulfil the
contract. PhD students can be enrolled to work on projects over which they have
little or no control, with no ability to change the aims, define parameters, decide what
site is investigated or which research techniques are employed. The relationships
and the trajectory of the research can all be predetermined, the researchers merely
tend the production process. Relationships in such a ‘university-factory’ are utterly
commoditized.
The suggestion here is that the explorative university as critical and innovative
has become ever more exceptional. Universities, Bill Readings (1996) argued,
once were defined by the German Humboldt model, which independently express
edthe unique spirit and identity of the country or place where they were founded.
The university allowed, even fed on, and into, self-exploration and self-definition
of the national community. Universities attracted scholars from the country within
which the university was situated, and in turn, stimulated and developed the political,
social and economic culture of that nation. But the contemporary university has
become deterritorialized – it has, in many senses, gone virtual. Many research tasks,
contracted to the university, are little more than the delivery of a pre-defined set
of services that could be completed anywhere. The university no longer functions
as an institution where one generation encounters another, reaffirming national
identity through the delicate transference of an esteemed body of knowledge, and by
reflecting on what is truly abiding.
Researchers have been ‘proletariatized’, in that they have lost their identity as
situated, engaged people, co-responsible in the exploration and definition of the
shared future of the nation. Their link to the development of their society has been
severed, not least because research now claims to be universal and generalizable,
and thus the application to specific societies is tenuous. The attempt to move relevant

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knowledge to an abstract theory, in pursuit of universal behavioural laws, is at the

cost of separation from specific people and circumstances. Research may claim
to support ‘efficiency’, ‘productivity’ and ‘economic growth’, but the beneficiary
of this progress is a generalized other and, with the financial system thoroughly
globalised, the economic rewards are unlikely to be even nation-specific. Research
projects have adopted the machinery and language of management, mastering the
wherefore of budgets, payment schedules, deliverables, work plans and human
resource management, but have lost much of the lived, immediate relationship to a
social context or citizenry.
Research links researchers to their incomes and possibly to prestige or
professional success; but not to democratic ethical goals. In the contemporary
university, democracy, as the relational ethics of social studies research, is rarely
acknowledged as something important – and certainly never seen as the pinnacle of
academic achievement.
For those who see ordinariness as more than inspiring enough, university research
as radical doubt is well beyond the pale. But we contend that research should provide
creative resistance to prejudice and unquestioned beliefs, exploding common-sense
and the taken-for-granted. As Jack Cohen says, “Science stops you believing what
you want to,” an aphorism as applicable to the social as the natural sciences. We
believe that research should champion respect, affection and presence against
the negative values of self-enrichment and greed. Such commitments should be
powerful enough to produce important work, but many defenders of the status quo
do not believe that any university-based opposition should have the creative power
necessary for any such potential for change.
Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996) largely set the contemporary agenda
for reflection on the social-historical significance of the university. Readings was a
radical ‘conditionalist’ claiming that knowledge, research and truth, only materialize
if the individuals involved make it happen. Learning, knowledge, science, reflection
and reason do not inevitably have personal or social value – it all depends on
specific circumstances and what the actors actually do. Readings asserted that the
contemporary university does not (and maybe cannot) provide the context needed
for positive development. He traced the development of the university’s goals and
conditions from the founding of the first modern European university in Berlin,
identifying three different paradigms along the way. He suggested that the late 19th
century national university had a goal of producing an educated citizenry skilled in
serving the needs of the modernizing national state. In the 20th century, he points
to the emergence of the teaching and research university that strove to produce
the technical knowledge needed to achieve universal employment and welfare via
the development of new products and services. Finally, he identified the features
of the contemporary 21st century postmodern university, where the simulacrum of
‘excellence’ has displaced knowledge, and hyper-reality has muscled out research.
Readings maintains that the university has been transformed to be more as if it
was an advertising agency, than a community of learned researchers. Yves Gingras,

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Peter Keating and Camille Limoges (1999), in a much less polemic piece, have
traced the history of the university from medieval and enlightenment scholarship, to
modern academic research. Gingras (2010) theorizes that the present-day scientist-
entrepreneur embodies contemporary academic work, a slightly less pessimistic
view than that of Readings, but still one that shows little place for emancipatory
studies.
Everyone agrees that the Humboldt University, founded in 1809, defined a
new form of organization: prior to Humboldt, teaching and research were separate
activities. In the 1780’s, Condorcet argued that teaching and research should not
be combined in one and the same institution. Teaching, he claimed, needed to be
responsible, careful, and methodological; while research required willpower, drive
and the sagacity to make good use of serendipity (Gingras et al. 1999).
In Humbold teaching and research were combined in one institution with what
we might now describe as ‘human resource’ goals in mind. The new university was
intended to create the knowledge and skills, and the manpower and ideas, needed to
grow and develop the modern society. Technologies needed for industrial growth and
the bureaucratic governance of modern society, were to be developed and supported
by the university. The university was proposed as a significant tool in the economic
and political development of Germany. Knowledge was to be developed and shared
in the interest of constructing a powerful and thriving nation.
Readings lionizes the American reinterpretation of the German university. In 1862,
the American government made it possible for the states to sell federal land to fund
new universities intended to teach the practical sciences, engineering and agriculture.
Thus, fifty years after the Humboldt initiative, the Americans adopted an adulterated
version, albeit for much the same reasons; that is, to strengthen industrialization
and establish effective civil administration. After the Second World War, the
Americans invested heavily in their universities, not least because they were a way
of demobilizing the troops: GIs were given the right to university scholarships. With
rapid economic growth, and seemingly significant possibilities for social mobility,
American universities during the 1950s and ‘60s experienced unparalleled growth
and success. But since the 1980s, the American will to invest in higher education
and university research has dried up. Most (neo-con) governments, especially in the
Anglo-Saxon world, have tried to divest themselves from responsibility for higher
education. Universities now receive less government money, and are increasingly
expected to earn their way: via patents; by providing corporate services; and by
developing saleable or commercial activities. This shift to an ‘entrepreneurial’
university is symbolized by the pervasive rhetoric of ‘excellence’. ‘Excellence’, for
Readings, is but a branding phrase (not a scientific category) and he was appalled to
see universities construct and adopt consumerist self-identities.
Gingras, with various co-authors, (1999, 2010, Roy & Gingras 2012), has argued
that the modern university is a recent invention, redolent of the nineteenth century.
Throughout the twentieth century, the university attempted to reinvent itself by
taking on preparation for more pragmatic employment opportunities. In so doing,

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it received finance from government (primarily military sources), health (both from
government and private sector) and other commercial sponsoring. Thus, we see
that the twentieth-century university was already enmeshed in government policy
and delivery, while also establishing itself as an appendage of corporate R & D.
To continue to exist, the twenty-first century university, it seems, will have to earn
its money by selling even more services and products (Roy & Gingras, 2012),
suggesting an ever-increasing orientation towards the market.
Readings feared that the entrepreneurial university would produce nothing but
vacuity. He highlighted the role of university administrations, in first seizing and
then implementing the empty ideology of performativity, stressing his particular
bête noir of ‘excellence’. Since formulations of ‘excellence’ had no content or depth,
research was reduced to a series of empty catchphrases. Universities became brands
that eschewed rigorous self-examination or thoughtful exploration of possible ideas,
let alone explorative risk-taking. The intellectual goal of the university was replaced
by empty sloganizing, simulating advertising.
Ironically however, the ancient Greek term Arete (ρετή) points to the ‘excellence’
of performing any kind of function well. As Samuel Weber (2001) has pointed out,
for Aristotle the notion of ‘excellence’ means for humans ‘becoming the best you can
be’ or ‘living up to one’s full potential’. It was as general and unspecific as it appears
to be in contemporary usage. Thus, the term itself does not necessarily seem to be
the cause of the problem. Further, Readings seems to idealize the university that
sprang out of nineteenth century German (Prussian) nationalism; and to denigrate
twentieth century (and 21st century) performativity. The Prussian university was
the training ground of a new bureaucratic officialdom, charged with modernizing,
industrializing and reforming the emerging nation. Political and research goals
were tightly aligned, with the consequent danger, as Max Weber puts it, that formal
(instrumental) rationality and the strict organization and obeying of rules would
dominate substantial rationality, demolishing any ethically guided awareness of the
general good.
Within the contemporary university it would be a mistake to see research as
following just one agenda. Instead, research seems to have become polarized,
either being individualist and open to a range of interpretations, or rationalist and
success-driven. Seemingly, research can be post- the postmodern turn, turning its
back on the consumer society; or technologically driven and pragmatically directed
towards economic achievement. Ethically driven, critical humanists may claim to
defend a quality-of-life perspective and the defense of the (experiential) lifeworld
against the attacks of the corporate or bureaucratic system world. And contemporary
utilitarian’s may claim to defend prosperity and progress. The former are certainly
in a precarious position, scrabbling to hold together their limited territory, while the
latter swagger as their relevance has indeed proved the ability to earn money.
If the nineteenth-century model focused on nation building and providing the
knowledge needed for modernization, while the twentieth-century university was
an instrument of applied social action centering on the defense of modernism

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and supporting welfare capitalism’s success, what might we see in the twenty-
first century? By contrast to the previous two iterations, the latter-day university
increasingly seems cut adrift from both the needs of the nation-state and the body
politic. The modern university has been left to fare for itself in a hostile market
environment and has to attempt to adapt as best it can. From this perspective, then,
one has to ask if Readings’ rant was but a Don Quixotic protest against political and
economic developments that the universities cannot control, and if it was not based
upon a misrepresentation of American universities, which have always had a thicker
pragmatic streak than he was willing to acknowledge.
This leaves the basic issue as to whether the university is, or has become, just
another instrument of applied, commercial, social control. Is university research
merely a useful tool in the reproduction of capitalist hegemony? Are universities just
sources of cultural fashions; and can universities provide more than infotainment
and sporting spectaculars? Jacques Derrida takes on these issues in an intriguing
exploration, asserting that the intellectual freedom of the university is a sine qua non
for the existence of a democratic society. Thus, the stakes are raised considerably.
Derrida admits that truly free universities do not exist and have never existed.
But the promise or ambition of reflection, questioning, thought and research has
existed. The truly free university always remained something to come, something to
believe in; it has been a crucial as if of the democratic future. Buttressed by the claim
that the welfare state costs too much and cannot be (nor should be) funded out of
taxation, governments have been cutting university budgets. As a consequence, the
ideals of the university, such as free thought and open research, are being replaced
by commercially-focused research and training programs that promise to deliver
whatever the market is willing to pay for. Contemporary ‘neo-con’ governments
do not want to finance universities; they see no virtue in intellectual speculation
and social critique. But, in Derrida’s analysis, this means that they are therefore
jeopardising democracy itself.
Derrida sees striving for the ‘university without conditions’ – that is, absolute
intellectual freedom, as a precondition for democracy. His 80 page pamphlet The
University Without Condition (2001, 2002), presented in 1998 as the Stanford
University Presidential Lecture, answers Readings’ radical ‘conditionalism’.
Readings sees scholars as intellectually driven but undermined by universities that
are false. Derrida answers that the university is a crucial institution without which
modern democracy cannot function. The problem is not one of good people versus
bad organizations, but of the necessity for social institutions that make democracy
possible.
Derrida argues that the link between the pursuit of reason and democratic
citizenship, forged in the Enlightenment, is vital. In an active democracy, citizens take
decisions, for instance via elections and political initiatives. To be a citizen means
that one must take part in, and therefore share responsibility, for collective action
and decision-making. Citizens must have informed opinions to allow discussion
and actions on resolutions, laws, budgets, priorities and political action. Citizens are

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needed to explain and give reasons for their choices, and who can intelligently listen
to others’ objections, counter proposals, and alternatives. Reasoned discussion is
essential in a democratic society. If adequate information is not available, if learning
to analyse and to reason is not established, and if civil norms do not exist between
discussants, democracy cannot prosper.
The university is a vital institution for a vibrant democracy. It is the place where free
discussion reigns and all possibilities can be analysed and investigated. Democratic
freedom depends on the university providing the space for thought, reflection and
investigation, which gives the grounding for political discussion in civil society.
Readings may be right that contemporary universities have been sidetracked by
emphasising their corporate identities and playing down their enlightenment task
but the freedom of thought is not (at least yet) ‘in ruins’ as he claims. Readings’
division, and subsequent opposition, of good people and bad institutions, embraces
the very individualism that Derrida, we believe correctly, opposes. Context counts,
and the university is a crucial element in a democratic society, and ‘relevance’ is a
useful term by which to describe that relationship.
Derrida’s The University without Condition portrays the as if of a thinkable but
not entirely existent university. It is as if the opposition between the connotative and
performative can be transcended. The scholar or researcher is mostly identified with
the connotative, in that researchers supposedly record, describe, define and analyse.
But a university professor professes: they have something to say and needs to believe
in the worth of their scholarship and teaching. Professors who are not performative –
who do not profess what they believe – are empty, void of significance, and an
oxymoron. People who work for universities who have nothing to say, and who have
no particular belief in intellectual content, may work, in the sense that they labour
from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, but they produce no creative
output, no work that Stiegler might value.
The academic who has something to profess works as if ideas count. Thought
leaves its traces in shared sense-making and meanings. From these traces, shifts in
significance constantly occur. Meaning is endlessly constructed and reconstructed
through time, and each time it is situationally reconstructed through its relation
to context. Trying to understand the relatedness of people and ideas, and how
one might be traced to the other, is a conception of scholarship that is opens to
discussion of the responsibility of the researcher, the nature of institutional belief,
and the existential value of intellectual work. We believe that it is important to try
to understand textual and social relatedness in their dynamic interdependent-ness.
Consequently, thinkers who have explored the notion of relatedness inform this
book, especially Derrida, Lacan, Stiegler, Foucault, Lyotard and Simondon. We
focus on researcher and researched, author and text, self and other. We question
what might be involved in communicative co-creation, especially when we refuse
to prioritize either social structure or the self’s agency. Derrida calls the study of
the traces of text ‘deconstruction’. We follow this by echoing, repeating, distorting
and changing traces of, amongst others, Kant (on knowing, knowledge and the

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university), Heidegger (on being, technics and thought), Nietzsche (on time and the
priority of perhaps), and Levinas (on other and otherness). Relevance, for us, entails
comparing researchers, researched and readers, as well as common projects, purposes
and ethics. Our unravelling of traces of connectedness is a form of ‘deconstruction’.
For Derrida, the university is as if it is the centre of the production of new and
challenging oeuvres. What works must be scrutinised, questioned, redefined and hence
recreated. The university is performative with new thought and creative solutions
produced within it. Research and development, experimentation and creativity,
discussion and dialogue are performed in universities. The value of description and
analysis, fact-finding and hypothesis testing, is in the action that they facilitate.
However, we do not want to over-emphasise the distinction between the connotative and
performative, for human learning and understanding require both. Performativity alone
is shallow, over-emphasises effect, and therefore is in danger of becoming authoritarian.
The connotative, if untempered, is always remote, making it insufficiently dynamic
and purposive. The university needs both the connotative and the performative, as if in
the process of learning and discovery, they can be mutually supportive and productive.
At issue, then, is the role and identity of the university. Stiegler has positioned the
university in terms of three levels of consciousness, moving from the connotative
to the performative. Firstly, there is raw experience, followed by awareness of
circumstance and stimulus. Sight, sense perception, and sensibility dominate.
Secondly, there is memory or a level of experiencing through which raw situations
are translated into what can be discussed and thought about. And thirdly, there is
text, wherein circumstances are transformed into propositions and discussion. Texts
are informed by theory and presented in terms of ideas and hypotheses. Stiegler
argues that the role of the university is to create and sustain the third level.
Stiegler also sees the university, or at least its facilitation of the third level, as
being under threat. ‘Proletariatization’ is destroying the practices of independent
thought, insightful writing, and critical reading. Text-making is being replaced by
virtual reality. Instant gratification, such as that seen in computer games and the
pursuit of short-term profit, threaten the tertiary level. For Stiegler, what is needed
is ‘deproletariazation’ – the possibility of slowing down researchers, so they may
bring their observations to memory, allowing them to critically write about events.
But sophisticated text production and consumption, without a willingness and ability
to take action, is in itself sterile. The process of experiencing, remembering and
capturing lived-existence in text, is essential on our way to democratic action. The
work of the university is to relate experience to thought; that is, to add relevance
via what is written and discussed. Pulling the university away from experience,
and placing it on a pedestal (no matter how high in cultural terms) destroys its
engagement. Life requires work, but this is not the labour of complex writing for
its own sake.
The schematic of three levels of memory is too hierarchical for us. Universities and
PhDs need to be about engaged relevance, rather than academic rules of expression.
We agree with Stiegler that some form of creative resistance to a debased consumer

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culture and the instantaneity of marketing is essential. Trends and fashions do

indeed destroy (or preclude) the ability to reflect, write and analyse. The consumer
society has indeed created a crisis on what Stiegler defines as the third level of
consciousness and memory. But the crisis can only be addressed by linking all three
levels in research work and not by separating out and concentrating simply on the
third level.
Thus what is at issue is whether the university can make a difference in thought
and discussion in civil society and public debate. Up to now, we have assumed
that the PhD thesis – a piece of work undertaken and completed in a university
setting – can indeed have significance outside the academy, be it social or political
significance. We have written as if the thesis is socially and politically engaged,
and as if the university’s mission is to make a difference in what is thought, seen,
debated, believed and decided.
From Bill Readings (1996), via Samuel Weber (1987, 2001), to Jacques Derrida
(1998), there has been a rich debate about what universities can do, which brings our
assumptions into doubt.1 Can a university be relevant in the sense of being ethically
engaged and speaking out for justice and creativity? Is the university willing to
witness – to see and to hear – and to report and judge? Such a humanist university
would have to be an institution that stood in defence of the social and the empathetic,
the ethical and the aesthetic, seeking shared grounded values.
Is this, can this, should this, be the goal of the university? Put bluntly, Bill
Readings, Samuel Weber and Jacques Derrida imply that the university may not have
been founded in order to, and may not be able to, achieve these goals. Relevance as
the practice of humanistic ethics may not be a possibility for universities.
This throws open two questions. First, a deontological question: can a university
take on a humanist agenda and still remain a university? But there is also the
pragmatic question: what are the humanist possibilities of the contemporary (post-
capitalist, virtual) university? Both questions ask us to consider the possibilities (or
lack) of relevance as engagement in the contemporary context.
The criticism is that everything looks as if the university cannot, or will not,
engage with the world as is. Derrida (2001, 2002) explores many as if’s of the
university, asking just what is ‘the university’? Is it an ideal, a concrete institution,
an organizational form, the sum of scholarly writings and/or discussions, or just a
word for what happens at a certain time or place? When we reflect on ‘the university’
are we interested in its insides or its outsides, or the relationship between the two?
Do we just care about what happens at a certain place, or what the effects are of what
happens there on the rest of us, or do we try and pay attention to both of these? And if
the university is about boundaries, how are those boundaries set and maintained, and
how are they experienced by those who cross them, and those who are constrained
by them?
Obviously, ‘the university’ is a problematic concept. Universities differ, and even
the same university is never constant. It is impossible to rigorously pin down what is
meant by ‘the university’ and so we end up, like Derrida, talking about the university

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as if. It is as if the university is a protected place of reflection, a centre of debate, or

an organ of truth. Examining several of these as if’s permits us to try to see anew the
PhD thesis. Just how relevant, or in what way is it, as if it is relevant; these are the
issues that we address.
A PhD thesis is written in a university, it is graded via university rules, and the degree
is, or is not, granted by a university. For a PhD student or supervisor, the university is
always relevant. The PhD degree program, we believe, needs to point to multiplicity,
complexity and change via discussion, analysis and shared dialogue. One writes a
PhD thesis at a university, rather than at home, because the university provides an as
if of freedom that encourages critical thought, or promises an as if of understanding
that might transcend anything outside. The university is as if it liberates one to think,
question and create. Libraries can be on-line and other social media supply more than
enough possibilities for chatting. Rather, face-to-face university discussion is needed
to free one of prejudice and to open one to alternative perspectives and possibilities.
One does not necessarily get one’s ideas from others in the university, but one does
gain the permission to think and to have them. In PhD seminars, common ground is
not essential and once self-evident assumptions are often no longer certain. Tutorials
can be seen as places where students gain their own voice and shed excess baggage.
It is as if the researcher experiences that investigation really is unconditional and that
questioning is potentially unlimited. Intellectual freedom, allowing wonder, doubt
and curiosity, are what a PhD programme needs to bring to its participants.
Often we hear or read as if pure rationality reigns within university research.
Research is described as the pure pursuit of knowledge, entailing the disinterested,
systemic codification of autonomous self-contained facts with universal validity
(Bledstein quoted in Weber, 2001: 208). But as Samuel Weber demonstrates, this
version of research poses all sorts of problems. It cannot explain how research
actually proceeds in practice. As ANT (actor-network theory) has made so clear,
social status, institutional power, lines of communication and unquestioned
assumptions are all part and parcel of laboratory life. Science is a complicated,
competitive, social process, which purely rational reconstruction does not adequately
explain or even attempt to deal with. Where do speculative hunches come from,
what really instigates a research project? How does one deal with the staying power
of significantly unproductive, but not (yet) superseded, paradigms? And what is
the relationship between pure research and (so-called) applied research? The claim
is naïve that university research is disinterested, driven purely by theoretical and
intellectual curiosity.
A relevant PhD could not be disinterested, for it is deeply interested in defending
people’s rights, in justice to others, in sympathetic understanding, and in economic
fairness. Engaged research claims not to be ‘disinterested’, but to be ‘interested’.
If the university’s very raison d’être entails keeping distance from otherness and
commitment, then research dedicated to a humanist agenda fits very uncomfortably.
But if one abandons disinterestedness as a key quality of university research, the
question then becomes how is one to distinguish between research that is in the

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public interest, and research that is designed for exploitive and/or aggressive goals?
After all, economic growth and national defence can clearly be presented (and seen)
as in the common interest, as well as destructive of the common interest and well-
being.
Doing research as if it is disinterested protects the university from debates to which
it has no simple answers – and indeed such answers may not exist. The ‘community
of researchers’ or the ‘academic forum’ does not automatically reach consensus,
and even if it does, it may not turn out to be the right or wise one. Nonetheless,
the claims of commercial disinterestedness, political and religious neutrality, and
methodological responsibility are crucial for the university; they distinguish its
research from the more obviously self-interested work of others. The university, in
order to function successfully, has to stay at a distance from vested interests.2
The university does have to try to keep its distance from marketing, self-interested
social engineering and consumerism. Without these borders, the university becomes
just another self-centred organization, competing with all the other organizations
for funds and profits. But too much disinterestedness or neutrality is just as bad. A
university unable to engage in real problems, self-enclosed in an intellectual bubble,
is irrelevant. To legitimate research, one has to appeal to what happens outside the
university. But such appeals threaten the protective barrier that disinterestedness
builds. Relevance, and the relevance of relevance, can potentially present unsolvable
dilemmas for the university. Universities try to function as if these quandaries do not,
cannot, and should not exist. But criteria of relevance are a big problem. Questioning
the value of research and the demand for accountability are incessant. Why is, what
is proposed, intended and accomplished, really worthwhile?
Researchers try to get around all these issues of worth and purpose by doing as
if access to the researched is direct, unproblematic and self-evident. But actually,
‘re’-search entails looking intensely, which implies that a naïve or uniformed look
is insufficient. Research access to the object of research is never unmitigated and is
always chosen and reiterated, therefore research cannot be unprejudiced. The need
for an ‘intensive force’ of looking is a major threat to research. If researchers look
purposively, with informed vision and insistently; then they are likely to only repeat
what their way of looking prescribes. Research becomes the researcher describing what
their way of looking has already determined. And the whole claim to ‘objectivity’or to
unprejudiced examination of the object of research falls into discredit.
Furthermore, the problems of ‘re’-presentation are a favourite touchstone point
of late twentieth-century critical (especially French) philosophy. If research always
‘re’-presents what it shows – that is, shows something with insistence and force –
then the research reiterates what the researcher has chosen and assumed. Why the
researcher chooses to display just this, and not that, is shrouded in pre-judgments or
prejudices.
For researchers to be able to tell us what they are planning to research and how, they
must have already defined the object of research and determined which qualities are
to be investigated. Identifying the object of research entails defining ‘what it really

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is’, and this is crucial to the whole research effort. The initial definition of the object
of research determines the identity of the to-be-researched and, in effect, defines
the whole research process. The delimitating of the object of research indicates
the perspective to be taken – is it gender or social class, is it wave or particle, is
it profit or social justice, or is it virtue or utilitarian? Of course, the research can
pose these self-same questions, but there are always other options, possibilities, or
definitions that have been left out. The defining of the object of research, if pursued
unlimitedly, leads to infinite regress. Any definition assumes other distinctions and
classifications, resulting in a never-ending problem of defining. Any definition
has to assume other definitions, in order to function, which stymies any claim of
unprejudiced or direct access to an object of research. Objects of research are the
product of the assumptions and preconceptions of researchers, or even worse, of
researchers’ supervisors.
Seeing the research object as ‘singular plural’ is probably the most elegant solution
to this problem. The idea was developed by Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) in answer to the
fallacy of immanence. No reality is ever totally immanent to human perception.
All perception and observation is mitigated by assumptions, concepts, structures,
preconscious notions, and the particular qualities of human perception. The ‘singular
plural’ acknowledges that all these factors contribute to making human awareness
possible. The object of research is ‘singular’ – that is, it is a particular phenomena
chosen to be examined. But it is, at the same time, always plural in that it is a socially
constructed set of terms and suppositions, which make it possible for research to
be communicable and understandable. Research is always repetition. What people
have seen and commented on, been amazed or angered by, forms the starting point
for research. Research is always embedded in shared concerns, ideas, language and
norms, which can inspire and delude, concentrate or diffuse our attention, and inform
or fool. And research is always difference; involving a particular case, specific data,
new results.
Every difference or new result, or unique research question, or particular case, or
site, entails repetition in how it relates to prior results, questions, cases and sites to
which it is being compared. Definition is always necessary in research and definition
is a process of difference and repetition; the one being the background to the other.
Research often excessively foregrounds difference – ‘this’ case, ‘this’ instance,
‘this’ example or ‘this’ experiment – and tries to repress obvious repetition or the
dependence on the discourses, assumptions and definitions that make the foreground
possible. Researchers may work very hard to set boundaries around their work.
This investigation is about ‘this’, and not about ‘that’, or ‘that’, or ‘that’ ... But,
no one specific site, case or phenomena ever stands alone; it is always defined in
relationship to some others.
Research often is presented as if pure phenomena, successfully differentiated
from everything else, can exist; in effect, as if what is researched could exist solely
in the mind of the researcher. Ultimately, any such effort must fail in defining what
is researched as totally distinct and uncontaminated by everything else around it.

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What is researched exists in a real world of processes, events and influences. But
researchers often pretend that the object of research is a singular, defined object of
concentration, reflection, observation or thought. It is as if research could really take
place in the head of a researcher, without all the complicating material of the world
interfering. Denying worldly relatedness and circumstantial complexity is crucial to
claims of conceptual clarity and causal analysis made in most research.
If you put research back into the world, it becomes sullied, hopelessly complex,
and emergent. It re-enters endless cycles of difference and repetition. And it becomes
circular, passing from the assumption to the resulting observation, and on to the
next assumption and observation, returning (eventually) to its starting point, in order
to rotate probably through many of the same points (though perhaps in a different
order). Research embodies an ‘eternal return’ of movement, from difference to
repetition, and back again. But we have agreed in our culture that time is linear and
progresses from before to after, via the present. Research time is iterative or circular;
normal time is linear. Research often avoids the pitfalls of this paradox, by denying
time altogether, and claiming that research is about immutable laws. But almost
all scientific theories have been revised, changed and replaced during the last two
hundred years. The claim for absolute, lasting laws is problematic.
Claiming situational rigor is an alternative. What is described in research is as
carefully examined, discussed, portrayed and represented as is possible. The singular
object of research is as carefully defined, observed and written-up, as differentiation
via comparison and contrast allows, or as the plural makes possible.
Research claims are relative; they are not relativist. The claim is not that anything
goes, or that one could just as well see something completely different. The claim
is that the research is as good as the comparisons it makes, and the examination
of writings and prior work it undertakes, and the checks it makes to ascertain the
quality of observation. Research is only as good as what it is compared to. Constant
comparison, critical dialogue and the contrasting of foregrounds and backgrounds,
produces the best possible results. It is as if research is a singular plural possibility
of observation, argumentation and agreement, and this as if comes pretty close to
‘critical realist’ or mainstream research methodology.
The comparative process just described is only as strong as are the minds involved.
Samuel Weber (1987, 2001, 2005) argues that the over-estimation of the mind is our
great pitfall. Enlightenment thought stressed the autonomy of reason. Supposedly,
reason, and reason all alone, could bring persons to share informed decisions
about human action. The autonomy of reason was proposed to be mankind’s best
protection against ideology, fanaticism, populism and religious misconception. It
was as if reason alone could protect mankind from unjust conclusions, prejudiced
opinions and false beliefs.
In this mindset, thought, analysis, and brainpower count, but certainly not the
quality of engagement with Other. The university is defined as if the mind suffices.
Engagement, commitment and participative activity do not further the ‘life of the
mind’. Secure and reliable knowledge depends purely on the quality of thought.

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World and interaction, multiplicity and mutuality, only distract from abstraction,
pureness of thought, and truth’s laws. Res cogitans, or thinking, is prioritized
above res extensa, or substance and world. Research ought to pursue categories,
concepts and truths; nitty-gritty, circumstance, and events are, at best, secondary.
Circumstances are never important unto themselves; the Other of the persons,
situations, and circumstances are never really crucial. From Descartes to Heidegger,
Western thought has juxtaposed the purity of the mind to the impurity of quotidian
material reality. The mind’s eye or Being, however defined, is posited to be more
‘true’ than circumstances, discourse or daily existence. ‘Truth’ as Being and/or ‘mind’
is what needs to flourish. Material circumstances, the hubbub of the marketplace,
and all sorts of distractions, stymie needed concentration and thought.
We observe that the individual mind is pretty powerless in contemporary university
mega-institutions, with thousands of employees and enormous budgets, and the
adherence to the rhetoric of the marketplace. Such universities pretend to teach
marketable skills, to foster innovation, to generate added value for the economy, to
practice accountability, and to be efficient and effective. Otherwise put, economics
and business terminology dominate their rhetoric.
Thought, alienated from practice, context and Other, cannot be a good guarantee
of ethics, civil society, or justice. Opposing the purity of thought to the corruption
of the world certainly will not lead to relevance, and historically has even lead to
totalitarian barbarism. We prefer the relatedness of critical questioning, dialogue,
and perspectivism, to the as if of the mind. Research can better be developed as if
it was embedded in a we of investigators and investigated. In ‘Mochlos’ (originally
presented as a paper in 1980) Jacques Derrida explores just this thesis (2004):
If we could say we (but have I not already said it?), we might perhaps ask
ourselves: where are we? And who are we in the university … What do we
represent? Whom do we represent? Are we responsible? For what and to
whom? If there is a university responsibility, it at least begins the moment
when a need to hear these questions, to take them upon oneself and respond
to them, imposes itself. This imperative of the response is the initial form and
minimal requirement of responsibility.” (Derrida, 2004: 83)
It is as if we question, doubt, investigate and reflect. Our ‘we’ (that is Letiche
and Lightfoot’s) is to be found in supervising practitioner PhDs. Our ‘we’ in the
practitioner PhD was needed to challenge participants to see things differently, to
trust their own experiences, and to talk about what concerned them. The students
learnt to profess; that is, to speak from their own observations and relatedness. The
participants’ we of thought, investigation, inquisitiveness, surprise and authenticity
was developed and shared. The possibilities of the thesis were defined in the graduate
classroom. A community of radical doubt and exuberant questioning engendered
creative speculation, critical thought and fresh observation. It is as if the university
exists for the researchers to find their own voices and to experiment with their own
ideas. The quality of the relatedness and of the integrity of the discussion plays a

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crucial role in the theses that emerge. The as if of the thinkable needs to be liberated.
Standard prescriptives will not create a radical democracy of thought leading to
powerfully engaged and inspiring work. Only if the professors believe in the power of
doubt, wonder, clarification, questioning and investigation, can they inspire research.
Many professors do not really believe in the value of questioning. They do not want
to (re-)open their field to new thought, to see established ideas replaced, or to explore
unknown territory. They communicate their needs, prejudices and rules to their PhD
students. Yet Derrida asserts that only if one enjoins radical questioning, does one
champion the university as if.
Too often ‘mind versus world’ and not ‘mind and world’ is proposed as crucial to
good research. The former claims ‘truth’ and ‘Being’ as its own; the latter claims ‘we’
and ‘relevance’. Derrida, in “Mochlos, or the Conflict of the Faculties,” explores this
divide via a dialogue with Kant’s “The Conflict of the Faculties” (1798). Kant divided
the university in two: in effect the professional schools of medicine, theology and
law versus a faculty focused purely on the truth of philosophy (letters and science).
The professional schools mix research and praxis. They have a knowledge base and
research activity, but they have a professional task that involves them in direct action.
The professional schools reward and sanction, praise and condemn, encourage and
forbid; all of which involves power and intervention. Kant’s point is that philosophy
in the university has the task of asking every question, considering each alternative,
and doubting all powers. The professional schools defend positions, practices and
traditions. They are intellectually not free and are tainted by self-interest and often
even prejudiced.
The professional schools represent a particular group in society, with specific
relationships to the rest of society, but are places where investigation and writing-up
of findings also occurs. This double representation – in the sense of representing a
special interest group and of representing facts and ideas in their texts – entails a
multiplicity of roles and a we. It is a we that cannot take responsibility for itself; the
professional schools have to be established over and over again – or as one says today,
be ‘accredited’ and subject to ‘research assessment’ – from the outside. Running a
law school is not a form of normal jurisprudence, maintaining a medical school is
not an aspect of medical practice, nor is the functioning of a theological seminary
an act of God. The grounding of the professional schools entails power structures
and economics. All of which falls outside of their responsibility to knowledge and
research, which Kant defined as characteristic of philosophy.
Derrida argues that Kant’s claim that philosophy can judge every practice and
can deliberate the truth in each circumstance is not realistic. For one thing, in such
a role philosophy would stand in judgment of everything and everyone. It would be
an all-powerful tribunal of judgment, standing above all practices, deliberating on
the right and wrong of every statement and position. In the economic crisis of today,
more philosophy or more critical judgment, for instance of economics and politics,
may be desirable; but to most of us, ideological control of all forms of practice is
politically and socially undesirable and unacceptable. Kant’s overwrought role for

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philosophy may not be realistic, but the conflict between practice and truth is all too
realistic.
Derrida calls for a lever to pry open professional responsibility and sees
philosophy or the pursuit of truth as potentially such a lever. The combination
of critical reflection and engagement is required. But in practice, responsibility
frequently remains inherently problematic. There is often no final answer to the
conflict between the theoretical and the practical; they remain two dimensions to
research that continue to be uncomfortable with one another. An example:

Tension between my professional role and my judgments about what is professional

divided my thinking in two. On the one side, there was professional knowledge,
including: business procedures, information technology, organizational micro-
politics, and organizational ethnography; and, on the other, there was philosophical
knowledge, including: what trustworthiness in relationships entails, the goals and
purposes of corporations and of capitalism, and the quality of self-examination
and my reflexivity.
I studied how bids for new work were organized in the large multinational,
multi-divisional telecom company in which I had worked. The firm supplied
the hardware for mobile telephone infrastructure: masts; senders; switches;
computers; etcetera. My job was to co-draft complex, multi-million dollar bids,
while different divisions within my company were all competing with one another
for the contracts. The Texas office would try to outdo London, while Frankfurt
would try to snatch business from the other two. The corporation had strict rules
about cooperation and on how bids should be written. Knowing how to write a bid
was seen as a key resource in having an advantage over others and in helping one
to win from those others. While successful bid writing often required information
and cross-site cooperation, bid writing was carried out in an environment of
mistrust and vicious competition. As much communication as possible was
done by email: this was helpful in countering the time zone difference with the
Americans, but more important it helped you to construct a record of what had
been said, and agreed to, in an organization driven by mutual suspicion.
It also helped when I came to write my thesis, as I was able to draw on an
enormous supply of email data, including so-called off-the-record emails,
between myself and a few people I trusted at other offices.
In the company, there were in effect three parallel forms of organization:
(i) informal groupings across different offices of people who trusted one another;
(ii) informal cut-throat competition taking place between the sites; and (iii) the
formal highly bureaucratic organization, characterized and defined by rules setting
out how the work should be cooperatively done. The first level of personal links
and relationships counted for everything. The logic of self-interest dominated
the second level and the third level was pure window dressing to protect senior
management.

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Kick-backs, petty deceit, and power politics determined who actually submitted
which bid. In the case I wrote my thesis about, the purchasing company collapsed
and went into receivership before the contract was ever signed. Everything had
been for naught.
I believe that my company was a parasite on the economy and society, and that
the story I told in the thesis bears me out. We were not trying to deliver the most
appropriate equipment at the best price; we and the purchasers were all trying
to profit from the situation as much as we could. No one cared a hoot about the
end users. The companies were playing fields for power-grabs, profit-taking and
taking advantage of one another. There was no central direction, ethical authority
or common sense of purpose; other than ‘being in it for yourself’. The projects
and bids were just too big and complicated for any individual to oversee and keep
under control. So cooperation emerged, despite the ‘lay of the land’.
My chief problem was in attempting to establish an ethical position from which
to make my judgements. I believe that my ethical integrity was established by the
quality of the relationships I maintained. In the emails, reciprocity and trust are
clearly manifest, assumed and realized. I believe that my authorial persona has
been credible because of how I was fair in my relationships.
But I know that the organizational violence and chaos was never hindered by
my presence: the winners (ab-)used my contacts and the work I had done. When
the group I had worked in was downsized, following the failure of the purchasing
company to come through with a contract, my friends and I were shown the door.
Who were the parasites? The company may have been one but surely I was
one too when I accepted a large salary. I may have operated ‘correctly’, but it was
in the margins of a totally corrupt set-up. Was my role that of so much window-
dressing, camouflaging the company’s cynical game-plan? Was I then dropped
as soon as the outward performance became unnecessary and unnecessarily
expensive? Thus were my ethics merely a temporarily helpful bit of camouflage
for the dominant group?

In his thesis about procedures and bids, the researcher suffered from a split identity.
On the one hand, he did ethnography and pursued social science legitimacy as a
researcher. But on the other, he was committed to professional practice, dealing
with organizational reality and to business studies. As observer participant, he had
collected excellent and vast amounts of data. But as a practitioner he continued to
represent doing business, being part of organizational politics and the IT industry.
From his mindset, not every question was possible. He could not address whether
laws had been broken and whether legal authorities should really have intervened,
without jeopardizing his own career and the position of the others he had researched.
There were fundamental questions he could not pose without his project exploding
into some very messy conflicts. He was what Kant called a parasite in the university.
He used the university to ask questions about responsibility and organizational

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integrity, but he did not take on the obligation of philosophy to follow the issues
to their rightful ends. The mixed we of involvement and reflection remained
uncomfortable, out of balance and problematic.
Relevance in research often entails ‘being-two’; for instance, being
ethnographically accurate and ethically perceptive. This double-ness can lead to
duplicity. The university needs relevance to justify its existence, but is threatened
by relevance because it is unstable, somewhat uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Both demands for utility and for critical analysis tug at the university. There is a
responsibility to ‘thinking’ and to social performativity. ‘Relevance’, as a goal,
captures the essential ambiguity of the two. On the one hand, universities exist to
be in service of reason; and on the other, they are sites for the (co-)organization
of professions. The first goal demands critical thought, which questions every
practice and doubts all claims; the second goal entails the valorisation of particular
competencies and the championing of specific skills. The first goal threatens to
destabilize all knowledge and to drastically confront us with our ignorance; the
second goal often comes close to trying to defend the status quo of privileged
interests. The university has a task to (re-)produce professional competences; we
need scientists, doctors, lawyers, scientists, etcetera, who are competent and well-
informed. But the university also has a responsibility to reason – it relates to the
defence of explanation, analysis and thinking. The two aspects do not easily come
into harmony with one another.
The defence of reason is probably the more threatened goal even though it is
the more deontological – acting in defence of reason is probably necessary for
universities to have a purpose and to continue to exist. The assumption of reason
supposes that one can ask for explanations of all events, experiences, or observations
in terms of causes and effects. One can demand: ‘What has to be supposed for this to
be able to occur?’, or ‘What factors preceded what actually happened?’, and ‘What
effect(s) did these events have?’. Causality can always be pursued, investigated
and delimited. But a critical awareness of reason forces one to admit that different
explanations, observations, and reflections are also always possible. Circumstances
can be defined and/or observed in different ways. There are often more than sufficient
reasons for explaining an occurrence. And the distinction between the observer and
the observed is often very problematic. Reasons for events can be named; and reasons
for those reasons can always be demanded – leading potentially to infinite regress.
Ultimately, the demand to know the ground to reason, or the reason for reason, poses
an unanswerable dilemma. The arche, (άρχή) or first cause to all being, if it exists,
is inaccessible; the university may exist to give reasons and to research the why and
how of occurrence, but the goal is ultimately unattainable.
The university can turn to utility, or some payoff from work done, for its self-
justification. But we believe that only by trying to think relationships, causation,
and intention can a lasting purpose be claimed. Pursuit of understanding needs to
be undertaken to achieve awareness, insight and knowledge; or ‘enlightenment’.

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The ‘idea of reason’ is that knowing is possible and significant. Supposedly, reason
and what there is in the world can be combined to create true propositions about
the world (Derrida, 2004: 136). Indeed, in the Kantian tradition, there is a moral
imperative to render reason, whenever one can. There is here a responsibility to
analyse, understand and to explain. But why this responsibility exists, how it is to be
grounded, or what its causes are, remains indefinable. Thus, in the end, the university
cannot really explain itself.
The university exists in pursuit of rational understanding and discovery, and to
consider the reasons for all matters of things, but ultimately without being able to
give grounds to this goal. Close analysis, critical probing and causal understanding
are explicable, but their final ‘Why?’ is not. This tension or paradox is crucial to
trying to position the PhD. PhD research seeks reasons for what gets investigated.
The why and how of occurrence is to be rigorously examined. But there is no
simple explanation for why it is so important that this is done. Roots, principles
and causes are examined, analysed and compared, but ultimately there can be no
closure. At best, a sense of coherence or awareness is achieved. The possibility exists
that the circumstance and observations of the researcher and researched combine
to form a deeply satisfying whole. A sublime possibility of successful awareness
and understanding is the best-case alternative. And this is the ultimate outcome of
Derrida’s reflections on the purposes and pitfalls of the university.
In the context of this book, Derrida points to an inherent tension or dilemma
in the concept of ‘relevance’. Relevance could refer to professional performativity
and to the utilitarian dimension of university training and research. Admittedly,
universities reproduce and try to strengthen professional practice. But in this role,
they represent particular forms of self-interest. Teachers, policy makers, lawyers and
medical professionals are all trained at universities. And their knowledge is part and
parcel of their effort to achieve and maintain their social positions. Professionals
try, based on the value of their knowledge-base, to occupy relatively stable and
privileged positions in society. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they do not.
Professionals try to use knowledge to guarantee their employment and welfare.
Sometimes professionalization fails – such as with the IT workers discussed in
Chapter Two, who have ceased to be real professionals. In the economic struggle for
positions, safety, and knowledge-based employment, the university is an interested
party. Here the university is not about the unlimited pursuit of knowing, thinking,
or the application of reason. There is a constant danger that the university will lose
its identification with reason and become a representative of utilitarian or pragmatic
forces. Derrida argues that such a move would rob the university of its raison d’être.
Commercial training institutes and/or on-the-job instruction can then compete,
probably successfully, with the university.
The relevance and power of the university is linked to its attachment to disinterested
explanation, awareness and analysis. It is not the university as professional school,
but as a site of unprejudiced investigation, that makes it relevant and unique.

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INTERTEXT THREE

Loes Houwling on Becoming a Researcher

Becoming a researcher, a PhD researcher, meant finding my way through all sorts
of things that have been written about doing research in pedagogy. And since I
knew that what I was trying to study was not simply linear or predictable, I looked
to the postmodern perspective. I wanted to write a thesis about writing a thesis;
specifically about my MA students writing their theses. But writing a thesis about
writing a thesis produces all sorts of reflexive or mirror effects. My students knew
I was writing about them; how did that influence me as a supervisor and them as
researchers? Was my first responsibility to my students – after all that was my
job – or to the research? I started the research on an assumption of radical equality
between faculty and students. But I discovered that it was simply not true. The
students often wanted dependency and directive coaching; often they were more
focussed on completion than on learning. And sometimes they did not give a
damn. Most of the time, I could not really identify with them. My pedagogical
ideology and reality clashed. Many times I felt lost. I would have liked to get
it done faster; it took me seven years to do it from the start to the finish. But
I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of it. But it could have gone faster.
It took me quite some time to find my own route, and, of course, that’s an
interesting search, which I think could have been faster if I had been helped to
look at it more from a more meta-perspective, to see what is happening. I was
drawn into the research situation and did not see any way out of it. It might have
been helpful, if the supervisors had given me an overview, getting me to look at
thesis pedagogy in a more distanced way. I don’t know if that would have been
possible but I like to think it could have been.
One important issue, in the whole process, was the difference between the two
tutors’ ideas about my thesis. I’d talk to the one, and I’d think: ”Well, Ok, this is
the way I want to go”. Then I would talk to the other the next day, and I’d say:
”Well, I should go a different direction.”And that shifting from the one to another
perspective took me a lot of time.
The difference had to do with to what extent you can say that something is or
it isn’t. The tutor has a far more outspokenly postmodern, probably relativistic,
perspective. But she wouldn’t say it was relativistic. I think that’s the main
difference. But what was important in the learning process was to make my own
choices and to stand up, and to be confident about what my choices are. The
main question is: “Could the professors have speeded up that process?” I think
I could have been helped with looking at it from, like I said before, a more meta-
perspective, from time to time. But that implies that the choice had already been
made, and it hadn’t.

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Of course there were moments that I thought that I was left alone too much.
On the other hand, I had to find my own way. So that’s the tension. There is no
right way. And I realize that getting a PhD is about making your own choices, and
developing your independence. But it was overwhelming, sometimes.
I was confused about which way to go. Of course that is necessary, because
otherwise there would be nothing to choose. But if someone asked me: “What
do you advise me, should I take this trajectory or not, what is your advice: to
take both supervisors together?” I would say: “It depends. It is very tough route,
but it is a route that you can learn a lot from.” And there is the balance between
following a clear direction and dealing with one’s own confusion. It’s important
to be confused. When is it takes too long though, it is painful. I was going to say,
if you don’t see any way out, but of course that’s part of the confusion that you
don’t see a way out. Maybe it was all about me gaining the confidence that there
will be way out.
I don’t think I ever thought about quitting, did I? No. But most of the time,
I left it to sort its self out, and there were times I said, “I am focusing on one of
you two, I’m working with one of you.” But there always came the reversal and
the doubt. That is not the way out of the confusion. It pops up again. But then it
was always on another level.
With another level, I mean that I kept seeing the confusion in a different way.
So I was able to look at it from a meta-level, in the end, so I could see where the
progress was coming from. That was the progress I had made. At first, just being
confused, then seeing what the confusion is about, and then seeing why it was
confusing me, and what I could do about it.
I was researching working with the students, and one time one of the supervisors
said that it could have been about what are you are doing with your students,
but it also could have been about making sausages. That’s what was happening
and then you are looking at it from relational constructionist perspective, and
that’s the heart of your research. The things what were happening could have
been anything. Making sausages, making cookies, working with students. The
other professor was appalled. He was furious because the research was about
education; it was about how to work with students, and they are a specific other
and not sausages.
Her point was about how to think about the relational constructionist
perspective, and that reality is made through interaction; in interaction with
students, in this case. But for her it could have been about any interaction. Her
remark confused me because, for me, it was important to say something about
education; I thought it was important to discuss working with students. That’s
why I started doing a PhD.
Later on I realized that Diane-Marie (Hosking) wanted me to make the thesis
about critical relational constructionism, and that really was something other than

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what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell the story of how I was with my students. The
sausage remark opened up the discussion of what Diane-Marie actually meant,
and then, from there, I was able to choose what I wanted the thesis to be about.
I definitely wanted it to be about education, but I wanted to examine education
from a relational constructionist perspective. Therefore, the thesis was not about
relation constructionism; it was about education from a relation constructionist
perspective.
To give you an example; the tango dance metaphor, which I used in my thesis,
illustrates the idea that you can’t rehearse anything, that you can’t represent
anything, that everything is new and changes every time, over and over again.
The dance is new every time. It’s a focus for change, and not a focus of similarity.
But the tango metaphor also produces a critique of relational constructionism.
There is an improvisational form to the dance called ‘art-time tango’. It focuses
on change and what is new that is produced, but it is important also to focus on
the similarity with what was before. Otherwise, you don’t know what is new or
changed. And without that, there’s no point in talking about change in ‘art-time
tango’, and I think that that also applies to educational relations. For me, relational
constructionism only focuses on the change. So part of the tango metaphor works
there too, but only a part of it.
I can’t see the process of writing a book separate from the process of doing
research. The whole process made me more confident, it made me more aware
of my own way of thinking. I definitely am now more aware of my own position
in the theoretical debates on education, on critical relational constructionism, and
on other perspectives towards research and science. I’m also clearer about how
research produces knowledge. Research does produce knowing and learning.
I didn’t really believe that when I started, but I am now more able to vocalize
what the strengths and limitations are of a particular perspective, and what other
perspectives might produce.
I am more process-oriented than result-oriented. My book is not the end of the
process, and the reading of the book is a continuation of the process. The book is
not just a product of the project I pursued; it’s not just ‘knowledge’ like in a report
or policy document, which often seems the whole objective of research right now.
The objective of the research of my project was, for me, how to enable people to
learn from each other, instead of using ‘knowledge’ that is a ready-made product.
Of course, what people learn in relationship to each other does produce
knowledge. It’s important in the specific situation, but that does not necessarily
mean that this particular knowledge is important for other people, in other
situations. Research produces text. And other people can get carried along by
those texts. That’s not the end. Text production remains fluid. In many situations,
written text is not so essential, but in this academic environment it is very
helpful. Here, it is important to produce written text, because it’s the way that we

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communicate in this community. But it is not the only thing. Other texts, other
means of communication, are also important.
I see writing as a way of organizing my ideas, by making arguments, and that
is an important way to communicate in an academic world. I am interested in
that world; I want to join it. I hesitated at first. I thought I would always want to
stay in the world of polytechnics (such as Cal State University), because it has
an interesting combination of the academic, maybe semi-academic, world, and
professional practice. The tensions between doing and knowing are interesting,
and I think that they are important. But polys need to join the world of the
universities, as has happened in the UK where the difference has been abolished.
We need to be able to speak the language of the universities, to some extent. But
I do not want to be an academic at a ‘traditional’ university (USA: such as the
University of California; UK: a pre 1992 university).
Most universities are far too connected with positivistic research and positivistic
science, and I think that that is a world in itself. My poly is an intermediary;
it’s more related (although still not enough) to what’s happening outside of its
buildings.
I am less than hopeful about my influence and that of my colleagues, however.
We do not even have a system in the polytechnic in which you use the written
texts of colleagues. We do not even refer to one to another’s work, and therefore
there is far too little cooperation, cross-awareness or work of the one having an
effect on the work of the other. When we write, we produce text for the outside
world, outside of our polytechnic, not for inside. When I produced text for our
own courses, then a lot of students refered to it, and they told me that they were
reminded of things from my previous texts. So what we do does influence our
students, but not our colleagues.
It is a very closed community. Closed in the sense that faculty want to prolong
what they are doing and they don’t want change. So they are not open for new
ideas, for development. It’s more all about preserving what is.
This dilemma of openness and closedness is explored in my thesis. In my
final reflexive chapter, I recommend that others reflect on their professional
experience, but that hasn’t been embraced by my colleagues. For instance, one
colleague does not refer to my thesis at all in his. It’s not in his references. But the
first part of his thesis is about reflective practice. He have could used my thesis,
he could have referred to it, but he didn’t although he’s read it.
From my thesis I produced an article. That was a presentation for a Dutch
conference on pedagogy. And I produced a text on professional reflection as well.
It is on a very concrete level for professionals to use. And I got an enthusiastic
reaction from that presentation, and from that article as well. But then it went
quiet. So those are the things I need to learn to better understand. What happens
with my texts and what can I do to make more things happen with them. Because
sometimes I produce something, and then there is nothing.

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Maybe it’s about agreeing that it is important to refer to one to another, because
often you are not really aware of it. When I heard who was on the committee to
judge my thesis, I threw in some extra references, especially for the committee
members. But that was in the final stage of editing. How these kinds of academic
communities work, we’re not really sufficiently aware of it. I think that the
supervisors should tell us more about it.
My first focus was to finish the thesis. I didn’t think that I was producing a
thesis to enter a community, I wasn’t sufficiently aware of that. I started this
whole research process because I wanted to learn and to develop my thinking.
And I had all glorious ideas about student/faculty equality and learning together
from one another. But once I had finished, I really thought: “It opened doors”.
People are now willing to talk to me who were not willing to talk to me before,
and it’s because of my PhD. That’s strange, a very strange experience. And I am
trying to figure out how I can do more with it. It could have been helpful to have
known a little bit earlier, how communication works. I had never realized that
there was a glass ceiling for poly lecturers, especially ones without a PhD. I had
no idea ahead of time how I was being screened out of all sorts of serious debates.
Many people on the DBA were aware that they needed to do the PhD as a
career step. It wasn’t my perspective at all, but maybe that says something about
me. I don’t know. The difficulty is that you are not satisfied with your position
anymore after finishing, and that’s always the case with education. I had the same
feeling right after my Masters as well. This coat doesn’t fit anymore. I need another.
My Masters opened me to the idea that there were many more perspectives in the
world. And it opened up a next career step as well. From speech therapy I ended
up teaching at a polytechnic. I see the PhD as a progression in that process.
If I get a professorship, I will have the power to set the research agenda. The
research agenda in the polytechnic is very much a professional research agenda,
for professionals and in the world; it’s outside the buildings. And for me, it is
a way to open up the polytechnic. Professors can facilitate research, out there.
Sometimes they have seconded researchers who do the research. And they can
facilitate the students to take part in research.
I keep looking for researchers who empathize with collaborative kinds of
research projects, and who really want to make things work in the world. In my
teaching I am focusing on participative research and the relationships between
that and educational research. It’s important for me to combine research and
education, while other professors are doing paid research more or less in a
consulting role. I am hoping that I can facilitate the transfer of the research to
education. And I am looking to discover how we can do research in education
together with Masters and under-graduate students.
The themes for the applied research and the perspective on basic research
come from the participants and the communities you are doing the research
with. I propose to do work in neighbourhoods where children can be involved,

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or persons around the children, or the community. Schools and neighbourhoods

in need of support in educating their children have my attention. The learning
element is important. People learn through research to create knowledge of
practice together. That’s the important factor.
This idea of constructing things together is far more upfront now than it was
nine years ago when I started. I think, when I began to teach, that I was wrestling
with the relativistic ideas about knowledge. And I tended to think that everything
was alright. I reasoned that if there is no position for which I can say “Yes this
is it, this is true,” then nothing is true or everything is true. So I was far more
relativistic than I am now. Now I say: “What we think together is true, what we
create together is true”. The truth may be situational and circumstantial, time and
place bound, but it is nonetheless true. I take a position in the circumstances and I
am one of the participants. I co-create what is true and in which context it is true.
I enter that discussion as well. I have to position myself in regards to what I think
is right or true.
The Masters program is changing from an excessively relativistic position,
to a more negotiated one. Students now have to be able to defend their choices
and to tell why their choices are valid. The ‘truth’ is now more co-constructed,
instead of being merely individually asserted. The lecturers in the first year of
the Masters program now tell what they think is ‘true’ and why. Because of
the way that universities operate, we have to produce lists of required reading,
covering different books and articles. And there are required assignments that the
students have to do. The openness for students to find their own way, to think
what they think, and to make their own choices, is becoming more limited. Some
of the books are good books, some of the assignments are good assignments, but
students don’t have to think about what assignments to do, they have to do them.
The first year runs on a sort of automatic pilot, the second year less so, depending
on who is supervising. In the old set-up, there was no automatic pilot and the
students had to design their own programs. In result, they just floated around for
far too long. That is all gone. In an effort to get the students to work, from day
one, we have ended up making choices for them.
I believe that in a Masters degree program, that there should be fewer
requirements than there are now. Of course, there is always a curriculum. As
faculty you always make choices. But there is an issue, of how much authority,
and what sort of authority. If I set a closed curriculum and say: “This is what
I think is important, for this or that reason,” then there is some freedom. At
least the principle of having to give reasons, which implies potential debate,
has been introduced. But if one simply says: “These are the requirements,” then
institutional governance dominates and individual thought or will is suppressed.
When you choose the reading lists, some books are favoured and other
alternative books are silenced. You can’t read everything in two years. So there is
always selection, and we could always make a different selection. But it’s really

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all about what you ask the students to do with the literature. If you say: “Read this
and answer these questions,” then it’s all predetermined. But if you say: “Read
this and share with us whether it is important to practice as you’ve experienced it
and why?” the discussion is more open. It’s more open because the students have
to select what they think are the important parts, and because you want to discuss
the ideas from the practice-perspective. I think that it is more open because you
can bring in anything you want as long as it relates to the text and to pedagogy.
I’m dedicated to helping people to develop their learning and their continued
learning, and enabling them to continue to learn. The curriculum of the Masters
has become a caricature of the learning agenda. The curriculum is so closed that
the students do not have a part to play, apart from repeating what’s assigned. And
that will not prod them to rethink their professional work.
With a traditional curriculum, it is easy to assess whether the answers are right
or wrong. But I think we should be judging what the students do with texts related
to their own work and their own pedagogical ideas. There is no right and wrong.
The ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ is dependent on how they are able to argue their own positions.
It is more a relational position, in the sense that the students need to relate to the
texts, and they need to relate to the community they are working in. I think that
an important thing I have realized is that this idea of individualism is flawed. We
are not interested in the independent individual, but in cooperation, co-learning
and co-evolution. And now I think that that is a workable perspective. I think
someone is always in relation to other, community, circumstance. So I started out
as a constructionist and have moved towards a more relational constructionist
position. In a sense, what you write is always in relation to all kinds of things you
are related to: the community you work in, the texts you have read, the audience
you want to address. It’s all about knowing how to relate from the one to the
other. If you are able to explain the relations, then you can understand your own
praxis.
One side-step, but important. We have a dilemma with English. If we write
in English our community is so much larger, freer and more cosmopolitan. And
intellectually you can do much more in education in Britain than in Holland. But,
I underestimated the difficulties in writing my thesis in English. It took me a lot of
time to write it and to make it readable in English. And it cost me a lot of money
for help in the editing. I understand the idea that if you write in English you are
able to reach more people, a broader and more open community, but on the other
hand, maybe it would have been wiser to write it in Dutch. But then I could not
have had both supervisors, as one barely spoke Dutch. It is so much easier to
express yourself in your mother language.
When I look at my colleagues who are now doing their PhDs at the University
of Utrecht, for instance, they are far more lonely then I was. They don’t have the
PhD research community that characterized the practitioner PhD. That community

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was important for me. Meeting each other every once in a while and discussing
our work was useful. It’s good to know other people who are going through the
same phases. I think students elsewhere are far more lonely than we were.

NOTES
1
The Derrida texts about the university, found in the collection cited above, date from lectures given
during the early 1980’s, while Derrida’s ‘University without conditions” originates from a lecture
given in 1998. In the published versions, Derrida refers to Warren, who in turn refers to Readings.
2
One of the authors did his PhD at a Protestant University, taught thereafter at a neo-Marxist
Polytechnic, thereafter came a position at an ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘pro-free market’ business school
in a large university, and thereafter a Chair at a Humanist University. Only the ‘free-market’ university
ideologically censored or controlled research. Its hyper-performative commercial culture led to a fairly
infamous case of research fraud, which is arguably characteristic of its institutional arrangements and
culture.

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RESEARCH ETHICS AND METHODS

Putting the quality of relationships at the heart of the practitioner PhD differs
markedly from the way in which research is normally viewed within social studies.
Underlying the difference is the distinction between thought and rationalization,
which is crucial to us. Research that thinks is research that describes, examines,
reflects, and theorizes the circumstances, conflicts and possibilities, which it studies.
Bad research just rationalizes them. Rationalization presents events as if they were
causal, ordered and inevitable, with scant justification for what it claims. Criteria
of judgment are hidden or non-existent, the researcher is unthinking. A normative
view of the world is unquestioningly presented; all the assumptions that precede and
underpin the act of research are presented as self-evidently true and natural.
Rationalization in research absents, sometimes deliberately, much of what we
consider important. A substantial strand of research concentrates on the enumeration
of things so that they fit into the academic machines of statistical calculation, without
reflecting on what exactly is being counted, or why mathematization might be
desirable or appropriate. To show what we mean here, consider the types of study that
pepper the media in the wider, etiolated dissemination of academic work. One such
study might claim to ‘prove’ that more ‘unsatisfied’ employees leave their employer
than ‘satisfied ones’. Although, at first, this might do no more than ‘prove’ what seems
blindingly obvious, a quick peek inside the box shows that there are a whole series
of unexplored questions: ‘Who are the ‘satisfied?’; ‘Who are the ‘unsatisfied’?’;
and, ‘What might such terms possibly mean?’ Once these questions are posed, even
more potential discussions appear. Did the ‘satisfied’ see themselves as adequately
compensated for a job well done? Or are they depressed low-performers who want
to avoid challenges, uncertainty and risk? The ‘unsatisfied’ might be frustrated
high-achievers and the ambitious, or the lazy and indolent. And what, indeed, is
‘satisfaction’? Statistical proof of correlation between ‘satisfaction’ and ‘low job
turnover’ does not tell us what ‘satisfaction’ is; or what does, or does not, ‘motivate’
employees to stay or leave, or what makes work worthwhile. There are even deeper
assumptions in the research, such as the one that the firm should want its employees
to stay and, as a corollary, that satisfied employees stay and dissatisfied employees
leave. This sort of research does not even try to understand the social. It refuses
to ask: ‘What might make the relationship between the person and the enterprise
worthwhile or rewarding?’ Under the mantle of ‘science’ all crucial questions about
the relationship between persons, groups and institutions, have been repressed in
what is ultimately a pseudo-science of mere counting. Only with a theory, say, of

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‘meaningful work’, or of ‘identity realization’, or of ‘organizational quality’, could

we explore some of the underlying issues.
Unthinking approaches now run riot in social studies, but it wasn’t always
so, even in disciplines that now are overwhelmingly quantitative. The following
prognostications of the effects now seem eerily prescient:
If the powerful new tools [of quantitative methods] are used as ineffectively
as they seem to be [...] then the future of the new finance and the finance
field in general is black. [...] It suggests that coming generations of business
school graduates will embark on their business careers well indoctrinated in
the ineffective use of quantitative methods and abysmally ignorant of finance.
Is this what we really want? (Durand 1968: 852)
The focus on metrics has become more important than discussion of what it is
that is being counted. In fact, examination of what is being counted may no longer
be of any importance at all. Generations that have travelled through the business
schools (and other professional schools) have learned to lionize the ineffective use
of quantitative methods, and are mostly abysmally ignorant of the workings of their
fields. If only we could dare to dream that things could change.
Rationalization inherently carries within it the potential for perversion. The
econometrists who modelled derivatives and other financial instruments for the banks
and insurers did some very astute ‘counting’ or social mathematical work that was
much prized both within the academy and in the corridors of high finance. Their
unswerving, uncritical support of deregulation, speculation and wilful ignorance of
the kick-on effects in the ‘real economy’, make it reasonable to question the ethics of
‘counting’. It is obviously possible to model share price rises and dips, and one can try
to develop the tools making it possible to profit from bear and bull markets, but what
kind of social science is this? Ultimately, we might ask, does creating the tools that lead
to social economic crisis deserve a PhD? Certainly, many such were granted. There
were warnings: Findlay and Williams, writing in 1980, commented, “Many observers
appreciate the rigor of the New Finance but not the nihilism.” By ‘New Finance’ they
were referring to intensively quantitative modelling based upon ‘positivist’ economic
theory, which was sweeping away the institutionalist and discursive traditions that
preceded it. That revolution has now been completed to such an extent that there is
no credible academic avenue within the discipline of finance to meaningfully explore
alternatives to the failed economic models that led to the current crisis.
Findlay and Williams’ historic critique exposes further problems with
rationalization. They comment on the smuggling in of unstated assumptions in the
New Finance, by first identifying the bold claim that runs through the literature: ‘As
stated by Milton Friedman […] positive theories are ethically neutral and, so long as
the conclusions follow from the assumptions, are to be judged on the basis of how
well they work’ (pp 11–12). But, ‘how well they work’ is a normative judgment
(p 12). Such half-hidden assumptions are perhaps unremarkable. Yet their influence
with ‘shareholder wealth maximization’ have changed our world for the worse:

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Our aim here is [...]to discuss the second point these texts invariably make:
that whether or not firms are SWM [shareholder wealth maximising], they
should be. Aside from the complications of introducing a purely normative
judgment into a positive context, our major difficulty with this position is that
its normative basis is unclear and quite possibly wrong. (p14.)
If SWM quite possibly does not and should not exist in the real world, why
is it thriving in the literature? Because, as far as we can tell, when combined
with perfect-market assumptions, SWM allows the application of separation
theorems to produce unique “answers.” Of course, it is not obvious what the
correspondence is to any question being raised in the real world.
It would be nice to conclude that SWM was a “harmless mutation,” in
that nobody really paid any attention to it except writers in arcane journals,
and that it was just as well that they did not. Unfortunately, its persistence in
the text and journal literature not only undermines whatever modest claim
finance might have to be value-free, but it also imposes values of the most
retrograde sort. Combined with the perfect market Walrasian framework,
any intrusion of government becomes automatically undesirable. Since labor
markets are presumed to clear at wage rates equal to the worker’s marginal
product, unions are similarly unnecessary. Finally, since managers and the
firm are presumed subject to the ultimate control of the shareholders and the
market, any effort to increase responsibility or information is opposed as, at
best, costly and redundant and possibly harmful. Our “value-free science”
becomes nothing more than a theoretical justification for the privileged
remaining privileged. (p15.)

Of course now, 30 years later, the idea that shareholder wealth maximisation could
at one point even have been described as a ‘harmless mutation’ seems inconceivable.
It has so deeply permeated not just academic finance but mainstream business and
political discourse that it now has achieved the status of simple fact. And those
‘answers’ that seemingly had no correspondence to questions in the ‘real world’
have seen the ‘real world’ performatively shaped by finance and business. However,
even though the logic appears to be unravelling, the almost complete adherence to
such beliefs within the business school and much of the social sciences has made it
difficult to muster critique, let alone coherent alternatives for the current crisis.
We could go further in exploring examples beyond the field of finance, to show
how such supposedly value-free research has had similarly deleterious effects across
the social sciences. It has been possible to gain a PhD (in social psychology) through
investigating how tobacco companies can psychologically influence (manipulate)
the public in order to sell more cigarettes, or how airlines have instructed the public-
at-large in the finer skills of waiting, docility and mass-victimization. If we are to
reject such ‘unthinking’ research, it opens up questions as to what ‘thinking’ research
might be. Do we require a consideration of some sort of ethics or politics before the
research even begins? Can egoism, self-interest and the pursuit of economic gain,

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suffice as a research purpose, or must we look for other drivers? The relationship
between PhD research, the university, and values is obviously a major theme to this
book.
One further aspect of the overly rationalist view concerns that of the individual.
The rationalized world and the models it spins off, depend on assuming a highly
atomised individual, where connections with others are posited to be of minimal
consequence. This, of course, reduces the social to but a footnote: there is no sense
that the social should be studied, either in terms of outcomes, or indeed as a focus of
reflection. But the concept of the individual is complex, although often such issues
are skimmed over, as in the rationalised model of an individual acting solely in
its own self-interest. It is assumed that self-interest is the natural state, anything
that might differ, is mere aberration. In economics, for example, the appalling
lack of explanatory power of game theory has not led to a reconsideration of basic
assumptions, but instead to calls for better modelling and better research subjects
who are more amenable to the theory. The narrow conception of ‘the individual’
from economics has found a comfortable home in the model of ‘the consumer’ who
exercises their ‘democratic’ right in making a series of individual choices. Of course,
if everyone were perfectly rational, the range of optimal choices would logically
be vanishingly small, and therefore even rationalising theory requires individual
differences that lead to different choices. But this still leaves a series of questions as
to where does this individuality come from?
Individuation, or the process of recognition of something or someone as
individual, separable, and different from Other, is embedded in social processes of
relationship and relatedness. Not only that, but the person, as pure singularity, can
have no identity or self, since these qualifiers are only recognised in relationship to
others. This is not to relegate individuality to irrelevance: without individual identity
there would be no need to strive for understanding, no language through which we
might communicate, and people would ultimately have nothing in common. But, an
excessive attention to individual identity can become restricting, destroying rapport
and strangling spontaneous contact. The risks of disindividuation in our society
are enormous. At its strongest, in the consumer society, the pressures from the
technologies of consumerism drive people ultimately to a ‘miserable consumerism’,
increasingly characterised by automatic, empty actions. Without thought, without
intelligence, the disindividuated wander the shopping malls of both the mind and of
the suburban wastes. For them, the social has become empty and meaningless.
We subscribe to a radically relational view of person and society. Within this
perspective, the social makes individual identities possible, and individual identities
are able to provide the ideation, which gives society voice, distinctiveness and
commonality. Neither person nor society is primary: it is their relationship that is
enabling. Within research, we suggest that seeing either the person (as done through
psychology) or the society (as done with sociology) as prime means that we are
unable to see relationship and the dynamic relatedness that makes self and society
into a dynamic process. But holding simultaneously the two ideas – of self as socially

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formed, and society as a product of individuation, runs against the grain of both self
and society. It is difficult to avoid collapsing into the safe embrace of the one or the
other.
Thus, descriptive social studies examining self and society, while holding on to
their mutual causality, is difficult to produce. Of course, the demand to think agency
and structure at once and together, is a call that has been echoing through the social
sciences since at least the 1960s, with notable exponents including Pierre Bourdieu
(1977) and Anthony Giddens (1979). Indeed, the creative tension between agency and
structure lie at the heart of Georg Simmel’s (1904) Philosophy of Money. However,
within these texts, the individual is typically treated in the abstract or, ironically, as a
dedifferentiated exemplar. We suggest that in order to take the individual seriously,
while attending to the radical relationship between self and society, requires neither
slipping back into sociological abstraction of the individual, nor psychologising the
social.
The research which this book champions respects person and context. For
instance, here we take the example of a former student who attempted to wrestle
with these issues:

What does it mean to be a physical therapist when the organization in which

you work is increasingly defined by protocols and procedures? If work is
standardized, regimented, and limited to following a series of rigorous codes,
abstracted from examples of previously established ‘best practices’, what
remains of individual analysis and action? What becomes of the relationship
between client and professional, and what remains a viable self-identity? At first,
ethnographic research seemed to reveal that the answer was that the professionals
saw such standards as realistic challenges, yielding goals that could and should
be realized. Conforming to the system was therefore a personal challenge and
became an aspect of one’s professional development. What might be seen from
one perspective, as threatening rationalization or transparent deskilling, was
instead transmuted into a realistic and acceptable objective of trying to learn to
do better work. This did not seem to be irrational – far from it – as the physical
therapists melded their personal goals with those of the system to derive an
apparently creative and purposeful new direction. This response from the shop
floor was unexpected and seemed to cancel some of the assumptions that work
rationalization was inherently destructive for both professional- and self-identity.
But as the research continued, a massive reversal occurred. The physical
therapists became tired, listless, ill, and often depressed. What might be considered
cognitive dissonance seemed to have overwhelmed them: although they apparently
wanted to keep to their story of self-professionalization and challenging work,
they seemed to lose all contact with their clients and themselves. We might see
and call this ‘disindividuation’, but the physical therapists found that they were

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without requisite words to describe or discuss their condition, and were thereby
ever more powerless to arrest their decline.
Listening to the voices of the physical therapists a more and more complex
and nuanced picture of the relationship between structure and identity emerged.
Initially, I was expecting to find professional discontent and was surprised to find
a very positive culture of ‘meeting the challenge’. As the research continued,
researchees’ identities collapsed dramatically, but this still did not produce
collective protest. Instead, anomie was manifested as discomfort and a general
feeling of uneasiness, which ultimately took a frightening physical and mental
toll.

This research seems to scream for action; whether it be protest, workplace

improvement, system change or political reform. And this does lead to a series of
questions about what is the function of research in the social studies, which we shall
return to later. Before we turn to such concerns, it will be helpful to further explore
the question of relatedness and particularly that of ‘presence’.
Research can clearly help foment change, since as we have alluded to above, the
re-orientation of academic research in finance fed into and stoked the revolution on
Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms. Although there is, of course, a sneaking
suspicion that research calling for more attention to the needs of the vulnerable and
dispossessed will receive less attention among the political and economic elites than
studies suggesting that those same elites deserve, nay require, better recompense.
Such sniping aside, there remains the question as to whether research, most especially
that of the PhD, should be intended as a form of creative resistance? Such a question
rather begs the question of resistance to whom or what, which is superficially fairly
easily answered. Resistance could be to processes of disindividuation, rationalization
and stupidity (that lead to economic crisis or even collapse), and to processes of
political degradation from democracy to authoritarian populism, and processes that
make dialogue, understanding, and the presence of the one to the other, impossible.
If one believes that research should be ‘objective’, this list may sound bizarre.
However, one of our basic assumptions is that university research is inextricably
and inevitably value-laden. Even when research pretends, like the now old ‘New
Finance’ that it is merely reporting or analysing ‘what is’, there are always normative
judgements surreptitiously squeezing in through the back door.
But that still leaves open the questions of which judgements and which research?
Here we suggest that one way to unravel such a conundrum is through Derrida’s
social reinterpretation of Levinas, which combines ethics with a particular research
approach. Our positioning originates in Levinas’s claim that presence, or what might
be termed the openness of awareness of Other, is an ethical category or quality
of organizing, which precedes knowing (epistemology), beauty (aesthetics) and
knowledge of how the world is (ontology). Thus, if presence is the category that
precedes all others, then you have to assume presence to be able to think about,

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discuss, or be aware of, any of the others. Put slightly differently, openness to context
and Other is a pre-requisite of human consciousness. Only a being possessing
presence can see, know, and feel. Presence is prior to all observation, reflection or
other actions that might seem to yield the means of knowing the world. To apply
this concept to individuation, the relationship between society and identity is only
possible because it was preceded by presence.
Grounding research in social relations is inherently controversial. Not only
does it replace the primacy of the mind with that of the relationship; it prioritizes
the we above the I. Thus, the rational individual is supplanted in two senses. The
philosophical tradition that stresses the truth of Being and/or of the mind rejects the
vagueness, potential polyphony, uncertainty and complexity of the We. We, as we
have already asserted, is singular plural, in that it is two or multiple contradictories
(self and other) combined. We is essentially uncertain and indefinite, and for some,
such as Derrida and Stiegler, this enduring indefiniteness respects the dynamics
of both the self and the Other, since we do not have to collapse matters into one
category, obscuring the rest.
While Levinas claims that ethics can only be understood as originating in
relatedness, and is thus a source for relational thinking, his relationship to the we
is complex. We can in effect make responsibility diffuse, impossible to attribute,
and ungraspable. The concentration camps and the gulag have lead some to fear
the potential totalising effects that may come from the we, and to insist upon
individual responsibility. We choose to embrace the we of relatedness, in our ethics
and methodology of research. Of course, ethics and methodology effectively merge
here, into a single reflection.

RESEARCH ETHICS: WE, I / THOU AND OTHER

The effect of rationalization, mindless quantification and downright opportunism

cries for more attention to research ethics. But the postmodern critique of modernist
idealisms blocks our way. The social ethics of Marxism leads to the gulag and the
hysterical neo-Romanticism of a fascist self to the concentration camps. Collective
identity, in we, as the basis to an ethics, is suspect. And, as we have clearly indicated,
the we of neo-con ideology has done a lot of harm. Tzvetan Todorov (2002) has
proposed a contemporary humanism that rejects the we in favour of the relationship
of I to You/Thou. He assumes that: (i) the I can be identified with the conscious subject
or mind; (ii) the We can be identified with common-cause, trust and solidarity; (iii) the
They refers to what is outside of the immediate living situation and is accessed via
ideation, abstraction, reification and rationalization; and finally, (iv) the You / thou
is the ‘other’, maybe ‘the stranger’, possibly threatening but occasionally carrying
the possibility of relationship, love and profound spiritual edification. For Todorv,
the I is particular, individual, and independent; supposedly singular and even self-
regulating. The I exists, developing and changing in relationship to other I’s. Each
relationship with another I is unique, grounded in the finality or specificity of the other

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I or ‘Other’ in that relationship. Other Is are not interchangeable or replaceable in

any specific relationship – relationship is unique to that I. Relationship is a universal
principle of co-evolution and of human development, although each relationship
is unique and specific. The I to You / thou relationship is primary and it is via its
dyad that identity is realized. The I can only exist in relationship to others. Human
physical existence requires nourishing, social support and collective protection; and
human consciousness is established and constituted via collective processes, such
as language. The I is socially constituted, relationally engendered, and communally
sustained. The You or thou is always a specific, lived, other. There is no We here, but
a polyphony of relationships, and a myriad of I to You / thou dyads.
Supposedly, the totalization of the I to You/thou relationships, in a collective We,
destroys their dialogic nature. While the self or I is co-constituted with the Other in
the You / thou, this is not without its downside: relationships are not perfect and there
is always the risk of inauthenticity or false consciousness. This drives Todorov to
his ethical standpoint: each I is responsible for its own gaze and for the recognition
that it brings to relationship. Love is the name given to successful I to You / thou
relatedness; that is, to the full acknowledgement of the Other which recognises
unicity, mortality and specificity. Relationship with Other makes consciousness and
human experience possible.
Todorov builds upon his assumptions to denounce some historical and political
atrocities, such as the Spanish genocide of the Mexican Indians in the 16th century.
This, he condemns on the grounds that the Spanish did not respect the Otherness of
the other (1999). Thus, the analysis and ethics are entirely grounded on the individual
level, and the colonization of Mexico seems merely to be the context. But this lays
open other, unintended questions: just whose otherness, and in what juxtaposition to
which Other’s otherness, is honoured and why? Despite the difficulty of up-scaling
such relational dyads into a coherent social ethics, the rejection of the power and role
of the We is supported by a critique of political populism, consumerist materialism,
and postmodern performativity. But can we, and should we, want to get along
without the We?
Conflict between the I and the We echoes the earlier discussion in this book of
psychology versus sociology, and of the individual versus societal perspective.
Themes, such as business competition, individual self-interest, and ‘Darwinian
fitness’ do not seem solvable on the aggregation level of the dyad. How can
concentrating on I and you/thou solve the European banking crisis, for example?
Obviously, there is a long political tradition that has sought its concept of justice
in the we, such as in the we of the proletariat as exploited and excluded. Prior to
Marx, Kant asserted the universality of human reason, or the we of enlightenment.
Liberal or social-democratic thought emphasizes the We of trust (Laclau & Mouffe,
1985; Gibson-Graham, 1996; Alvesson & Deetz, 2000; Alvesson & Willmott, 2003;
ten Bos & Jones, 2006, Roberts, 2003 & 2004). But, the current crisis of finance
capitalism reveals that the we of solidarity, even amongst the rich nations, is all too

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weak. Too often, the well-educated, productive and economically useful seem to be
acknowledged, and the subaltern has no face or voice.
Todorov (2002) asserts that his philosophy can produce an ethics of ‘doing
justice to the other’. He claims that in meaningful I to You / thou interaction, there is
recognition and acknowledgment of the Other or the You / thou. Simple descriptions
of relationships or prescriptive ethics of relatedness only reify interaction, and in
such texts, the They perspective supposedly takes over. Consequentialist, virtue-
based, and/or communitarian ethics are all We based. Formalized ethics lapse into
the They, and cannot therefore catch the essence of lived relatedness, which forms
the crux to the ethical. In this, Todorov follows in the tradition of Levinas, who
emphasized the direct encounter as a “manifestation of the face over and beyond
form” (Levinas, 1969: 66):
... to encounter the other as face is to encounter her in her absolute alterity
from myself, to be faced by her as unthematizable, escaping all my attempts to
understand and thus to assimilate her. The face makes it impossible for me to
reduce the other to myself, to my ideas of her, to my theories, categories, and
knowledge. Since form betrays the other, for Levinas, the face of ethics is not
the face whose form we take in with our eyes. (Taylor, 2006: 1)
‘Face’ is not what can be seen or touched in a visual or tactile sense. The encounter
with ‘face’ emphasizes relationship through difference, or as Taylor puts it, ‘alterity’.
Difference and the recognition of difference is essential. It cannot be overcome
without destroying the relationship and the humanity of those involved. Tying ‘face’
down to the knowable, reduces difference to the known, and thereby destroys its
significance. The differences between the I and the You/thou make relationship
possible. The subject positions of the I and the Other may be useful and necessary
linguistic placeholders, but they do not have the status of truths or facts. Awareness,
consciousness, and knowledge have to remain interactive to flourish.
To turn to research as an instance of relatedness, research can be understood as
relationships that are grounded in experiences of otherness. Indeed, in social studies,
openness to an-Other can be understood as essential to researching. As Derrida
(1978) suggests, if research is a pure act of the mind, where knowing is characterized
by objectivity, then the researcher must try to possess the truth or essence of the
researched. The otherness of the other does not then remain intact; difference is
subordinated to, or subsumed within, the researcher’s theory, investigation and
conclusions. In Levinas, ‘Openness-to-an-Other’ requires leaving the Other
intact, which means that research has to stay open-ended, partial, incomplete and
ever emergent. If the I of the researcher dominates the Other or the You/thou, the
interaction is blocked and dialogue is replaced by monologue. Only in openness to
the other, can expression, thought and communication, develop.
The I to You/thou relationship can take different forms, and has undergone
historical development. Todorov wrote a series of books exploring the relatedness of
the Renaissance with Michel de Montaigne as exemplar, the Enlightenment focussing

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on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and 19th century liberal-democracy using Benjamin

Constant as his specimen (Todorov, 1999, 2001b, 2002). Montaigne, Todorov claims,
wrote his diary-like essays to explore human individuality. Montaigne insisted that
he was not better than any other man and that his personal self-exploration was not
undertaken to reveal commendable truths or virtues. Nor did Montaigne intend to
display the deeds or the ideas of someone exceptional. Rather, he suggested, humans
were not inherently noble or ethically good. Human existence was not Godly, virtuous
or saintly – it just was – and it was all that there was. He interpreted, communicated
and shared, but more importantly, for our purposes, he wanted (by sharing text with
his readers) to co-create his and their identity. Montaigne thus brings together the I
of the author, the You/thou of the reader, in the They of the text. He inaugurates the
idea of a community of sense-making, and understanding through shared-text.
For research methods, the emphasis on the ethics of the I to You/thou relationship
provides attractive implications. The researcher is the I of the research text or thesis.
If the authorial I is relationally sound and reliable, the text is justified. The text
is a They – an externalized, reified artefact. The researching is the event, and the
relationship between the researcher and the researched is crucial. Research ethics
rests upon researchers attending to their relational responsibilities in their work
with the researched. The researched have to be treated in a way that is profoundly
sympathetic, just and acknowledging. But if the authorial I has all the control over
the narrative, the ethical claim can become very weak.
The problem is one of what guides the research practice as a relationally
worthwhile activity. Such guidance requires ideas about what in human relationships
are worthwhile; that is, ideas of ethics.
Our research ethics came in part directly from Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas, but
often also indirectly. Thus, we look via Lingis’s translation of Levinasian concepts,
to a form of ethnography, and to Bauman’s subsequent drawing on Lingis to define
an ethics of the contemporary society, as well as via Stiegler’s grounding of his
social studies in relatedness to Other, and via Roberts’s addressing organization from
a Levinasian perspective.
Levinas is the philosopher of ethics as relatedness, and his understanding of the
gaze is the obvious point of entry:

…. gaze… is about how to approach the Other in their otherness. The idea of
encountering the Other (pp. 74-6) is due to Levinas, who was imprisoned in a
Nazi concentration camp. This appalling experience sharpened his attentiveness
to the humanity of other people. The engagement that, for Levinas, lies at the
heart of ethics means treating people not as objects, as part of an undifferentiated
group, or as replicating one’s own values and assumptions, but on their own
terms with all their distinctive differences. The effect of such an engagement is
not one way: the person encountering the Other is changed by the experience.
In the context of the mass dehumanisation of people by a Nazi bureaucracy as
unfeeling as the technology it employed, Levinas’ transformative ethics has

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real bite. …. such transforming encounters seem to be so rare that we need

more openness to the Other than our current normative environments provide.
This openness is not something that can be a routine. (Grace, 2006: 376)
Or in Levinas’s own words:
This gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it
demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which
one recognizes in giving . . . this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as
a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is
to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. (Levinas, 1969: 75)
The gaze is focused on the face or on how Other appears to one; it addresses the
Other and through that attention creates interaction and identity (see: Levinas, 1969,
1998, 2001).
Relevant practitioner-PhD theses are a particular sort of gaze, wherein practice
is ethnographically researched and the process is reflected upon. This requires
engagement and relationship between the researcher and the researched. The
research relationship cannot be at a distance – it must take place face-to-face:
... to encounter the other as face is to encounter her in her absolute alterity
from myself, to be faced by her as unthematizable, escaping all my attempts to
understand and thus to assimilate her. The face makes it impossible for me to
reduce the other to myself, to my ideas of her, to my theories, categories, and
knowledge. Since form betrays the other, for Levinas, the face of ethics is not
the face whose form we take in with our eyes. (Taylor, 2006: 1)
‘Face’ is an event of relationship. ‘Face’ resembles saying and can never becomes
said. ‘Face’ cannot be tied down and defined without destroying its alterity and
significance. The gaze struggles with ‘not-being-able-to-slip-away-from-an-
assignation’ (Levinas, 1981), wherein self tries not to dominate other but still to
speak – in this context, to write and to do the research.
Obviously, It would be a performative contradiction to impose relationality on
someone else. Levinas’ philosophy of relatedness and responsibility to the Other is
not directly applicable to professional work situations – it is far too existential and
ontological for that. For Levinas, responsibility knows no limits; it is unbounded,
absolute and total. Professional relationships are circumscribed, always limited and
partial. John Roberts (2001, 2003, 2004, 2006) has taken this theme and translated
Levinas’ inspiration to the performative world of professional activity, demonstrating
how responsibility operates in the midst of social engagement.
Our focus on responsibility is directed to acts within practitioner research. With
the PhD students we organized seminars where participants presented critical book
reviews; discussed position statements, exchanged philosophical/ethical/political
viewpoints; and where research ideas were analysed and examined, testing how they
might be realized. Repeatedly, the question of ethics was thrown up and discussed
around questions such as: ‘What makes this research situation (or assumption, or

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method) worth pursuing?’; ‘What in this theme or approach is truly important?’;

or ‘What can be brought to light in this manner that is important to make visible?’
We, professors and participants in the seminars, assumed that research is socially
significant, and that it was part of a professional dialogue wherein participants want
to engage in the active defining and investigating of what they believe to be valuable
practices.
Levinas was a central figure for us because he puts ethics at the crux of matters,
instead of seeing it as an add-on. Research ethics are often translated into lists of
‘do’s and don’ts’, leaving research questions, choices of theory and fundamental
research goals out of the picture. For us, ethics refers to one’s starting point: ‘What
does one want to know and why?’ By ‘ethics’, Levinas means how do we deal with
fundamental human relatedness. Ethics are not here rules or prescriptions for action
(as in ethical codes) but the quality of existence, which is most originatory (or
originative) to human existence and being.
According to Levinas, humans are inherently accessible to relatedness. There is
an ontological quality to awareness and response to the Other. This relatedness is
found in empathy, love, co-creation and responsibility; it is radically originatory
for what we as humans are. Because the gaze of the Other, whether we want it or
not, is presented to us and demands response of us, and we respond to this Other
which lies exterior to us, we are inherently relational beings. And, as relational
beings, we are ineluctably interactive. Ethics is about how we deal with the innately
interpersonal quality of existence. We can acknowledge the gaze of the Other, or
look away – both are responses. We can be passionate about our relatedness and the
essentially interpersonal quality of existence, or horrified by it and aggressive in our
relationship to Other. But taking this further, to live in self/other denial, is a response
with ethical ramifications.
Ethics is therefore about what we do with the inevitable call that the existence of
Other makes on us. How do we respond when addressed by Other? How do we reply
when relationship imposes itself on us as part of the reality of human existence?
Levinas believes that what we tend to do is to assume that the Other is like ourself
and we project our ideas and prejudices onto Other, reducing Other to our own
preconceptions and presuppositions. In so doing, we deny Other and destroy Other’s
presence to us. For Levinas, ethics demands that we stay true to other as other –
that we accept and take responsibility for relatedness, acknowledging that we are
beings who are addressed by other beings. Levinas is not discussing here an ethics
of relationship since the issue here is not what the one says to the other, or what
the one does or does not decide together with the other. Rather, his concern is that
of individual consciousness: do we allow ourselves to really know that we are
addressed continually by Other and that existing always entails being with others?
Levinas’s point is that the acknowledgement of the other as other, is the individual’s
own personal responsibility. The Other is not responsible that Other exists, but I am
responsible for what I do with the fact that Other appears to me and addresses me.

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To exist as human is to be continually addressed by Others; human consciousness

entails awareness of presence, participation, interaction and relatedness. The quality
of sociability or of interrelatedness is infinite and unending, and the quality of address
is what Levinas calls ‘responsibility’. To put it slightly differently, consciousness
can be seen as response-ability – the ability, need and obligation to respond. Other
appeals constantly for response and self has to deal with this appeal. For Levinas,
then, responsibility requires response to the presence of self and other, including
acknowledgement of the other as other. But knowing Other as other, rather than as
we might most easily want to assume Other should be, is difficult. Ethics, when seen
as the acknowledgement of the inherent differences between self and other, is very
demanding. Levinas suggests that it is precisely this demand that makes us human,
in that we are aware, conscious, complex, and relational. Other makes it possible to
be what we call human and that human is a social interactive form of being, which
co-evolves with Other.
Responsibility is the principle that underpins connection and empathetic
understanding, and without responsibility, the necessary qualities of sociability
would not exist. But while relatedness creates purpose, wellbeing and the very
possibility of sense-making, it is also confronting, problematic, and even threatening.
From Levinas, the applied question arises: ‘How does practice, and do practitioners,
requite their relatedness to Other?’ Practitioners may be tempted to ignore Other and
to deny the Other’s otherness, by sticking to assumptions, best-practices, protocols
and rules – all the techniques that seem to make modern professional life function
more simply. At that point, responsibility is offered up as an alternative to rule-
bound procedures. Practice may be well organized, but in terms of Levinas, it is
then not ethical. Rules might be applied efficiently and honestly, but there can be no
justice in a Derridean sense, since the laws are so well organized that doing justice
to immediate problems, to issues that arise, or to the being of the other as other, can
be completely ignored (Derrida, 1992). Social administration can operate perfectly
efficiently, but it is dead and inhuman, with little or no ethics. Rules and procedures
do not have the human abilities of being able to empathise, to experience, create,
or deal with human interrelatedness. And this is the alienation that so many of us
experience in our relationship to bureaucracies. There are rules and laws, but no
humanity.
Levinas leads us to posit a key question: ‘Is practitioner research and knowledge
compatible with ethics, and if so, how?’ Todorov was right in asserting the dangers
of the We – concepts of shared identity can drive out relationship and become
rationalizations that kill. But he was wrong to base ethics solely on the dyad I to thou/
you. As Levinas wrote, and the turn to affect explores, ethics entails consciousness’s
presence to Other in all its complexity, emergence and incoherence. Research that
relies on that presence tries to influence it, and as text, reifies it. Thus, an ongoing
discussion of what a practical research ethics might look like, is essential. We have
been consistently sceptical about the normative basis for research, and its effects on
relationship, in the events and circumstances that are researched. Levinas wrote high

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theory; he did not proffer examples of ethics for practitioner research. Thus we have
to attempt to translate Levinas to practitioner research practice, helped by a few key
sources.
The American philosopher, Alfonso Lingis has developed a research and writing
strategy based on a Levinasian approach. Over several years, he has gnawed away
at the problem of how one might convey gaze, responsibility, and the otherness of
the other into text. Research produces text; a PhD is a book. But how can written
work sufficiently acknowledge Other in order to be ethical? Will not writing always
reduce the other to a text, which is writer-ly and wherein the author, and not the
relationship, dominates? Is it not the essence of research that the researched is made
‘objective’ – an object outside of the relationship – and does this not suggest that in
Levinas’s terms, social science research is always unethical? Lingis’s reply comes in
his writing. His texts are descriptively powerful; his language invites and gains the
reader’s involvement. His ethnography is affective, conveying and characterized by
its emotive power, he produces provocative accounts. He writes poetically and his
writing is evocatively focused.
In contemporary ethnography, there has been a ‘turn to affect’, covering aspects
such as the writing of existence focussing on relatedness and showing interest in
what is felt, how response takes place in daily existence, and what sites of emotive
involvement feel like (Stewart, 1996; 2007). This work calls upon Lingis for
justification and support, since he shows how radical relatedness is in his writing
and, often, how indeterminant its workings are. One key theme in Lingis’s work
is the conflict between ethics and morality. In a moral framework, theft, revenge
and murder are clearly forbidden but, in ethics, things are far less certain. Lingis
explores emotion, gaze and responsibility, and where they can bring us. He looks
for paradoxes and dilemmas, where law and morality seem to oppose felt justice and
relatedness. He does not seek or give answers, but reveals a series of contradictions,
desires, and passions. He might be described as a phenomenologist of human co-
existence, exploring and explaining what sorts of bonds exist. His radical empiricism
leads him to display human interaction in extreme circumstances, such as in war or
where people are total dependent. In so doing, he reveals the Levinasian concept of
responsibility in all its starkness. He cleaves true to Levinasian principles, refusing
to say what should be done with the responsibility – he leaves it to us to decide.
The gaze of Lingis’ texts stares unwaveringly at us; it is for us to decide what to
do with this intrusion. And that, according to Levinas, is exactly how ethics works.
The practitioner researchers, inspired by Lingis/Levinas, have confronted us with
many crises in frontline work, where avoidance, self-enrichment or Machiavellian
tactics have prevailed. They have also revealed passionate involvement and great
depths of sensitivity. The world of human relatedness is often rationalized away
in reams of documented best-practices and evidence-based considerations – our
researchers have done better than that.
But a radically emotive, direct, and participatory experiential ethics, rendered
poetically, is always a partial truth. It can be revelatory, but in the act of revealing,

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it will necessarily hide other things. Emotion can be voyeuristic and involvement
can blot out analysis – we can all get caught up in the fevered joy of the journey,
missing much of what we pass by. Existential engagement can be very rewarding
but it does not necessarily lead to an awareness of structural causation, general
characterizations of hierarchy, or institutional pressures. Description, as inspired
by Levinas, and realized and influenced by Lingis, can remain very ‘personalist’
or subjective, particularist and limited in its scope of thought and reflection. Very
focused and miniaturist work can be very moving and excellent, revealing unknown
contexts and little considered relationships, but it certainly is not the only possibility
for relevant research.
Practitioner researchers looking for a more broad perspective, or wanting to
do research at a higher aggregation level, have in our experience often turned to
Bauman, a sociologist who throughout his career has questioned the ethical basis
of the concepts of sociology (1973, 1976a, 1976b, 1978, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992,
1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2008). Sociology often
emphasises structure over agency and the precedence of social order; what freedoms
of choice and action do actually exist? We can see the problem more clearly when
considering bureaucracy which is, for better or worse, crucial to any description
of contemporary social order. Max Weber coined the description of the ‘iron cage’
of bureaucracy, wherein rules, precedents, and structures slowly but surely become
all determinant (1969). Ritzer’s popularized version of Weber, re-presented as the
McDonaldization of society, has powerfully re-interpreted the basic points for
contemporary audiences (1992). Bauman has taken this a step further and suggested
that the ever-increasing rationalization of society ultimately becomes a process
of massive irrationalization. At what point do regulations and guidelines become
unreasonable? One of the tools in the armoury of once-powerful British trade unions
– ‘work-to-rule’ – illustrates the question. If everyone does exactly what they are
supposed to do – what is written down in their conditions of employment, say – then
production grinds to a halt. It is impossible to prescribe complex work processes
so that, ‘follow-the-rules’ can really work. Interpretation and good will are always
needed to keep the flow of organization moving. The tipping point, where statutes
and procedures obstruct more than they facilitate, seems to have been long-passed
in many organizations. More regulation makes organization more cumbersome,
inefficient and confused, but every time the system breaks down, there is a call for
more rules and regulation. As a further example, in a university known to us, the
bureaucracy surrounding student records was felt to be inefficient and burdensome.
Consultants were called in to sort out the mess. But, unable to cleanse the previous
regime, they advocated the creation of a new system of record-keeping to run
alongside the existing one, with a further set of procedures to follow. In this way,
increased rationalization merely produced more disorder. Bauman was fascinated
by this irrationality, which seems an inevitable part of rationality – the point where
more analysis and specification simply leads to more chaos and inefficiency. This
analysis, perhaps unsurprisingly, appeals strongly to many practitioners.

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Bauman questions the irrationality of rationality in an especially controversial

manner by analysing the holocaust. Bauman is Polish and Jewish, and as he explains
in the introduction to his book, Modernity and the Holocaust, the question of the
holocaust was especially emotional for him. Bauman argued that the holocaust
should not be seen as something that could only and uniquely have emerged in Nazi
Germany, but that it followed from the very nature of bureaucratic social order.
He implied that the concentration camps and the other crimes against humanity
were partly a logical result of the systematizing taxonomic procedures of modern
bureaucracy, and thus potentially could occur anywhere where highly developed
bureaucracy reigns. In post-War Europe this was, to say the least, a very controversial
assertion. It implied that the allies were potentially capable of producing a similar
sort of evil as the Third Reich.
Bauman asserted that personal relatedness is what can block violence. The other
as abstraction – as faceless unknown and unknowable, never seen or spoken to –
can be banished or ghettoized. But the person we see, we know and can relate to,
someone that we can look in the eye, that is a person that we find it difficult to
discriminate against, and to hate. Genocide operates against nonpersons and all
politics of genocide has to reduce its (future) victims to the status of nonperson. This
is what, according to Bauman, bureaucracy does: it reduces everyone it deals with
to nonpersonhood. Dehumanization works through procedures, rules and precedents
and, in so doing, destroys the foundation of an ethics based on respect and mutuality.
Thus, any society based on impersonal procedures and regulations risks losing its
ethical roots. For instance, the reduction of care for the elderly to minute-by-minute
protocols, where there is no room for conversation, reduces the old to objects subject
to a series of processes – cleaning, feeding and clothing. There is no space for, no
need for, co-production of respect or understanding. The rationalization of elderly
care reduces the elderly to objects stripped of their humanity. Bauman argues that
it is an ethical crime to destroy the other’s (and thereby one’s own) humanity. And
this crime has the potential to lead to much worse crimes of inattention, indifference
and brutality.
The Milgram electric shock experiment and Stanford prison guard simulation
back up Bauman’s contentions (Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo, 1971). In both cases,
when direct ‘gaze’ or one-to-the-other contact was lacking, ‘normal’ American
citizens were willing to perform sadistic harm to others if the rules or the authorities
in the situation pointed in that direction. Bureaucratized humanity has a very weak
sense of co-existence as shared humanness disappears very quickly in rule-bound
and impersonal society. For teachers and educational consultants, professionals
working in elderly and nursing care, and managers of social services, Bauman’s
assertions often provoke a shock of recognition, stimulating research and proposals
for innovation.
Through the years, Bauman’s thought has evolved from a bureaucracy-directed
critique of society, to an analysis of the postmodern world. But the basic ethical
stance has remained constant – without immediate co-relatedness, and without

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co-individuation as well as cooperation, humanity loses the ability for empathy and to
appreciate self and other. Bauman’s original fear, that society would be rationalized
into a totally impersonal and sterile regime of regimented ineffectiveness, has
shifted over the years. The loss of identity via the depersonalization of relationships
has remained, but the causality has changed. The problem is no longer the crushing
weight of bureaucratization and regulation, but more the lack of democratic or
shared governance. Hyper-capitalist consumer society fosters a culture of disorder,
wherein individuals grab what they can, and civil society is emptied of significance.
Sociability becomes fluid, shifting, uncertain, fragmented and indefinite. The only
thing people seem to have in common is consumerism; they all yearn to consume.
The problem is that the things that are purchased become the only commonality
between them, and that no shared social events further occur. The bonds of sociability
weaken so much that only disconnected isolation remains.
On the other hand, contingency and ambiguity offer opportunities for innovation
and self-determination. If the iron cage of bureaucracy really is no longer a danger,
then there is a renewed possibility for autonomy. Such an uncertain future poses
both threats and opportunities. If what is to come is not known, and cannot in
principle be known, then responsibility becomes much more relevant. In indefinite
circumstances, individual action has greater significance. What the person does can
be decisive. In a predestined or determined universe, individual responsibility is
minimal, since what will happen is going to happen, whatever the person does. But
in a complex and indeterminate universe, individual action can act like the ‘butterfly
effect’. The smallest of actions, such as a butterfly flapping its wings, can potentially
‘cause’ a major effect, like a storm half way around the globe. Responsibility thus is
more meaningful if determinacy is lessened. And this insight makes the practitioner
much more important. Instead of being a cog in a machine, the person is a ‘strange
attractor’ that can draw others and events into action.
Responsibility in a complex or fluid society becomes an individual form of
responsibility. Sociology traditionally, and certainly as influenced by Marx, looked
to the collective – be it class or group – to be effective. ‘We’ could change things
while the ‘I’ was just too insignificant. But in the contemporary fluid society, the
‘we’ may have been dissolved by consumerist individuality. Nonetheless, since
people supposedly can be responsible to one another, they can acknowledge their
gazes, share presence and undertake joint action. But this is a different logic to what
went before: this is ‘I’ + ‘I’ + ‘I’ without a ‘We’. Proximity may make recognition
and mutuality of relationship possible, and socio-cultural indeterminacy may make
relatedness potentially important, but the so-called postmodern society may be so
consumerist and diffuse that these possibilities cannot be exploited or developed.
From Levinas to Bauman, relationship creates meaning. But Levinas seems
assured about the possibilities of meaning in his ethics, while Bauman is sceptical
about meaning’s possibilities. The tension between these differing positions is
something practitioners seem to recognize and find deeply significant. Moments and
instances of relationship and action may be the only ‘truth’ we can know, share or

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mobilize. But most of us have not learned to describe or theorize lived relationship.
What is called ‘research’ seems far too often to turn away from relationship, instead
of embracing it. Abstractions and rationalizations seem to drive out the lived
perspective, leaving far too little room for practice. In the perspective of Levinas,
abstraction cannot know relationship – and ethics requires direct experience. Ethics
can only exist between concrete living and affective persons. Relationships will be
immediate and felt, or they will not be anything at all. Research will respect the
primacy of relationship or it will fail to reach normative or ethical professionalism.
Researching relationship from this perspective takes on enormous existential
significance. In direct rapport, ethics happens. Immediate, lived circumstances are
vital. Abstractions and generalizations miss the point; circumstances and immediacy
are where the action is. Everyday practice, thus, is theoretically charged with
significance. The drive for generalization, characteristic of traditional social science,
mirrors the bureaucratic past; the complex, diffuse and messy present requires
knowledge of immediacy, relationship and proximate events. And who is better able
to deliver such research, than practitioners who are very close to the other in the
lived quandaries of practice?
Of course, work is often organized to be as predictable and standardized as is
possible, denying the importance of individuality and co-creation, and it is, in this sense
unethical. Regimented healthcare, protocolized teaching and routinized counselling,
all try to forgo the particular. Pigeonholing reduces the other to bounded categories,
and turns practice into thoughtless routine. This is not just a problem in the working
world: sociology’s study has often produced categorization and taxonomies of gender,
class and race. Bureaucratic structure has not suddenly disappeared. People are, to use
Bauman’s term, ‘de-humanized’ or socialized to identify with categories rather than
to experience their circumstantial particularity. Such socialization fixes the person in a
social ‘We’ that abrogates the possibility of direct responsibility, denying the potential
significance of immediate action. People learn to repudiate their own personhood
as a characteristic of their identity. Although self-destructive identity formation is
commonplace, Bauman asserts that its polar opposite is also common, albeit equally
destructive. In what Bauman calls ‘sociality’, the self becomes lost in the ‘flow’.
Existence is claimed to be sublime, affective and Dionysian, and any semblance of
personhood is washed away by the exaltation of sensation and belief. There is little or
no specific responsibility, just heteronomy and the sway of feeling. In sociability, the
person is lost in the ‘crowd’, surfing a sea of emotion and collective power. In both
socialization and sociability, there is little or no space for individual relationships, or
for a thorough-going responsibility, since the relationship of the one to the other in the
gaze has been lost. In both rule-bound bureaucracy and in celebratory ecstasy, the self
is lost. This means that Bauman’s championing of the humanist self requires careful
unpacking. Is it well-considered theory or does it merely entail facile confirmation of,
for instance, an individualist prejudice?
After focusing on Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy, Bauman has turned to
Durkheim’s principle of the social causation of ethics and responsibility (1957).

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For Durkheim, social cohesion, order, and structure are the bases of ethics. The
shared common goals and principles of ethics depend on sustainable social cohesion.
Bauman has asserted that only if people can encounter one another in dyads can
the acknowledgment and the co-creation needed for an ethics of responsibility take
place. There has to be response for there to be response-ability; and direct, one-
on-one relationships are the key social building block. Thus, for Bauman, neither
Weber’s bureaucracy, nor Durkheim’s social cohesion, work as a first cause. Bauman,
like Levinas, puts ethics first, before social structure, as his primary concern.
Bauman defines a social studies of immediacy and responsibility that is inspiring for
practitioners. For us, the question remains if this position is not too self-confirmatory
for practitioner researchers. On the one hand, the importance of their activity is
confirmed, but on the other, doubts about relevance, social roles and self-interest
are papered-over. Relatedness thinking touches upon the crux to practitioner identity
and activity, but it needs to be critically questioned and analysed. We will reopen this
discussion in Chapter 6 when we examine ‘critical communitarianism’ but first we
want to pursue the implications for research methods of what has been said.

RESEARCH METHODS

Social science research typically isolates issues of epistemology in a so-called

“Methodology” chapter. In that chapter authors explain why they choose
(participant-) observation, interviewing, or (auto-)ethnography, or most likely, some
combination of them. We suggest that ‘methodology’ is isolated so that it will not
contaminate the authority of the authorial ‘I’ in the rest of the text. Methodology
discusses how research is done, and how data is analysed and understood. It is
admittedly problematic. But at most universities, PhD candidates who openly doubt
and question how they did the research are in for a hard time. Producing the illusion
of researcher self-assurance is one of the hidden demands for getting the degree.
Persistent self-doubt destabilizes the illusions of research realism and, in most
social science faculties, realism has to be maintained. Doubting, deconstructing or
destabilizing realism is not looked upon kindly. If the thesis has to present the world
‘as it is’, and say something about it, data has to be reliable, interpretations valid, and
conclusions generalizable. An authorial ‘I’ that admits that: “I speculate …,” “I guess
it could be …,” “One could fantasize …,” is not likely to be on its way to getting
the degree. One does not call attention to the text as “fabrication” or as a product of
framing and assemblage; nor say something that is readily recognizable and artificial
and to-be-doubted. Conventionally, the authorial ‘I’ has to be thoroughly realist and
utterly certain.
Thus, methodology forms the aporia of the thesis. It is the place where there
is an admission of falseness. The realist truths presented in the main text actually
are ‘textual fabrications’ or cleverly constructed written materials, which seem
to simulate ‘reality’, but actually are just so much writing. The semiotic trick of
feigning realism, while at the same time explaining how the trick was done, is a skill

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required of the ethnographic PhD candidate. But how the candidate learns to carry
this off is not normally stated in the thesis. How the student became a successful
writer of a thesis is normally well hidden. How the ‘trick’ is mastered remains a
secret.
The reality-effects that the researcher produces are probably the most important
result of the writing. A thesis produces a claim and/or a perspective and this is a
reality-effect. The researcher has to take responsibility for how that effect is produced
and what it asserts, forgets, suppresses and emphasizes. The student assembles
observations, texts and theoretical materials in order to produce the ‘reality-effect’.
Methodology has to do with how the researcher assembles observations, descriptions,
theories, quotes, other texts in order to produce the thesis.
The ethically and democratically open text, we assert, lets the reader join in with
the constitutive process, enabling us to see what has been observed and understood.
The reader can be informed as to how the reality-effects of the text have been
produced. Ever since Gibbons et al. published The New Production of Knowledge in
1994, the comparison between Mode 1 and Mode 2 Methodology has been amongst
us. These two modes describe two different strategies of creating research reality
effects. The idea that these two modes are insufficient, and that a third mode is
needed, has been propagated by one of the authors of this book (Letiche et al.,
2008), as well as by Ronald Barnett (Barnett & Di Napoli, 2008; Barnett 2000,
20011a, 2011b); while Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education (1999) provides
similar conclusions. The Gibbons et al. book asserts that contemporary research
in the social sciences is informed by two contrasting methodologies or logics of
knowledge production. Mode 1 amounts to ‘normal science’ wherein the ‘world out
there’ is claimed to be ‘objectively’ studied in accordance with established scientific
theories and methods. Mode 1 operates along the lines of Newtonian science and in
the tradition of Cartesian doubt.
Stephen Toulmin (1990) has asserted in Cosmopolis that (Mode 1) is scientific
modernism. It defines science in terms of method, certainty and universality, in
order to suppress philosophical and religious controversy. This works by putting
metaphysics out-of-bounds, replacing centuries of conflict over religious warfare,
inter-group intolerance and ideological violence, with universal order and social-
economic progress. By cutting itself off from traditional religious normativity,
scientific modernism tried to avoid past disputes, but it also created a major
problem for itself. Science had to create an ethics of investigation from within
itself. Normativity underpinning the scientific endeavour was needed to ground its
practices and values somewhere, for science had to stand alone without God-given
certainties. Could such a science arouse scholarly enthusiasm, or would it merely
degenerate into so many instruments of manipulation and control?
As long as science was recognised as delivering economic prosperity and
political freedom, it remained legitimate and popular; but if it indeed is losing, or
has lost, these metanarratives, then what? Trying to make behaviour predictable and/
or controllable can seem authoritarian and anti-democratic, and the link between

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science and progress can become fragile, endangering the whole enterprise. After
all, science requires substantial funding to exist, since experimentation is expensive
in human and material resources. The modernist pursuit of knowledge, focusing for
instance on physics’ or chemistry’s objects of examination, can seem reductionist and
repressive, and controversial. If pollution attracts more attention than production, if
climate change seems more urgent than cheap energy, if social conformity is more
stifling than organization is rewarding, then the pursuit of Mode 1 knowledge, as we
have known it, may come to be threatened.
Mode 1 defines the objects of knowledge in terms of ‘a world out there’, separate
from subjects or ‘knowers’ of those objects. It presents an unambiguous distance
between researcher and researched. Science’s access to the referent is supposedly
unproblematic with the scientific subject or researcher presumed to be able to
know, and to be in a position of authority. But this position is debatable: the ‘turn
to language’ in critical thought has asserted that if we can only signify in symbol
systems, which we cannot really command or control, then scientific mastery is
illusionary. If ‘atoms’ are not understandable as things, but need to be comprehended
as relationships, metaphors, ideas and trends, then science is in the ambiguous
position of at once assuming, and not assuming, clarity and comprehension.
A postmodern and post-structuralist epistemological critique of Mode 1 has
come from the minoritized and ephemeral edges of the humanities, social studies
and science and technology studies. The reigning order of knowledge ignores the
function of the signifier and pretends direct access to the signified. The role of
interpretation in investigation and analysis was repressed, but the indeterminacy of
wave or particle, or of the fate of Schrödinger’s cat, has undermined the illusion of
an unambiguous or certain scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, Mode 1 science is
presumed to possess the power of insight, granting it superiority and privilege.
It is professional practice that we are most interested in, and key here is the notion
that the opposition between the one who knows, and the one who does not, can
supposedly be unambiguously scientifically defined. Within Mode 1, knowledge of
meaning is demarcated from non-mastery of knowing, and the one who knows, or
can know, is defined as the scientist. Science authorizes the truth of its research and
it produces incontestable results; thus its truth(s) supposedly speak for themselves.
Mastery is transferred from the signified or the contents of science, via the signifier
or what is said and written, to the researcher or scientist. The scientific researcher
is directly identified with the real although, according to critical thought, this is
inherently impossible.
Critical thought asserts that there can be no direct human apprehension of the
real, but only symbolic, mediated, and reflexive activities of research, accompanied
by understanding and ultimately leading to writing. Science supposedly entails a
whole series of relationships – between objects and language, representations and
understanding, scientists and paradigms – and there is never one ‘real’, but always
a whole chain of ‘reals’. In research, there are many different kinds of interactions,
placed in relation to an ongoing series of enigmas and conundrums. But rather than

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pay attention to this, the effects of science, as Latour stresses (1986, 1988, 1999,
2007), are often substituted for the activities of science.
The scientific subject who is presumed to know is the locus of power, resulting in
an imaginary idealized self. In Mode 1 science, a totalizing image of prediction and
control, supersedes the bits and pieces and chaos of phenomenal existence. In the
researcher, an imaginary proto-self is organized and unified. Science is an abstraction
that is too powerful, with basic concepts that are clearer and better grounded than
is humanly possible. Its assumptions are more constitutive than constituted. Mode
1 leads to an ideational all-knowing, powerful self, with little space for the living
subject lodged in-between the subject that knows and the subject that does not.
Mode 1 science assumes an imaginary autonomous knowing self, which objectifies
the subject, meaning that a complex and interactive phenomenal subject is replaced
by an imaginary researcher, which claims to objectively know the real.
The authority and hubris of the scientific subject is the basis of our critique of
Mode 1. But Gibbons et al. have very little to say about the pro’s and con’s of Mode
1; their book is much more a manifesto for Mode 2.
A summary of the two Modes from a review article:

Mode 1 Mode 2
Academic context Context of application
Disciplinary Transdisciplinary
Homogeneity Heterogeneity
Autonomy Reflexivity/social accountability
Traditional quality Novel quality control
control (peer review)
Attributes of Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge production
L.K. Hessels & H. van Lente (2008) Research Policy vol 37, no 4, p 741

Mode 2 knowledge, is thus: (i) produced in the context of application; for instance, the
psychologist who works in and reflects on therapy; the organizational theorist who
engages in concrete problems of organizations and their solutions; the pedagogue
who is directly involved in (child, student, adult) learning and its improvement.
Knowledge is constructed in interaction, close to practice and in real-time. This
knowledge is: (ii) transdisciplinary; for instance, psychologists need to take social
circumstances, work and medical issues, social-economic factors and (shifting)
norms and values all into account when studying a clinical issue. A study of sexual
abuse in child-care will demand different assumptions, skills and research team(s),
than will research into professional motivation amongst medical doctors. The ideas
and expectations applied to research are: (iii) heterogeneous and bring organizational
diversity in the research team. Expertise in popular and/or youth culture, computer
gaming or drug and alcohol abuse, could be crucial (or irrelevant), similarly the use

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of thick description and ethnographic expertise could be vital or irrelevant. Because

the research is so circumstantial – as in ‘bound by circumstances’ – the researchers
are faced with: (iv) enhanced social accountability. This means doing justice to
the researched and their specific problems. This school, these pupils, parents and
teachers, are at issue rather than some vague generalization of ‘education’, and it is
their well-being that is at stake. Because of the complexity of the stakeholders and
the interests involved: (v) quality control has to be broadly based and not restricted
to the researchers and their colleagues.
Mode 2 knowledge is grounded in mutual understanding and dialogue, with its
principles subject-centred. People can, in the research relationship, define their own
needs by identifying problems and solutions. It is assumed that self-understanding
can, and will, prevail over crises and dilemmas. If the participants lose faith in
subject-centred reason’s ability to be responsive and fair, and become convinced
that self-interest and greed rule, then a radical critique of research will result.
Will the researched really be willing to let their assumptions, practices and beliefs
be questioned? From Nietzsche (1966) comes the doubt that the multitude will let
itself be challenged and will neither want to meet changing circumstances head-
on, nor will embrace chaos and indeterminacy. False certainty, mindless repetition
of routine, and crass scape-goating may come to characterize subject-centred (un-)
reason.
From Lyotard (1984, 1988, 1989, 1992) comes the fear that science will become
the terror of performativity. Optimal input/output relationships, focusing on
efficiency and producing the most goods and services at the lowest possible price,
may accompany the growth of a sterile and repressive society. Science costs money;
political will is necessary to finance, protect and see it utilized. But the science that
politics wants and industry demands may not be the science that furthers humanity.
The logic of corporate and political leadership is not necessarily consistent with
benefiting the greatest number of people. Lyotard wanted to keep science and
(economic and political) power separate. He called them different ‘language games’,
asserting that they were incommensurable. What Lyotard feared was the hegemony
of performativity, and we may suggest that this has indeed occurred. The ‘knowledge
economy’ values science and research in terms of productivity and brute domestic
product – knowledge for its own sake or for its emancipatory possibilities has largely
been reduced to being seen as naive utopianism. Capitalism has reinvented itself as
the only metanarrative in town; the pragmatics of economic growth, shareholder
value, and material competition dominate. The ‘terrorism’ of performativity, or
existence defined in terms of production and profit, dominates.
Mode 1 claims to study a ‘world out there’, often leaving questions about what
‘is in here’ unaddressed. For instance, the British economist Joan Robinson in her
1976 visit to Holland, reminisced about her prior visit in the 1930’s. Then she had
debated with Dutch economists who claimed that an economy will always achieve
optimal equilibrium without government intervention. Mass unemployment and
social suffering were all around, but the belief was unshakeable. Science and

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politics are inseparable and scientists’ convictions can display little understanding.
Mode 2 confidence that a researcher/researched dialogue will produce fairness and
justice is just as deeply problematic. Questioning integrity and honesty in practice
is rarely valued or even accepted. Does the teacher know what virtue is; can the
officials explain their sense of integrity; is the judge capable of defining honesty?
Such Socratic questioning demands public discourse about convictions, conducted
with reflexive understanding. But Mode 2 research seems more focused on public
agreement between researchers and researched, than on public self-examination
and justification of beliefs. Mode 2 can degenerate into professional populism
wherein teachers are ‘pro-child’, experts ‘respect their clients’, and managers
champion ‘opportunities for all’. Ultimately, unanchored, such glib statements
mean little.
Justification of research and knowing is not, in itself, necessarily trustworthy or
even honest. Mode 1 is mainly a discourse about the natural world, and Mode 2 is a
discourse mostly about the social world. The danger is that a sharp ontological division
will be attempted between nature and culture. After all, knowledge of ‘nature’ is and
remains human knowledge; atoms are not things but constructs with relationships
and functions. Physicists let/make particles appear via complex manmade machinery
such as particle accelerators. But culture as pure social construction is equally
partial – social existence entails more than signifying processes since there is a
materiality to work and everyday sustenance. We are neither a bit of nature, nor a
construction of culture; we are a multitude of hybrid functions and relationships.
The metanarrative of Mode 1 reifies human relatedness, reducing knowledge to
thingness, where science is the source of its own understanding. The metanarrative
of Mode 2 threatens us with an uncritical normativity, wherein a subject-centred self
is the source of its own ethics.
We suggest that a Mode 3 knowledge is needed: one that is intended to explore
a human engagement with the world that is not governed alone by the self.
Circumstances are more complex than either the individual or scientific laws can
deal with. We are and we are confronted by open-ended systems of provisional
relationships. Nonlinear, irregular complexities of experience are commonplace
but their descriptors are deeply problematic. We can assert that understanding is
circumstantial, personal and fleeting; but our sentences are linear, rational and
reifying. The quandary is then how to provide de-reifying, intertwining, involving
and living descriptors? The phenomenological abandonment of universals, in favour
of narratives and immediacy, does its best. Laws or truths abstracted from complexes
of circumstances, leave the living, dynamic and purposive, behind them. Existence
is not a billiard ball that once struck follows a predictable course, but resembles our
current understanding of the weather, where there are structures and regularities,
but also indeterminacies and surprises. Mode 2 is too focused on agreement and
social epistemology; it is too little aware of its own contingency and the dangers of
situated subject-centred agreement. Shared awareness can be subjugating; group-
think, collective delusion and herd behaviour all endanger its results.

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The ambition of Mode 1 can be thought of as to produce ‘subject-less knowledge’

or knowledge independent of the subject’s (in-)ability to know itself. Without this
seemingly paradoxical idea of ‘subjectless-ness’, knowing is susceptible to infinite
regress. How do you explain, the knower’s ability to know? The possibility of
knowing depends on the subject’s ability to know; and knowing that one knows
depends on the subject’s ability to know. Understanding of consciousness, or of how
we know that we know, bedevils science’s assumption of pure knowledge of objects
or content – who or what in effect knows, and how does it know that it knows? One
can assume universal or absolute content, making the knowing subject irrelevant;
which in effect produces ‘subjectless knowledge’. But actual experiencing or the
‘empirie’ of events, data and knowing, is then repressed. Scientific knowledge
posited with no mediation at all, that is with no knowing subject between world
and thought, is in effect transcendental. Knowledge, it is claimed, goes beyond
the ‘self’. Scientific laws and theories are supposedly the product of the (research
or scientific) methodology, which produces certitude and achieves universality.
Science, or subject-less knowledge, is systemized and ‘empirie’ is summarized in
(universal) laws and rules. This is the world of the billiard ball, whose path once
struck is determined. An assertion of methodological certainty is employed to justify
an overblown claim of objectivity, inherent to Mode 1’s paradigm of ‘knowledge of
objects’ and of ‘non-subject-centred rationality’.
Mode 1 implies the division of knowledge into scientific realism versus social
constructionism. Do we research a pre-existing world or do we produce the world
we study via theories and categories? What is the role of the cognitive and cultural
practices of science on what is discovered? Has scientific thinking desacrelized
nature, destroyed mankind’s awareness of change, and/or reduced mindfulness to
the mere observation of regularity? Does modernist science obliterate emotion,
spirituality and subjectivity? The study of the production of scientific knowledge
has dealt with everything from alienation and rationalization, to the production
and uses of power. It has been claimed that the social and ideological biases
of science produce social engineering, cultural regimentation and the anti-
democratic privileging of a technocratic elite. Science often legitimates itself via
a metadiscourse of truth, expertise and progress, while counterclaims protest that
science produces literal meanings of pure denotation, whose validity and reliability
are made unquestionable. Debate and uncertainty supposedly belong to subjective
experience, while science contains objective truth grounded on stable laws. Science’s
denotative language supposedly reveals the true state of affairs; while literary or
poetic narrative is always partial and situationally bound. But we would suggest
that neither humanist intellectuals nor experimental scientists can legitimately lay
claim to the whole truth. Experience and its accounts are at all times provisional;
understanding is always engaged. Scientists try to create beautiful, parsimonious
theories, thus creativity and innovativeness are necessary in all original thought.
Realist/constructivist dualism does a disservice to the creative process, whether
scientific or artistic.

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Mode 2 rejects the myth of subject-less knowing and replaces it with a paradigm
of shared, functional understanding. This produces a knowing that is more like
forecasting the weather than like predicting the trajectory of billiard balls. Laws
of physics do, obviously, apply to the weather; but the system is too complex to be
reliably reduced to simple predictions. What ‘knowing’ is possible, is approximate,
time-bound and motivated by human interests, leading to questions such as ‘Will
it rain?’ The ‘knowing’ is produced by a specialized group of professionals whose
‘judgment’ is (more or less) trusted. Specialists, in this case meteorologists, are
expected to produce ‘weather reports’. But their results are not thought of as true,
instead they are readily acknowledged to be approximate. Not ‘truth’ but ‘informed
judgment’ is produced. The meteorologists’ professional activity is identified with
a particular group and the knowing is not democratic, but restricted. The group
can change and can be restructured to meet changed conditions, but it remains
circumscribed. The truth claims, however partial and incomplete, are buttressed via
professional practices, such as the establishment of weather analysis as a career, and
the possession of specific knowledge and tools of understanding. Mode 2 research
does not produce certain knowledge of an independent objective reality, but informed
knowledge of probability and of a likely path of occurrence. This knowing is almost
always functional, directed to problem solving and issue resolution. Professionals
study health and illness, teaching and learning, architecture and urban planning,
managing and the economy, etcetera.
Lyotard, in La Condition Postmoderne (1979), has powerfully attacked the
presuppositions to Mode 2 knowing. As Foucault (1970) had already pointed out,
professional disciplines offer an orderly way of examining matters at hand, but
the professionals and their clients are all closely controlled. Disciplines discipline
anything, from professionals to organizations, clients and society at-large, while
functional knowing implements instrumental reasoning. Ideally, following this
system of reasoning, problem solution follows study and the specification of input,
throughput and output, leading to optimal actions. Problems are broken down into
their smallest parts and the organization and manipulation of these is then tweaked
to achieve desired results. Lyotard pointed out that functional analysis tends to
blindly pursue efficiency or the optimization of input/output ratios, which he
termed performativity. Professionals have maximized the growth and power of the
consumer society by developing innovative advertising, implementing complex pay-
schemes that deliver further incentives to maximise output, and increasing available
consumer credit, while managerial and IT professionals have given added impetus
to globalization. But there has been little consideration as to whether any of this
was wise or worthwhile. Lyotard argues that performativity eliminates social ideals:
there is no metanarrative left of progress, justice, fairness or welfare-for-all. Mode
2 becomes a narrative of pure power: the development of professional efficiency
for its own sake. In the so-called knowledge society, research funding is there at
the service of economic growth, leading to ever closer links between science and
profit, culminating in the belief that research with economic promise is worthwhile

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while the rest is not. This places a heightened importance on the economic politics
of research.
Lyotard (1984, 1988, 1989, 1992) called for a strict division between politics
and research, arguing that the ‘differend’ (or the incommensurable nature of the
two) made them into incompatible bedfellows. The logic or discourse of politics,
or of representative democracy and its uses of power; and of research, or the
activities of description and understanding; Lyotard suggested are totally different.
The two epistemes or logics cannot speak to one another; they belong to entirely
different registers or universes of discourse. Researchers pursue hunches, engage
in experiential exploration, and attend to unexplained phenomena; while politicians
represent populations’ self-interest, and attempt to regulate economic and social risk.
The concerns, awareness and assumptions are different. If researchers just do what
politicians want, they stop exploring the implausible, become narrowly utilitarian,
and destroy the freedom of speculation. Lyotard feared the effects of the subjugation
of research to the performativity of politics, characterized by ‘research assessments’,
the ‘audit culture’ and ‘experience-based’ practice.
But instead of following Lyotard by looking for opposition to a repressive
performative ideology by splitting research and politics, one can do exactly the
opposite, and argue that research is inherently a political process. Dividing the two is
artificial; it produces false ontological dualism(s); and falsifies how research is done.
Science produces complex threads of activities, actions and materials. For instance,
the study and production of antibiotics entails materials, laboratories, reputations,
observations, big money, government regulations, and much more. Science strings
these elements of substance and politics, people and their interests, institutions and
power, together. Science has always been about coalitions of dominant paradigms
and assumptions, where power and control play a big part. The actor-network theory
(ANT) approach to the study of science highlights this, by focusing on the sociology
of knowledge and on how ideas are produced, shared, sold and fought over (Latour,
1987). In Mode 2, there is nothing that inherently determines how relationships
between research and economic and political power will be valued. Our fear is that
Mode 2 practitioner research will become narrow and utilitarian, with economic
performativity dominating over all else. There does not seem to be anything inherent
within Mode 2 that will keep research on the path of the good life, with consideration
of fairness, justice or ethics.
Mode 3 prioritizes the normative self-awareness of relationship, which is
needed to achieve respectful, just and ethical investigation. Mode 1 or 2 research,
by comparison, makes use of ethics. In Mode 1, there is an ethical commitment
to respecting rationality and objectivity. Mode 2 is linked to professional ethics;
for instance, to medical integrity or pedagogical concerns. But ethics is in Mode
1 a handmaiden to science and in Mode 2 it is subservient to professional goals.
Mode 1 primarily has epistemological ambitions directed to achieving reliable data
collection and verifiable demonstrable laws. Mode 2 has utilitarian aims of reaching
informed consensus and dependable professional action. There is an ethics of Mode

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1 scientific research, centring on accuracy, providing truthful accounts, and letting

others control one’s work. And there is an ethics of Mode 2 professionalism, focused
on respect for participants and professional integrity. But in both cases, the primary
focus is not on ethics per se; the ethics has to do with the quality and integrity needed
to achieve the primary goal. By contrast, in Mode 3 ethics is the leading factor.
In the Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967), Paul Watzlawick and his
co-authors assert that one cannot not communicate. A close corollary is that one
cannot not relate to others. Mode 1 research is based on the opposite assumption.
Objectivity, with the researcher standing outside of relatedness, is the principle
methodological goal of Mode 1. One can argue that relatedness in physical science
research takes a form of disinterested ‘objectivity’ in that research objects are
mathematized, rationalized and ‘dehumanized’. And one could argue that this is
an intellectually and even socially wise move. But it is essentially proposed as an
epistemological ‘move’ or strategy, and not as an ethics of relatedness. Our interest
here is less in epistemology or ways of knowing, than in the ontology or the nature of
‘being’. If all human ‘being’ is about relatedness, then there can be no ‘truth’ outside
of process and society.
This assertion poses certain problems for ‘critical thought’. For instance, much
Marxism tried to place itself outside of capitalist society as a critique of political-
economy and of capitalism. But if relatedness is inescapable, then ontologically
there is no such outside. All researchers stand linked to their others and to the society
and culture within which they live. These links can vary and might be oppositional,
but they cannot be broken without dying. This assertion complexifies the task of
‘critical’ thought. For instance, if there is no position outside of the society being
studied, from what position can so-called social critique really come?
Foucault, early on in his career, thought that he could, in his study of discipline
and power, voice critique from the outside. But Derrida called him to order, pointing
out that his studies were always radically related to the subjects researched and
the societies analysed (Young, 1990). Foucault’s texts were not outside critical
social studies and radical social philosophy, but examples of them. The issues,
illustrations and ideas were all developed in relatedness to others, whether thinkers
and scholars, or prisoners and mental sufferers. Likewise, all ‘relevant’ scholarship
exists in relationship to the societies, politics and traditions criticized, and which the
researchers attempt to (re-)form.
If Mode 1 has too much distance to Other; Mode 2 does not have enough. In Mode 2,
the effects of the assumptions, attitudes and goals of the profession studied are
underestimated. Researchers act in relation to their informants and colleagues; they
know that they know, and they know that their informants know that they know. In
Mode 2, the effects of this double interact (speaker addresses other; other responds;
speaker knows that other has responded) are insufficiently examined. Researchers
are in relationship to one another, and to the researched. The researchers anticipate
this relatedness, and often are out to produce what their public (whether the research
director, the grant giving institution, some political force, or their intellectual

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‘father’) wants from them. The inevitability of this being-in-relationship to others

threatens the research process.
Our answer is to acknowledge that threat and to make it as explicit as one can.
This is exactly what Derrida tried to do. Relatedness is ontologically inescapable;
thus one’s ethics of relationship is crucial to what sort of research one can do.
And this perspective is what we call ‘Mode 3’. Mode 3 assumes that ethics is not
a metanarrative, or simply a quality of action, but that it is the originatory base
to action. Only if committed to trying to know the other, can social studies be
justified.
Of course, we cannot enter into the other’s consciousness; knowledge of the other
is always partial and approximate. But if a fundamental commitment to be open to
the other is not made, it means that there is no opportunity to do justice to Other.
The other must not be appropriated, possessed or reified, if the goal is to achieve
relationally just knowledge. Making the other predictable, by disciplining the other
in one’s own pattern(s), reduces the other to a model in one’s head. This is by no
means the same as trying to actually know the other. Knowing requires empathy,
openness, attention and the ability to appreciate. These qualities demand an ethics of
authenticity and care, making understanding possible. This ethics assumes that self
and other can engage in a process of unfolding relatedness, and that connectedness
is a path to the human good. The constitutive function of self-open-to-other produces
the possibility of an ethically legitimate text. Mode 3 research tries to be loyal to
relatedness and thus it is characterized by narratives of self-reflexive awareness,
of careful and caring observation, and by ideation developed by researcher and
researched using each other’s terms. Its opposition to performativity is central to its
politics; it is always engaged.
Mode 3 has been developed in terms of polyphony, carnival and heteroglosia
(Bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1986, 1990). These concepts of narrative relatedness certainly
have (potential) truth-value, but not every verbal engagement is dialogue, nor is
every form of difference respectful and genuinely open to other. But we can talk
about multi-voiced occurrence, relatedness that bursts the boundaries of hierarchy
and convention, and complex texts with various layers of meaning. Even so,
narrative relatedness with researchers aware of their own roles, and awareness of
the action of the ‘double interact’, can lead to misunderstandings or be a tool of
exploitation and lead to the one terrorizing the other. Multi-voiced occurrence is not
always respectful or virtuous, and it is important to acknowledge that discourses
of disrespect, aggression and repressive assertions of power are part and parcel of
Mode 3. Mode 3 therefore comes with both the ethical and the unethical; it can
be positive or negative. The ethical Mode 3 has its unethical nemesis, and there is
everything in between.
Mode 3, put positively, claims that normative professionalism (research
undertaken in respect, with care and in co-being) is vital for applied social studies.
Research that attacks, or even destroys the social, becomes an oxymoronic of ‘social
studies’. Social studies have to be performatively social to do their work, and the

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ethical defence of the social is inherent to the study of the social. We, in effect, repeat
here the Socratic demand: anyone who studies the social has to know what the social
is. Knowing the social entails permitting the social to express itself, and being able
to inquire into its potential possibilities, and a willingness to make its various forms
manifest.
Calls for Mode 3 research are not common, but Ronald Barnett has made
them. Barnett was a Professor of Education at the University of London, with the
‘philosophy of higher education’ as the focus of his work. We have written a book
based on specific PhD supervision and our direct experience of Other, he wrote
more in general about the university and its identity. Our view has been bottom
up, based on our experience, and from there we have travelled to the nature and
mission of the university; Our approach throughout this book has been iterative and,
at least partially incremental. The reason why we come to ethics after discussing
the university, despite arguing that ethical discussion is the lynchpin of research, is
that we contend that it is impossible to comprehend ethics in PhD research practice
without understanding the university that frames the PhD. Barnett’s perspective
has been top-down, presenting us (2000a, 2000b, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2012)
with a typology of the university from the Middle Ages to the future. His sources
are often, but not always, similar to ours, in that he responds to Readings, Derrida,
Lyotard and Deleuze, but he also turns to Heidegger, Taylor, MacIntyre and Bhaskar.
Barnett appeals often to complexity thinking as a key source to his description of
contemporary thought and epistemology, although Letiche (2012) argues that Barnett
has the relationship between complexity and postmodernism wrong.
Following Paul Cilliers (1998) analysis of the parallels between complexity theory
and deconstruction, Letiche asserts that complex knowledge is emergent, temporarily
coherent, and contingent on socially constructed agreement. Complexity makes
an untenable appeal to a permanent ‘Truth’ outside of the processes of knowing.
Complexity focuses attention on the multifaceted relational qualities of knowing. No
knowledge is outside of relatedness, or of subject/object, consciousness/materialism,
self/other interaction. Epistemology and its epistemes are historically grounded
in consciousness, and are products of affordances, no matter how strong models,
paradigms or homologies may be (Letiche & Lissack, 2012).
Barnett writes about supercomplexity, but he tends to see it as a quality of institutions
and societies, as if complexity did not profoundly influence the epistemological
possibilities of the researcher. Examining complexity from the outside, as if it is an
object, misses the point. Complexity is a quality of existence wherein self and other,
and society and psyche, are mutually defined. Complex knowledge is emergent,
dynamic and relational, or characterized by what Derrida called ‘deconstruction’.
Knowing occurs in networks of social and physical relatedness. Texts always exist
in relationship to other texts, and social identities always are in relationship to other
social identities.
Barnett argues that the ‘social imaginaire’ (though he does not refer to
Castioradis’ (1998) who wrote extensively about this concept) entails a crucial

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connection between self and other, and particularly, university and identity. For
Barnett, universities are actors with agency; he talks about what universities do
and represent. Whether this reification is really so handy, seems debatable to us.
From our perspective, and as we have argued in the previous chapter, PhDs indeed
are written ‘in’ universities and how universities are perceived as social actors
is important. But we believe that their agency is limited. Even if universities are
fostering ‘state sponsored entrepreneurship’, as Sheila Slaughter et al. (1997, 2009)
maintain, there are still spaces of flight and rebellion. Research has in many places
been redefined as a developmental laboratory for innovative capitalist activity. PhDs
are being made into accounts of incubator success, knowledge has been equated with
successful market ventures, and the thesis is sometimes replaced by the start-up.
Graduate school has, in some instances, become an apprenticeship in marketization,
with the university acting as a ‘business angel’ investing in new ventures. Such an
entrepreneurial university is indeed very different from the work we have done or
the context we know. We must not underestimate how far experience-based action
has replaced reflexive critical thought, or competencies are defined irrespective of
students’ personal interests or needs, nor how far these changes may yet travel.
Barnett sees the university as having moved through three phases: (i) the
metaphysical university, (ii) the research university, and (iii) the entrepreneurial
university. The metaphysical university connected the immediate with the
transcendent. Students went ‘up to university’, suggesting that they were transcending
everyday consciousness, achieving higher spiritual awareness. The university
supposedly offered a path from the mundane to the sacred. The scholar came to
know many things to which the rest of the populace had no access. Reading and
writing, book knowledge and theoretical awareness, were exceptional. Those who
had studied indeed rose to a higher plane. But as literacy and knowledge became
more widespread, the extreme elite status of the university diminished.
The next phase – the research university – was a bourgeois creation. While the
metaphysical university linked humanity to God and the universal, the research
university was intended to link the educated classes to the state. The universality of
the university was originally spiritual and religious and the metaphysical university
still has skeletal remnants today, mainly in some religious seminaries and in the
so-called ‘therapeutic university’ where faculty and students pursue well-being and
human flourishing. Universities can still have the spiritual quality of existence as
their goal, though such institutions are now exceptional and marginal.
The research university was framed around the knowledge and skills needed to
develop the rational bureaucratic state and to support industrialization. In the 19th
century, modern organizations started to take off. Innovative forms of production,
leading to mass prosperity, came into being as did the risks of aggravated forms of
economic crisis. A new understanding of economics, production and government,
was needed. Technological advance required engineers and scientists. Modern states
needed rational governance and rule-bound administration. The society needed more
lawyers, doctors, social workers, policy workers, managers and engineers than in

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the past. Professions had to be established and professionals had to be trained. The
university had an enormous task to perform, delivering immediate welfare rather than
the possibility of reward from God. The successful modern society, industrialized
and well-administered, replaced metaphysical concerns as the key focus. The
university, in effect, now worshipped the state, as humanity became administered in
terms of social-economic goals. As we have discussed in Chapter 3, The Humboldt
model of the university is the paradigm of the university dedicated to the well-being
of the state. And the post-Sputnik American research university is a contemporary
second-phase example.
The entrepreneurial university of the third phase is global capitalism’s
development facility. Its goal is to produce innovative products and services, which
will support on-going economic development, and to underpin the social wealth
of society. While the metaphysical university had a transcendent focus, and the
research university was directed to trans-individual social goals, the entrepreneurial
university is utterly mundane. Impact, accountability and revenue are its terms of
reference. This university is more involved in wealth creation than ever before, and
personal rewards for success are unmatched. Efficient and effective wealth creation,
optimal capitalization and profit-taking are the new first principles. For those like
Readings, who are nostalgic for universities that were set to serve God or the state,
it is a dreary and desolate landscape.
Barnett sees so-called Mode 2 research, as one of the primary ideological vehicles
of the entrepreneurial university:
… the form of knowledge production itself begins to change. If the research
university was characterized by Mode 1 knowledge – formal, propositional,
disciplinary, universal and public – now the entrepreneurial university is
characterized by Mode 2 knowledge – in situ, ephemeral, multidisciplinary
(and even transdiscplinary), and problem-oriented. Certainly it was part of
the thesis of Michael Gibbons and his colleague authors (1994) that Mode 2
knowledge has grown up outside the academy. But it is part of the being of the
entrepreneurial university both that it seizes the main chance and engages with
its potential customers; and so is drawn naturally into the knowledge world of
Mode 2. (Barnett, 2011: 444)
Barnett tried to provide an alternative to the entrepreneurial university with his
initial efforts to oppose the march of mundanity. The appeal, based on Heidegger,
was to being-in (dasein, though he never seems to use the term), as a principle of
involvement. Individual engagement supposedly is inherent in all activity. If the
actants know themselves, they realize that their ‘being’ as becoming consciousness,
involvement and awareness, is necessary. The epistemological necessity of the
knowing subject makes a purely technocratic concept of knowledge production
and distribution illusionary. Persons in specific circumstances create knowing via
their engagement with the world. Knowledge is never an economic automaton, but

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always a human endeavour. Focusing on the human quality of knowing ought to

make purpose, intent and existential awareness into necessarily acknowledged facets
of learning. But no matter how often Barnett repeats the Heideggerian analysis of the
crucial role of human ‘being’, the entrepreneurial drive to put the subject outside of
knowing and to understand knowledge purely in economic terms, marches on.
Furthermore, Heidegger’s attachment to Being as a universal principle gets in
the way of Barnett’s effort to understand Heidegger mainly as a source of ontic or
existential being. For Heidegger, becoming or dasein is, of course, a very partial
and weak awareness of what Being is really all about. A turn to Heidegger, really
entails a return to the metaphysical university, where the Being that transcends the
momentary or individual is opened for scrutiny and brought into awareness. Barnett
knows that such a re-universalization of the university, given the surrounding culture,
is not realistic. Thus, he abandoned Heidegger as a primary source of opposition and
deployed a more worldly strategy.
Barnett has developed what he calls the ‘ecological university’. In embracing
transcendent empiricism, or the always moving, impermanent quality of contemporary
existence (similar to what Bauman (2000, 20003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b) calls ‘the
liquid society’) Barnett has suggested that imagination could still provide the link
between indeterminacy and possibility. The social imaginaire or ideas of affirmative
relatedness, or of rhizomes and fantasy, or of alternative thought and becoming-
minority, transcend the everyday. Thus the phenomenological category of the
‘natural attitude’ or the prejudices of common sense, the stupidities of unexamined
assumptions and the bigotry of close-minded thought, can be transcended via
creative thought.
Imagining produces a social imaginaire through which man and nature, life
and the environment, can be put in balance and be sustainable, while being
aesthetically satisfying. The transcendence of the metaphysical university is
hereby recaptured in a contemporarily manner. And the radical open systems
insights of complexity theory are put to work. Since the university is no longer
clearly bordered or easily defined, it is indeed open to a broad swath of economic
and social, physical and spiritual, utilitarian and idealist pressures. Present day
universities are emergent in that have many facets, multiple constituencies, and
often change their goals. Universities can be at the same time networked and local,
physical and virtual, entrepreneurial and empathic, opportunistic and critical. The
idea that the university is but one thing, and can be neatly defined, is long-since
obsolete. We live in the world of the multi-versity, which is borderless, pliable
and unstable.
Within this complexity, there are indeed possibilities of ethical action, of human
flourishing and of thrilling discoveries. But one has to accept that the university
no longer has a grand narrative: it does not do ‘Truth’. It is not restricted to one
identity or a single goal. Higher education has become a complex field of actions
and reactions, initiatives and pursuits, imaginations and possibilities. Within all this

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indeterminacy, there is uncertainty and possibility – but what should be emphasized?

Is the situation challenging, liberating and fully alive; or is it characterized by fear,
dread and retreat? There is money-grubbing, and unthinking consumerism, delivering
woe to all higher values, but there are also fine dedicated and sensitive people, who
care about life, others and responsibility. The question perhaps is as to whether
good use is made of the spaces that open up outside the predictable and repetitive
schemes for short-term gain? Barnett’s ecological university aims to fill such niches
through embracing the contemporary imaginary of care, and it is dedicated to taking
creative and ethical action. The imaginaire that desires close observation, thorough
description and critical analysis, is an existential statement of devotion, commitment
and respect. Barnett calls this ‘Mode 3’:
A Mode 3 knowledge … beckons, in which it is recognized that knowing the
world is a matter of producing epistemological gaps. The very act of knowing
– knowledge having become a process of active knowing – now produces
epistemological gaps: our very epistemological interventions in turn disturb
the world, so bringing a new world before us. No matter how creative and
imaginative our knowledge designs, it always eludes our epistemological
attempts to capture it. This is Mode 3 knowing, therefore, is a knowing-in-
and-with-uncertainty. The knowing produces further uncertainty. But it is
still a form, of knowing, a form of knowledge, albeit a knowledge which is
itself a complex of personal, tact, experiential and propositional knowledges.
(Barnett, 2012: 69)
Mode 3, for Barnett, results from prioritizing ‘care’ as a crucial source of imagination
in the production of the social imaginaire, whereby the study of radical relatedness
or complexity can be realized in a dynamic and ethical manner.
A second theorization, that resembles a Mode 3 approach, comes from Basil
Bernstein(1975, 1996). Bernstein was professor in the same institute of the University
of London as Barnett. He came to academic research with a background in school
teaching, doing a post-experience PhD at the age of forty. He had noted that while
working class youths did fine in school in mathematics, they did much worse in
language, and wondered why. This led to his concept of ‘elaborated’ (explained in
detail and open to all) and ‘restricted’ (you have to know the code to understand)
language. He asserted that much language is effectively coded, locking out vast
numbers of people.
Late in his career (1999), Bernstein wrote an essay on vertical and horizontal
discourse, where he staked out three methodological positions: (i) hierarchical
knowledge structures, (ii) horizontal knowledge structures with a strong grammar,
and (iii) horizontal knowledge structures with a weak grammar. We suggest that these
correspond fairly closely to Mode 1, 2, and 3. The distinction between hierarchical
and horizontal knowledge structures has to do with the epistemic worlds that they
embrace. Hierarchical knowledge wants to be objective, at a distance, systematic,

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coherent, explicit, and vertically organized. Horizontal knowledge is directed to

the lifeworld; it is context dependent, specific, tacit and multi-layered. In context,
it is coherent, but often contradictory across contexts. Horizontal knowledge
zeros in on particular persons, events and circumstances; it reveals how a specific
instance of action occurred and what local truths can be identified with it. Here,
existence in its unicity and cultural specificity, is revealed. Horizontal knowledge
with a strong grammar aggregates its insights, drawing general conclusions; while
horizontal knowledge, with a weak grammar, stays close to the collected data.
Hierarchical knowledge and knowledge with a strong grammar have the ambition to
structure knowledge as a pyramid.

This is knowledge that attempts to create general propositions and theories by

integrating knowledge from lower levels with a goal of showing underlying
uniformities across wide ranges of apparently different phenomena. Hierarchical
knowledge tries to produce ever more abstract integrating propositions (Bernstein,
1999: 162).
Contrastingly, horizontal knowledge takes the form of L1, L2, L3, L4, L5 …. where
each L is a particular language. Each instance of research is placed in its own text,
wherein the generality of descriptions and analyses vary. When descriptive and
analytic languages are standardized and generally accepted, there is a strong grammar.
But when phenomena are described in a whole variety of different languages, there
is a weak grammar. Bernstein’s assertion is that social sciences, such as sociology,
are characterized by weak grammar.
This implies that there are a plurality of possible languages with which one can
describe almost any social event or occurrence, and that each language will reveal
different aspects of the circumstances. One cannot really say that any one language
is right or wrong because they all focus on dissimilar aspects of existence, and each
language gains its legitimacy via its proximity to what it studies. Researcher and
researched have to choose which aspects of relatedness to highlight, since horizontal
knowledge requires the social negotiation of goals and ethics. It entails jointly
deciding to see one thing and not another, focussing on one possibility and ignoring
others, valuing some aspects and devaluing others.
Sometimes horizontal knowledge is highly structured, and disciplinary hegemony
strong, resulting in what Bernstein describes as strong grammar. But sometimes what

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is to be recorded and understood is highly contested and controversial; this results in

weak grammar. You can think of two competing representations:

LΔ, LΔ, LΔ, LΔ, LΔ, LΔ, ….

and LD, LD, LD, LD, LD, LD ….

LΔ represents a situationally grounded, descriptive language (L) of study and research

that has the ambition to universality, to having predictive value and to making a
hierarchical truth claim. LD is the language of petites histoires or of description and
analysis that remains close to the lifeworld, representing existence as it is felt and
experienced. LΔ resembles Mode 2, and what we call LD, Mode 3.
As Bernstein stresses, Mode 2 and 3 knowledge are all a question of (L) language.
The effort is one of describing and communicating, which requires finding words
and ideas that correspond to what has been experienced. Mode 2 seeks to define
a guiding methodology, while Mode 3 assumes that each event requires its own
languaging (L) to do full justice to its particularities and lived qualities. But since
language, in order to be language, has to have a sufficient level of generality to
be communicable, Mode 3 has to constantly navigate between the specific and the
general, in order to do justice to Other while communicating. The differentiation
between Mode 2 and 3 is a sliding scale in that Mode 2 can never totally get rid
of the specific, while Mode 3 can never totally avoid generalization. However, the
type of knowledge they want to produce is different: Mode 3 wants to describe lived
existence in how it is experienced, while Mode 2 is more focused on causality and on
predicting or influencing events. Mode 2 has praxis and professional competencies
in mind; Mode 3 centres more on possibility, the social imaginaire and the ethics of
human flourishing and wellbeing.

CONCLUDING

Relevance can be defined in terms of relational ethics, following Levinas. This

requires a research methodology dedicated to doing the greatest possible justice
to Other – that is, to the researched and to the readership – and Mode 3 attempts
to describe just such a research concept. The Mode 1, 2, 3 discussion obviously
occurs at a meta- level of discourse and such divisions of research into three gestalts
is not new, as we have seen throughout this chapter. However, the triptych has
other antecedents: Burrell and Morgan (1979) thirty years ago divided research (in
organization) into three. Their categories – of unitary, pluralist and radical – reflects
the politicization of research of that period. The ‘unitary’ perspective emphasized
goals, common objectives and successful leadership. It was management-focused,
asking: “What does management (need to) do to achieve organizational success?”
The research was intended to help organizations to thrive and to become (more)
profitable. Conflict was thought of as exceptional, good leadership would indubitably
lead to accomplishment. The ‘pluralist’ perspective focused on relationships

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between producers and customers, corporations and their suppliers, investors and
managers, government and corporate leadership, unions and management, ecology
and profitability, rich established economies and up-coming industrializing ones.
Following pluralist political theory, it saw society as a matrix of tensions, conflicting
ambitions, and competing forces. Most of the time, compromises were seen as being
achieved; some of the time, crises occured. And, the ‘radical’ gestalt assumed that
social and economic conflict prevail. Capital and labour are in implacable opposition
to one another; rich countries exploit peripheral ones and the powerful control the
powerless. ‘Unitary’ research supposedly focused on principles of good governance,
corporate success and the uses of managerial prerogative. ‘Pluralist’ research was
directed to the dynamics of negotiation, compromise, and finding balance between
competing interests through examination of the (micro-)politics of organizing
and the processes of group and organizational dynamics. And ‘radical’ research
examined exploitation, repression, alienation and conflict, concentrating on social
violence, political manipulation and organizational misuses of power. Mode 1 2, 3
fits within a different zeitgeist than does the triad of unitary, pluralist, radical. The
ethics of research and the quality of relatedness now form much more the backbone
of reflection and practice of relevance than it did then. ‘Radical’ research was often
disrespectful of the researched, with researchers aggressively imposing their ‘truths’
on their data. We will return to these themes in terms of the social technics of research
and of the social ethics of our understanding of relevance. In the next chapter, we
examine what Mode 3 entails on a much more operational level. In terms of the PhD,
we assume that the relationship between the student and the supervisor has to be
congruent with Mode 3 ethics, for the methodology to be feasible. We examine other
facets of the process in more detail in the sixth chapter.

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INTERTEXT FOUR

Robert Earhart: Belief and Method

When I entered the practitioner PhD program, my original idea was that I was going
to write something that would contribute to the field of sustainability. I thought
I’d write an overview of sustainability that could almost function as a textbook.
The book would be supportive of environmental sustainability and it would cover
the highlights of the theory of sustainability and then it would integrate that with
organisational theory. That was originally the idea. Then, of course, the workshops
started and I started seriously looking at different organisational theories. At the
end of the first year, I came up with a proposal that was resoundingly unpopular. It
was the only presentation where I felt like I’d really bombed in a PhD workshop.
I proposed a toolkit of different strategies, based on different organisational
theories, which could then be utilised cafeteria-style in different organisations.
And it was incredibly unpopular. I think the most damning critique came from
one of the tutors, who said that I had presented a transparently managerialist
agenda and that it just wasn’t interesting. In comparison to the work I had been
doing before, it was quite boring and predictable and just plain managerialist. He
was right.
It was really during the second year, after rebounding from my disastrous last
workshop of the first year, that I started looking at what was interesting about
sustainability. I discovered that what for me is interesting about sustainability is
the difference between what it presents itself as, and what it actually is. What it
actually is, of course, is open to interpretation, but that’s when I started studying
Bakhtin’s polyphony and heteroglossia. It was at that point that I started to see
how sustainability presents itself as an idealised form of business practice, and
as a very privileged space of uniquely, ethical business practice, as opposed to
traditional business practice. But the privileged status that sustainability discourse
was claiming for itself was actually the same status as traditional business
practice claimed. There was really nothing besides the word ‘sustainability’
that was different. What was ironic was that it became more and more apparent
to me, particularly through using Bakhtin, that the dominating discourse of
‘sustainability’ was really traditional business practice with a veneer of ethics,
and environment, and social responsibility added to it. But in the end, my thesis
became more about how sustainability was used in practice by professionals.
Sustainability is mostly a communications exercise, which asserts an ethics that
actually is not followed. While writing a paper for a conference at the University
of Essex, I realised that what was interesting about sustainability was not how
it presents itself, but how it combines with other forms of practice. It certainly
is not exempt from traditional business practices. If anything, the theme of its
exceptionality is a red herring, for it implies that environmental ethics depends

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on the private sector or on business. It uses itself as the role of justification to

minimize government and action groups.
This was a realization that definitely induced bile. It really had a bilious,
nauseating effect. I realized that I had drunk the sustainability Kool-Aid. I had
thought that sustainability would be the perfect way to incorporate my political
activist and NGO background with a business agenda. It seemed like the perfect
link between my activist past and something relevant in terms of my MBA. And
it wasn’t. So this was a horrifying discovery. I am really giving myself too much
credit here, because frankly, while I saw the problem during my second year of
my PhD study, it took until my fourth year until I was willing to accept it.
I was working for an environmental consultancy firm at the time, and we
were invited to go to this conference on corporate social responsibility (CSR)
and sustainability. So we all travelled to Maastricht with the conference manager
G (who actually we later fired). R and me, on the train, were looking at the
agenda for the conference, and we were a little sceptical because there were too
many big names on the agenda, and we wondered how useful it would be. So
we got there and the conference venue had holographic badges. A lot of very
fancy logistics were in place. Our conference was happening parallel with a
conference about volunteering. The volunteering conference had taken over all
of the exhibition space. Most of the people there seemed to have come for the
volunteering conference. That conference was very Dutch, it was only in Dutch,
not an international crowd, and the CSR conference had people from all over the
EU. The CSR conference was paid for with EU funds, as the Netherlands was
assuming the presidency of the EU quite soon after that. So, the three of us went
to sit down, close to the front, and the program started.
There were two different people from Dutch ministries on the agenda, and
they both gave long speeches about how important social responsibility and
environmental responsibility in business are and how Dutch businesses are
leading the way in this regard. And then we heard from somebody from BP, and
somebody from Shell, and somebody from Philips, all repeating how important
CSR and good corporate behaviour is, and telling us about all the important things
that they were supposedly doing. It was a: ‘Oh look at us, aren’t we fabulous?’
show. And it was very boring. The speakers were horrendously boring, and I was
struggling to pay attention. I felt like something important was happening, but
I couldn’t tell what, plus I was sitting up front, so I didn’t have the benefit of
seeing the rest of the audience, and whether they were paying attention.
The series of speeches finally ended and the stage was cleared, and suddenly
a curtain went up and we were sitting there, looking at the audience of the
volunteering conference on the other side. It had a very strange effect, because we
weren’t expecting them to be there. We had no idea that this was going to happen.
There was this very odd moment, of about 15 seconds, where it was just us,
looking at them, and them looking at us. And from what I could see from across

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the other side of the stage, everybody had a ‘What is this?’ sort of expression
on their faces. It was just all so very surprising: you don’t normally have an
audience on the other side of the stage looking at you, when you are sitting in
an amphitheatre. It was very disturbing. Then some loud music started and some
fireworks went off and this Las Vegas-style dance show, which was not very well
choreographed, began. It went on for a long time. It was a good 20 minutes of
dance spectacle. Spectacle is being generous, it involved a lot of out-of-shape
farm girls from Limburg doing this sort of modern dance, half striptease, to some
music and fireworks. The thing that struck me the most was that there were these
cages that they were dancing in. They were in these boxes and it looked like
maybe they were trying to get out of the boxes, or maybe they were happy to be
in the boxes, but it had some very S&M sexual overtones. Then suddenly, there
was the finale of fireworks and streamers coming down from the ceiling. And
the show was over. I do remember that the applause was only polite. Nobody
understood why we had seen this show. Nobody on the other side of the stage,
the people from the volunteering conference, seemed to understand it any better
than we did. It had been entirely inappropriate. It didn’t fit and seemed almost
contrary to what we had been discussing. It was almost a negation, but then not
even a true negation. It was like we were talking about ‘A’ and then suddenly we
were at ‘Z’. There was nothing in between, to bring us from the one place to the
other; it was all very strange.
Then several speakers came up on stage, carrying their own chairs, and there
was a panel discussion, which involved both the volunteering conference and
the CSR conference. This, in retrospect, really disturbed me even more, because
the whole point of CSR is that it is integral to business functioning and it is not
volunteering. And here it was being seen as somehow relevant to and incorporated
into volunteering. This actually undermined CSR, because volunteering is
voluntary, and not about business. The dance show was really more relevant to
the CSR agenda of the Netherlands then anything that the speakers were saying,
because I think that it illustrated the real agenda. There were probably some aspects
relevant to Dutch politics that were at play here, but I am not privy to all of that.
Basically, the message that I got was that the Dutch government was not willing
to take CSR seriously, and that sustainability was not to be taken seriously. It was
non-business and therefore was a mere compliment to a volunteer conference,
and a Las Vegas style dance routine could be thrown in at will.
The dance thing is what sticks out most in my mind, when I think of that
conference. Nothing anyone said has stuck with me, but that Las Vegas style
dance has, and it definitely wasn’t a good Las Vegas style routine. If they were
going to do Las Vegas, they should have really brought in dancers from Las
Vegas. It was more a simulacra of Las Vegas that made it look even more cheap
and tacky than it is. As I was later to discover, I think that directly relates to
the true undercurrents of sustainability, as it is being practiced by independent

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professionals. The dance ended up being a very powerful metaphor. I actually

ended my thesis with that incident, because it is such a fine metaphor. It was all
very disingenuous and cheap, and tacky.
It was a bit bizarre. I ran into my thesis supervisor at that conference, and then
I ran into him in Berkeley (California) at a performance of ‘Hard Knot’, which
is a drag performance of The Nutcracker. I was with my parents and he was with
his family. I think we ran into one another several times during that year, when we
were just not expecting to see each other at all. And it was always somehow in an
emotionally charged or metaphorically charged atmosphere.
I had started the PhD immediately after finishing my MBA, in fact before
the graduation ceremony. So I approached the PhD with the mindset of an MBA
student: do lots and lots of hard work, try to impress everybody, and be incredibly
organised and put together a McKinsey consulting style package. In my case,
during my first year in the PhD program, that was about post modernity and
philosophy. So I was basically taking the same MBA approach, but turning it
onto high theory and philosophy, which I think also was an interesting contrast.
My approach and methods were McKinsey: very, very orderly, producing very
clean narratives. So for example, in my presentations there were always a very
clear narrative from the beginning to the end. It was very much, part one, part
two, part three, therefore the conclusions are indisputable, and as subtext, I am
very smart. My presentations were a bit provocative, but the plot was always the
same.
The first year, in comparison to some other participants, I seemed to know
exactly what I was doing, and they did not. It seemed to work, until I did my
proposal. Then that self-image came toppling down, like so many tons of bricks.
The second year there was the Essex polyphony conference and that’s where
things really started to unravel. That’s when I discovered my first really valuable
lessons, which became Chapter three in my thesis. I actually started using
Bakhtin and polyphony, and although I recognised that the way I was doing
it was somewhat slipshod, it worked. It was a very good way of interpreting
data and opening up my themes. I used an internal spat that I had had around
a conference that we were organizing. The entire email conversation about
who would and would not be allowed to speak was my data. It was brilliant,
beautiful data. That’s when the CSR story came together as a way of managing
perceptions, and I saw what it actually means and how professionals behave
towards one another. And what happens when there’s an interloper was crucial.
Other was not welcomed at all. In this case, M was coming from a completely
different ideological mindset than myself. I started to realise that sustainability
is built on an ideology that is not that dissimilar from the same American
right-wing ideology that M followed. It had the same requirements demanding
adherence to how it presents itself and demanding that you do not ask too many

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questions. When you start asking too many questions, it starts to fall apart.
Particularly when you are looking at it as a communications or PR exercise, it
falls apart incredibly quickly, because there’s no substance. And that goes back
to the dance metaphor, and subsequently to much of the other work that I did
for the thesis.
It was at the Polyphony conference, which ran with many of the faculty
members present, that I presented my CSR polyphony analysis. I felt very
lucky because many of the faculty took a real interest in what I was doing, and
everybody was very supportive. It was then, that I rolled out the Polyphony email
data, and analysed it with Bakhtin, and found that what was interesting about
sustainability, was not how it was different from standard business practices,
but how it was the same. And that started the questioning. Why, then, as a
sustainability professional, do I give myself a privileged place in the business
discourse, and do I really deserve that privileged place? What am I doing that’s
really different from standard business practice? What are the stakes, what are
the benefits; why are sustainability professionals so dysfunctional, why are they
more dysfunctional than a lot of standard business professionals? That was when
the ideology started to unravel, but it took me a long time to accept that.
In my third and fourth years, almost nothing happened. I did the Tampa
conference on Organization & Belief in the fourth year, and presented a
discussion of repetition and difference from Deleuze. That’s when I started to do
auto-ethnography, influenced by the whole Buchner and Ellis approach (Buchner
presented in Tampa), although not using Ellis very much. It was a modified
auto-ethnographic approach, where I created the characters, but did not make-
up the plots. Unlike Ellis, the events I described basically all did occur as far as
possible as they were written. My goal then became to show the dysfunctionality
of independent sustainability professionals.
That’s when the topic started to get more focused. The problem with that,
which caused almost nothing to happen in the fourth and fifth years, was that
I was implicating myself more and more. The more I researched, the more
I read, the more I questioned my disingenuousness. I started identifying a lot
with Baudrillard at that point. Sustainability was indeed a simulacrum – a hyper-
real business with great appearances but only an advertising-like sheen. Every
decision that I had made going into this profession was fundamentally flawed
and transparently fake. I liked the fact that I could present myself as a highly
ethical person, yet in the end, ethics was entirely beside the point, really. What
sort of ethics is it if it only serves your own pride? Actually, the hypocrisy made
it even worse. If I was working for Shell or BP, drilling hydrocarbons out of
the seabed, at least I would be more authentic about what I was doing than I
was in my sustainability consultancy. In my sustainability consultancy, I was
dealing with banks and finance and this was the period that was leading up to
the financial crisis. The arrogance and the awfulness we were dealing with,

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including even being used for free by banks that could easily afford to pay us.
And trying to convince them to work on ethical financial products, when they
were of course sneering at us the whole time. We were tricked into working for
free for an investment bank. Trying to maintain a viable sustainability practice,
without selling out, was exasperating. You have to eat and have a bit of money.
Otherwise, you always end up selling out.
I could present all the sustainability theory I wanted, but in the end I was really
just justifying the status quo, pushing a public relations and marketing spiel. That’s
really in the end what was happening. I don’t want to say that every sustainability
professional is like that, but really you are either an activist or you’re not. Nobody
involved in sustainability as a business can make money as an activist, so basically
to be successful you cannot do sustainability. That became very apparent as I did
the research and collected the data. Most of the data collection happened just
doing my job. It all came from people I was talking to, experiences I had, and
conferences I went to. The thesis became more about disillusionment than about
authenticity. That was hard to do, I actually became depressed, despondent, and
I was finding myself writing things that I did not want to write. I didn’t like
writing it; it was painful. I felt incompetent and foolish. It took fully implicating
myself, to finish the thesis. To be able to acknowledge that I’m a, excuse the term,
‘shithead’, that I’m a ‘prick’, I’m a hypocrite, I’m disingenuous, my idealism was
horribly, horribly naïve. So basically I documented in my thesis my own selling-
out process. Essentially that’s what it became.
When at the end I open a dialogue with a pragmatic version of Levinas, via
John Roberts, it is a kind of a possible exit from all the self-incrimination. Oddly,
there have been some after-effects from what I wrote. Putting what I wrote into
practice has turned out very differently that I’d expected. Instead of arriving at
a win-win solution based on mutual acknowledgement or recognition, I entered
into yet another cess-pool of manipulations and fabrications. To even out the old
debts I signed on for a EU sustainability project, having been promised that old
injuries would be healed. But it just produced new ones. At this point, I don’t even
know if I want to touch sustainability, academically any more. I’m very happy
teaching marketing to undergrads. If I jump back into sustainability, it will be as
a critic and not as a believer.
I still don’t know where this all leads us, I’m still trying to figure that one
out. I’ve just been giving a business ethics course and I enjoyed doing that a
lot. I can talk about ethical theories and I can talk about ethics in practice, and
discuss cases where ethics have been profoundly violated. But I’m not personally
involved in those ethical violations. I guess I like the armchair position. In my
thesis, one of the sources I used was a lecture from Damian O’Doherty who did
work at Manchester airport. His was very disillusioned with academia. His intent
was to move towards daily practice. He felt that was more real and authentic,
and he did some interesting work around access that I found quite helpful. But

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I find myself going in the opposite direction. At least in sustainability, business

practice seems to be horribly inauthentic and academic reflection to be more
authentic. Sustainability can really only be authentic in theory at this point. My
big realisation is that without major shifts in economic practice and public policy,
sustainability will always be a veneer. It is not possible not to be hypocritical with
sustainability. It’s just not possible, so I think that academia is a nice refuge to sit
it out, and to keep some distance.
Doing the thesis, for a period, made me worse off professionally. By doing
it, I’ve made choices that I know I would not have made without it. I feel much
happier with the choices I’ve made.
One of the interesting things about Ellis and her auto-ethnographic approach
is that the story of all of the people that were in her class was a fake. I did not
know that it was a fake – nowhere in the book does it say that it was fake. In The
Ethnographic I, all the students end up worse off. And this was her made-up story
of an auto-ethnographic class. It is interesting that all of her characters become
worse off, because it suggests that you are of a certain mind if you are going to do
auto-ethnography. I think that you indeed do end up worse off. You cannot look
at yourself in your research, and be the subject of your own research, without
having it affect you for the worse at some point. If you are researching yourself
with others, and you are a participant, it is impossible not to start to see your
own flaws. Seeing your own naivety, makes your perception of yourself change.
In some ways the subject already exists, but at the same time, you are your own
subject. The process is kind of dangerous. You cannot see yourself as a subject,
and not begin second-guessing, not begin doubting. It’s almost like hearing your
own voice recorded and played back. The first few times you hear your voice
after it’s been recorded, you cringe, because you don’t like hearing yourself. It’s
not what you think you are like. I think it’s very hard to be your own research
subject and not to have that same effect. Studying yourself with others – it’s
hard not to see yourself in a way that you would in normally not see yourself.
It’s horribly narcissistic as well. I had never spent that much time thinking about
myself in a very organised, methodical way as I did when writing the thesis. The
effects were disturbing, although maybe it’s just my own underlying pathology.
It is hard not to judge yourself. You cannot avoid looking at how you behave
with others and what it is you do, if you are researching yourself in context with
others. I think we all have ideas of who we are as a person, but actually we don’t
go all that deep in investigating them. We don’t speak back to ourselves and then
speak again, back to ourselves. If you do you start seeing your own hypocrisies,
your own shortcomings, your own egotistical adolescent stuff. It’s just hard not to
become increasingly self-aware. I don’t know if self-awareness is always a good
thing. Not everybody should go into therapy, not everybody should be analysed,
not everybody should look at themselves in that way.

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The self-investigation was hard, it was awful, and I did for a while think that I
was worse off, but in the end, I would not have given it up for anything. I think
it was exactly the right thing to do at exactly the right time, for the right reasons.
I just needed time. Now that I’m two years away from completing, I can look
back. For a good year, it was depressing that I was finished. Because, now what?
Now that you’ve seen the crazy people behind the curtain, and you’ve closed the
curtain, you can’t un-see what’s there. After you lose your virginity, you can’t re-
virginise yourself, it’s gone. It took a while to adapt.
I think the most interesting part of this whole project was after the thesis
defence, the evaluation seminar that we had with the other graduate students.
There were 30 people in the room, and that was a lot more intellectually taxing
than the thesis defence itself. In the thesis defence, I just stuck to my position
and would not let anybody pull me out of it. So I played my thesis defence very
safe. But in the seminar room I actually had two of the key people profiled in my
ethnography sitting in the room. What I did was not kind. We were all aware of
all the issues in the book. They were themes that we talked about all the time.
But I never said, ‘Oh by the way, you are going to be in my book.’ That’s why
I anonymized everyone. I aired some dirty laundry and the funny thing was they
all really liked it. They thought it was such an accurate reflection of what was
going on.
R had said use everything, use my name, use everything, I don’t care. S would
never have given me that permission, which is why I anonymized a lot. But they
both pretty much affirmed everything I did. That was shocking. I was really
worried about it, but they both were incredibly kind and polite that day and were
very open in sharing their experiences. R was really funny, because he said, ‘I
still don’t get it, it’s almost like watching football, why don’t you just watch the
football game, why watch the analysis?’ He supported the research but didn’t
understand what the point of it was. I thought that was very interesting. I so
wished that I had taped the discussion, because it was actually very illuminating.
Getting feedback from different fellow graduate students, everything just seemed
vindicated, and tied back in a neat bow. It was somewhat depressing, in a sense,
because it was almost like everybody was agreeing that, ‘Yeah, you fucked up.
Good for you, you did such a good job at it.’ There was sort of that element to it
as well.
I don’t know how many people outside of the people who were at the defence,
and a few others have read my thesis. The feedback I’ve gotten, my father actually
really liked it, but he said that it’s weird, because obviously you know what you
are talking about, but it reads like a trashy novel, which I think was my intent.
Once you’re outside of the theory, it does sort of have that gossipy, ‘Oh, look at
what they did!’ element to it. That I think is part of the tone.
I think I haven’t been particularly effective with the distribution of the book.
I haven’t pushed it out as much as I should have. I don’t think that I was really

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ready to do so. Now I am. I don’t know how dated it might seem, but I think it’s
still relevant. It is interesting as a snapshot of sustainability’s Wild West origins.
I think sustainability is now much more professionalised, as I indicated in the
thesis. I think the claims they are making are still inauthentic. It’s just much
more polished now. Since the thesis, I’m still working on one last sustainability
project, and it’s very hard to do. An energy efficiency project – it’s really hard
to care. I kind of want it to be bad, in a way. There’s a part of me that wants it
to be bad, I am self-sabotaging a lot, and I’m really putting most of my energy
into getting away from it. I think the lingering after-effects have been one of total
disillusionment. It’s as if I am sleep walking through it. On the other hand, I am
very engaged in my teaching and I now, more than ever, enjoy working with
students. I enjoy being in the classroom. I enjoy research and writing, in a way
that I didn’t before. I feel more competent in doing those things. And those are the
things that actually don’t involve sustainability and CSR.
I run my classes as a critic. My course says: ‘I’m not only going to teach you
marketing and how to be a marketing professional, but I’m also going to show
you how not to be such a stupid naïve consumer.’ Most of my students were born
in the late 80’s and 90’s. They are incredibly media savvy, but they are incredibly
naïve, so I’m sort of lifting up the veil. In some ways, what I’m doing with their
consumer habits is the same thing I did with sustainability. It’s kind of fun and it
is sort of funny to watch how their opinions and critical thinking evolves, as they
go through the class. That’s what makes it really interesting, for me. For example,
we talk about luxury goods. Where I teach, most of the students know all the
brand names, all the designers, even the esoteric designers, they know everything
about luxury goods, they have them on them, they embody them. Then, to start
talking about, ‘Why are you willing to pay 3,000 euro for this handbag and not
30 euro for this other one?’
Obviously, it’s the brand name and the image. Let’s take a look at the advertising.
Other people around you have the same things, what does that mean to you, why
is that so important to you? Actually, how are these things produced? Some of
them are made in artisanal settings, but if you look at Burberry, for instance,
most of it is made in China. There’s always somebody wearing Burberry in class.
Somebody is paid a dollar or two an hour to make the products. ‘Why are they
still worth so much to you?’ Let’s look at the quality: ‘Oh that stitching is coming
loose’. Let’s actually look at what’s going on here. What does your consumption
mean economically, what does it mean socially, what does it mean in terms of
your personality and aspirations? Why do you choose to define yourself via
consumer goods; why are you willing to pay so much, in order to define yourself
via these consumer goods? Who decides what brings elite status? Why do you
care; why is this important to you? The essays particularly about luxury goods are
very thoughtful. They actually can’t answer: ‘Why?’ They write: ‘I don’t know
why, I’m not going to say that I’ll never do it again, but I don’t know why I do

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it’. The fact that they admit that they have no idea why they consume as they do,
and that they feel slightly betrayed by it all, begins a process of thinking more
critically about these things. Maybe the economy isn’t as simple as it appears.
It’s not just a question of how to sell people things they don’t need, or how to
increase my return on investment and my profits from my marketing program.
Maybe there are other ways that we can approach this. If I get somebody a little
bit on that road to critical thought, 18, 19, 20 year-olds, it’s actually something
achieved. What I’m doing is a bit subversive, but it is actually nice, seeing it
happen. Seeing people start to ask questions, become reflexive, thinking a little
bit more. They start to see themselves from a different perspective. That’s part of
the program. I do the same thing in my business ethics class, the same thing in my
organisation class; it’s sort of my shtick. And it’s refreshing.
There are two research strategies that I’m flirting with now. One is to do a
series of articles like I did in my thesis, but on very specific topics, such as eco-
tourism. This would entail an ethnographic approach to studying eco-tourism. I’d
go from portraying the one eco-tourist to the next eco-tourist, and basically kind
of pull the same moves. The results would be slightly different, I think, given the
slightly different context. That would probably get boring after about the third
time, but it’s something that I’m very interested in doing at this point.
The other area in terms of research which interests me. is that I’d like to take
my conclusions and actually go a little bit further with it. I ended the thesis with
hope. No one wanted a very solipsistic, sad ending. We didn’t want the French
expressionist film ending. So I looked at a scholar, John Roberts, who I think
had gone through a similar process with his academic career. He focuses on
accounting, but he basically develops a modified version of Levinas’s concept of
taking personal responsibility for the other and the encounter with the other. He
takes this idea of transparency and ethics, and reformulates it. Rather than using
transparency and ethics as a club, or using it as a mode of oppression, which it
often has become, he develops a tolerant and open humanism. I agree with his
descriptions. But the effects of the transparency rhetoric have not been what was
intended. We have got more policing and not more ‘responsibilized’ encounters
with the other. Crucial is not only taking personal responsibility for ourselves,
but also taking responsibility for Other. The need is to look for mutual solutions
that do not involve constant policing, suspicion and control via ‘transparency’
operationalized as codes of ethics and codes of conduct. I believe that it becomes
crucial to admit our own hypocrisy and to admit that we sometimes don’t know
what we are doing and that we do mess up, and actually that we then do engage
in dialogue with the other. I ended my book with a discussion of a disaster from
a consulting project that I had worked on. The disaster was that basically I’d
worked very hard on a project, did really good work on it, and then in the end
lost money. I ended up actually owing money to the project managers. They
had made an accounting mistake, so what I thought I could pay myself for the

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project, I ended up owing back to them. It was money that had already been
spent on the project, so I was in a really bad position. Using Roberts’ ideas on
the encounter with the other, and taking personal responsibility for the other, I
said: ‘Look we can get lawyers involved, we can try to ruin each other’s careers
and reputations, or we can try to figure out a solution of mutual acceptance, and
agree that we both made some mistakes.’ So we came to an agreement. But after
the thesis was published, I was backstabbed and cheated out of what had been
agreed. I’d really love to write another chapter of ‘Well that didn’t work’. It is
nice in theory but can we get it really to work? Can it work?
And a final area that I’d like to go more into is research methodology. I think
that in some ways this is already being done, but I want to refine what auto-
ethnography is and what it means to be a researcher as a participant. What sort of
truth claims result? But also what are the effects and dangers? What is the effect
on the researcher? I think that would be interesting on a more meta-analytical and
methodological level.
 CHAPTER 5

THE AFFECT OF BEING-HERE

In this book, we have largely concentrated on painting a ‘big picture’ of what

might be a relevant post-experience PhD. In this chapter, we examine a particular
development that is deeply complementary to our approach. It is not essential for the
realization of our goals, but readers who have followed us this far will find much of
interest in the writings associated with this development.
The practitioner PhD is characterized by individual research projects, where the
scope of investigation is fairly small. Most practitioner-researchers engage in small-
scale qualitative research, with which they illuminate aspects of their own work. For
them, what in their professional experience needs examining, describing, evaluating
and explaining is relevant. Their research obviously has to address what it claims
to address and it does so by evoking intended issues, themes, experiences and
attitudes. The researchers are responsible for relevance in how they position their
investigations, reflect on themselves and others, and take charge of their writing. In
all of this, the quality of relatedness plays a paramount role.
The assertion that research demands relationship and concern, as well as care, is
presently championed as the turn to affect (Berlant, 1997, 2008a, 2008b, 2008/2009;
Clough, 2004, 2007; Sedwick, 2003; Stewart, 1996, 2007). The ‘turn to affect’
manifests itself in proximal ethnography (Earhart, 2011; Ho, 2009; O’Doherty,
2010), grounded in post-phenomenological philosophy (Alphonso Lingis: 1984,
1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2011). It is an ethnographic research
strategy, which is: (i) philosophically grounded in Levinas, (ii) pays attention to
phenomenology and social constructionism, (iii) partakes of critical social thought,
such as Stiegler’s, and (iv) explores the limits to experiential sensibility, for instance
as seen in the writing of Alphonso Lingis. Kathleen Stewart may be seen as the
emblematic ethnographic practitioner of ‘the turn to affect’, while Lingis is the
adventurer who preceded her in developing the themes of the philosophically
informed exploration of situated, relational sensibility.
Relationality is not just ethical or methodological; it is also a set of practices.
Research techniques are not covered in this book, principally because there are
actually very few basic research techniques, and their descriptions are fairly simple.
In qualitative research, there are mainly variations on interviewing and observation.
That is not to say that they are simple in practice, and learning the requisite skills
can be demanding. Furthermore, the subsequent presentation and analysis of data
can be very difficult to master. Many starting out in research cannot interview
effectively or describe an event in a way that communicates the experience to their

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readers since, unsurprisingly, most people who start a PhD are not accomplished
writers and their powers of description are initially limited. But such matters are
more a matter of training and the development of necessary skills than of theoretical
understanding. Listening, really listening, to Other, makes insightful interviewing
possible and an acute awareness of how one can best co-produce a research text
requires some subtlety. But the basic insight – that interviewing is relational work,
and that its results are inherently polyphonic and dialogical – is not difficult to grasp.
There are all sorts of complications, such as how the researched often perform for
the researcher, that require close observation, careful reflection, and theoretically
informed self-questioning. One needs to attend to questions such as: ‘What is it that
the researched is trying to reveal and hide’; ‘What is the interviewee’s relationship
to the interviewer?’; ‘What assumptions, power positions, and forms of influence
played themselves out in the interview?’; ‘What belief structure underpins what is
and is not said or asked?’; ‘Which answers are socially desirable and professionally
rehearsed, and which are not?’; ‘How is empathy and antipathy engaged in the
research?’; or, more classically, ‘How do gender, social class, and ethnicity manifest
themselves in the interview?’ Granted, these themes are easy enough to list, but
much harder to feel, experience, and document in the field. These are all important
issues, but not ours here; we are trying to concentrate on the complex question as
to what makes a PhD thesis relevant. When researchers know what they want to do,
and why, then they have to fine-tune their research techniques and their uses of them,
to enable them to get on with their research. But all too often, PhD students initially
do not really know what they want to know, or why. They have no ready answer for
questions such as, ‘What do you think is worth knowing and why?’
We are focusing on proximal investigation that attends to practitioner relatedness,
and to I/Other interaction (Cooper, 1992). Clarification of what might be proximal
research, as well as actual examples of it in action, is scarce. There are, of course,
some fine examples that would include Ackroyd (Ackroyd & Crowdy, 1990) on the
slaughterhouse, Jackall on (1989) bureaucratic ethics, Earhart (2011) on consulting.
But it is probably true that claims of the importance of proximal research are more
prevalent than examples of its successful practice.
Proximal research demands relatedness on a primary, experiential level and the
so-called ‘turn to affect’ champions just such research. Human affectivity has to
do with receptivity towards Other; and in the researched/researcher relationship, to
feeling, perceiving, knowing, empathizing, understanding, worrying, and even anger.
Affect makes experienced relatedness and mutual causality between researched
and researcher possible. The ‘turn to affect’ is not characterized by the pursuit of
radical connectionism, with the difference between self and other being transcended
in some single life-force or principle and we are not underwriting themes such as
rhizomatic or unlimited connectionism.1 With affect, the gaze engages both self and
Other, sameness and difference. It is multiple, complex and heterogeneous.
Affect is also about the concrete, lived and partial. It is phenomenal and
existential; that is, it is not an all-embracing first principle of Being. Affect is local,

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specific, experienced, and substantial. It is temporary, occurring in lived-time, and it

is relational. Affect is what crosses over from the one person to the other:

The nurse at the little Swari clinic stopped our vehicle emphatically, asking me
to come and see this patient of his, although maybe it was too late. I went inside,
past the airing room, into the simple interior with its plain table. She was there, a
tiny girl, maybe eight years old, struggling for breath while her father squeezed
a bellows furiously to pump more air into her fragile throat. No oxygen, just
bellows ... now I was staring helplessly at this little father’s darling ... No I said, it
can’t be too late ... we seated the father in the rear driver’s side seat with his little
girl on his lap ... we needed to get away ... the moment was loud, terrible, insane,
and I wanted to drive away ... at last we drove away. We managed a thousand
feet, I guess, and then someone told me to stop the car. As soon as the car stopped
I could hear the screams and ululations of the little girl’s mother ... (who) knew
what stopping meant before I did. I turned in my seat to look ... the little girl ...
was struggling for her breath like some animal was chasing her, and then she
began to reach toward me ... she stretched her arms and squeezed her palms, her
eyes asking for something ... she wasn’t looking at me, I could see that, and I was
absolutely terrified. She kept reaching, grabbing .. until finally she got the breath
she was working for – one last breath, the loudest breath I had ever heard ... and
immediately the smell of death was upon us. I never knew until that moment that
death had a smell. (Straight, 2007: 3–4)

Proximal ethnography attempts to convey experience from researcher to reader; but

we can never really know the other’s experience since, “experience is an ultimate
paradox, the ultimate paradox” (Straight, 2007: 7). Experience exists, can be
exchanged and it can be written about; but we can never actually know another’s
experience. Experiencing has to do with us feeling what the other felt, and seeing
how the other saw. But we do not really know if we feel what Straight felt or saw.
We are touched – the little girl’s death makes us tactful, careful, thoughtful, worried
and sad. We feel contact with Straight, the little girl and her parents, their spirits and
their lives and the little girl’s terrifying death. Such writing attempts (and here, we
feel succeeds) to “capture the ephemeral, excessive character of being in the world
that signs simultaneously succeed and fail in conveying” (Straight, 2007: x).
The reporting in the text of the discovery by Straight of death’s smell is both bodily
and textual. Something does make its way from the one to the other; affect allows that
journey. It is from the realm of ideas but also profoundly visceral, thus both textual
and physical. In its sensuous immediacy, there is competition and fear, joy and
regret, innovation and retreat. What is conveyed is phenomenal and social, and not
just discursive. The turn to affect explores the proximal nature of such relationships,
rather than just their idealization or rationalization. Research often seems to be 99%

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ideation, utterly lacking the sensation touch of direct relatedness. Retrospectively,

researchers attribute a certain kind of causality and attempt to objectify existence,
but they seemingly cannot help but hide relationships and emotions. Research that is
going to touch such concerns must be done in a particular way and the turn to affect
provides a particular agenda for a specific type of ethnography, in that it calls for
research focusing on self and other, and their inter-relatedness – and this cannot be
achieved without the intimacy that the best ethnography can provide. Affect touches
self and other, researcher and researched, observer and observed, via feelings,
emotions and shared awareness. This cannot be felt over the distance demanded by
quantification, nor can it be explored without openness to the other.
Affect produces immediacy; it produces an ethnographic ‘being-here’, open to
closeness and emotion:

My first experience of ethnography came when I was a first year university

student. Allan Berube was a classmate. The sensitivity, which he later displayed
in his well-known ethnography of gay soldiers in WWII (1990), was already
apparent. He inspired his co-students to make an ethnographic photo-collage,
transforming the impersonal concrete corridors of our dorm. We peopled our
halls with faces and events; that is, we got rid of the sterile uniformity of bad
architecture, and replaced it with things that stirred us emotionally, things that we
were passionate about. We substituted faces, grimaces and expressions for where
there had been but emptiness and sterility. Ethnography or the exploration of the
gaze gave some sort of answer to institutional indifference. Facing the other leads
to affect, and to confrontation with poverty, uncertainty and despair. The dead
space of the hallways became experiential and affective. Photographs were not
enough. Elderly people from the surrounding neighborhood were invited in to
tell their stories – that way, the faces did not just remain images but came to life.
Our circumstances were re-cast to reflect the life histories of the neighborhood
surrounding us. Lived existence was now present and felt, co-existing with the
university’s previously dominant agenda of reading, writing and exams. Family
was invented as we tried unsuccessfully to circumvent loneliness.
I saw what Allan did and embraced it. Living awareness was threatened by the
sheer amounts of text we had to master. We were bombarded in the classroom,
and in our reading, by ideas. But we needed to know people around us and the
city we lived in. That was not at all easy – one of us was murdered; the violence
of Woodlawn, its poverty, drugs and despair, were beyond our understanding. We
could never know, understand or really want to share existence in the Chicago
slums around us. One can call for the recognition of every other, however violent
or deranged. But one’s will to know does not include the excesses of repression
or the destruction of the one by the other.

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Allan was a natural ethnographer. Back then, gay sex did not play a role in his
ethnography. Years later, when I met him in San Francisco, he’d cut conversation
short to head to the dark rooms; he was unwilling to pursue an idea if it was
not erotic. Openness to affect is always selected, orchestrated and partial. Allan
produced text to do justice to the hurt, love, and the regrets he harboured. The
affects he marshalled in his ethnographic work focused on themes that he felt he
could do justice to; he dealt in the affects he knew, appreciated and identified
with. Affect is selective. I could not really ‘be’ with Allan – my sexuality did not
embrace his; his later ethnography was in my view not inclusive enough. Only
some places, people and practices fascinated him. One is affectively attuned.
Following Levinas, how open or closed one is, is crucial to one’s (research)
ethics. (Research notebooks, Hugo Letiche)

The social anthropological work of Kathleen Stewart exemplifies good proximal

understanding. In her 1996 book, A Space on the Side of the Road; Cultural Poetics
in an ‘Other’ America, she returned to the rural coal mining villages where James
Agee researched Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939). Her somewhat unusual
title invites us to explore, as she does, what is on the side of the road – that is, what
is not on the road itself. ‘On the road’ is, of course, a classical theme of American
economic and cultural development, as well as a key landmark in fiction writing
from the Beat Generation. It embodies both rootlessness and the restless push to
new frontiers.
But being on the side is to be left behind, to be backwards and to be irrelevant: it
is to step off the great road of progress driving us forward. James Agee was a writer
for the New Yorker magazine, who during the Great Depression got the assignment
to write about some of the poorest communities in America. When Agree returned
to New York, months later, his writing about ‘white trash’ explored dignity, common
humanity and grace; and therefore the Biblical title. He put what was ‘on the side of
the road’ in the limelight. Slick success, unbridled competition, and heartless self-
interest were implicitly criticized by attention to the less glossy residue, visible in
what had been excluded from material wealth.
Stewart follows the same path and her writing relates to hopelessness, poverty,
ruined lives, and problematic emotions. She returned to Agee’s mining villages,
and through careful exploration, rediscovered their dignity, bringing to light how
the villagers talked their world into existence. All the physical components of the
villages – houses, roads and communal areas – were all alive with stories and images
of events. The world was strongly peopled with ‘others’, all of whom had vibrant
tales to tell, yielding a space that was humanly felt. In the oral culture of the villages,
each place was identified with chronicles of things that had happened . Existence
was in a space inhabited by human events, and life was lived within the stories of
interaction. Each place had its own narrative of loves and conflicts, where people

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had met and inter-tangled. Existence in such places meant that ‘self and other’ were
always related and affectively linked. Stewart is explicitly following in the tradition
of Agee, but her work is also redolent of Levinas and Buber, as she explores the ‘I/
Thou’ of addressing, and being addressed by, Other.
Stewart writes about America’s underclasses and outsiders, and about life-styles
that stray away from (or have been separated from) the consumerist dream. The
people in the villages are desperately poor, but their lives are rich in narration and
in the imagination that comes through storytelling. Every event is made into an
existential adventure worthy of exploration and many retellings – life is amazing,
full of import, and often unfathomable. Because they tell and retell their stories, with
characters, events and places of their own choosing, they live in their texts, rather
than as spectators to stories gained by consuming mass media. Their lives are ‘in
place’.
The ‘road’ is defined by exploitation, poverty, repression and inequality, and Stewart
recognizes that she can do very little about any of this; she is not an interventionist,
but a witness. She sits on the side-lines, collecting oral histories by listening and
recording, and (much later) by writing and publishing. As an ethnographer, she is not
‘on the road’ or part of the road, rather she lets the other come to her. She is affected
and moved by what she is told – and tries to convey that in the assemblage of stories
that she puts together – but she does not attempt to give answers to the deprivations
caused by coal mining or the results of poverty. By holding to the proximal, Stewart
is able to show affect as a form of entrainment, in that one person is linked to the
other through circumstances. The world that Stewart reports on is imaginative and
emotional, but it is not one that is efficient or effectively organized. Her miners are
dirt poor, mostly unemployed, and entirely marginalized from much of American
society. ‘On the side of the road’, with the researched, is to be on the periphery of all
the ‘big’ social-economic and political issues.
Such research seems to hold promise for replication elsewhere, but it does require
careful thought as to what the research is designed to seek. When researchers tried
to use Stewart’s techniques to study Manchester Airport, in Britain, it did not
work. The researchers sought to investigate what they thought would be the lot
of the contemporary worker in a large multi-dimensional organization – that is,
to witness the confusion, disaffection, and frustration. But Stewart does not deal
in such categories: the world she opens out to is specific, living, and social, and
she reveals this by being directly affected by Other, helping us to co-feel moments
of existence. By contrast, the researchers at the airport had already identified it
as a deterritorialized non-space of alienation (Knox, O’Doherty, Vurdubakis &
Westrup, 2005, 2007) and what they saw in the airport was more an idea than a
place. Watching check-in or baggage personnel, or greeters and the welcomed in
the Arrivals and Departure Halls, might have generated interesting data, but that
would have produced narratives of lived-space, which was not what the researchers
sought.

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Later, Damien O’Doherty (2010) ‘lived’ in the same airport (in that he was
on-site daily for a year) and he was affected by it. He was able to illustrate the
stories that flowed through the space: the Polish waitress who could not celebrate
Christmas because she had to work in the coffee shop while the cat, which was
the office mascot, received salmon flown in especially from America. O’Doherty
discovered, how complicated airport security tests are more a question of having the
right friends, and thus getting the ‘right answers’ ahead of time, than of mastering
facts. For the casual traveller, the planes may fly all over the world and the airport
might seem a gargantuan machine for channelling ceaseless movement, but for
those working there, the employees’ lounges are spaces of safe haven, and the only
geography that counts. The ‘ordinary affectivity’ of the airport is characterized by
humour and sadness, inclusion and exclusion, skills and happenstance, acceptance
and rejection, and O’Doherty let these affect him. What is particularly notable is
that the affectivity of the social universe he studied is his human co-construct. He
observes the monstrousness of an organization that loves its cat more than its people,
but he is the connection between the waitress and the cat, and from them to us.
The researched do not necessarily ‘know’ or ‘speak’ directly to one another. In the
disjointed and often discontinuous world of interacts he describes, O’Doherty seems
to be the only sinew holding it all together.
With Stewart’s lived proximity on one end of the spectrum and O’Doherty’s
reconstructed awareness on the other, we suggest that there is a huge range of
different research possibilities through which to consider affect. Indeed, there are
more examples of successful affective ethnography that fill some of this space. Karen
Ho (2009) has produced a superb piece entitled Liquidated: an Ethnography of Wall
Street. Her focus was on new recruits to Wall Street and she narrates the ‘being-here’
of financial management, where the ‘best and brightest’ come to believe in their
own superiority, while being totally obsessed by money and working like dogs. Her
approach neatly sidesteps any need to evidence claims that the world of finance is
economically rational or efficient, or that it might be good for economic growth
(measured in GDP) or serve the interests of most people. She shows that bankers’
affective horizon is shaped by an overweening belief in their personal and social
superiority, coupled with intense avarice. Relatedness is visible, but it is the opposite
of what the word normally means, for here it is characterized by a profound lack
of friendship, mutuality or reflection. Profit, or the worship of the so-called ‘bitch
goddess of money’, is all-absorbing. Similarly, Robert Earhart’s (2011) Partiality
of Responsibility shows environmental (‘green’) ethics consultants competing in a
bizarre way to be environmentally conscious and successful, with the consequence
that the ‘believers’ fight each other to a bloody pulp, while the cynics from ‘big
consulting’ surreptitiously take over.
Affect examines how relatedness takes its course. This goes against the pragmatic
grain of professional schools, as it reveals, for example, how infighting may be
more important than strategy, jealousy can be a central driver of organizational
development, personal grief may secretly dominate relationships, and power, pride

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and arrogance may be overwhelming. Thus, this is research where the researcher
must be willing to hear whatever ‘being-here’ brings, even if it aggressively confronts
previous cosy notions of professional or organizational rectitude. The turn to affect
attempts to empirically study subjectivity and responsivity through relatedness,
and researchers may be unwilling to accept such a radically phenomenological
perspective. Relational or communicative openness has been textually rendered by
Berlant (1997, 2008-9) and Stewart (1996, 2007). It can leave us ‘struck’ (Cunliffe,
2002a, 2002b; Houweling, 2010), enthralled, and (sometimes) overwhelmed.
Affect can reveal joy, triumph or creativity, but it can also centre on jealousy,
revenge and greed. There is no guarantee that researching affect will result in more
fairness or social justice, since vengeance and hatred are strong affective logics.
Some, like Alphonso Lingis, believe that the social logic of affect is existentially
valuable, but this conviction is not universally accepted, and the precise benefits
remain uncertain. Connolly (2011) has used the turn to affect to defend American
pluralist democracy; Thrift (2009) to champion critical socialism; and Massumi
(Massumi, 2002; Carnera, 2012) to defend Deleuzian materialism. The multitude
of approaches and results simply confirm that there is nothing inherent in affect that
will ineluctably lead to the resolution of political or professional issues.
Affect as central to the researcher/researched relationship is one thing; affect
as a leadership or organizational tool is another. But the difference is only one of
degree; after all, the researcher intends to ‘move’ their constituency of readers.
This raises the issue of the presence of the orator, which in the polis, goes back
at least to ancient Greece. It poses the question as to whether orators really have
something to say or are they just sophists and frauds? Some contemporary orators
have presented power, greed or laziness as virtues, this is fairly obviously less heart-
warming than affects such as solidarity, altruism and engagement. We are reminded
that it is vitally important to consider how affect is marshalled or dominated. The
tradition of Levinas, within which we have placed Stewart and O’Doherty, focuses
on the affectivity of care, respect and affirmation; but the affective loss of rational
control and escape from formalized procedures is not necessarily a good thing. For
instance, the riots after the Kenyan elections of 2007 were affectively powerful, and
undoubtedly revealed collective will. But poor people butchering other poor people,
tribal vendettas centring on land ownership, and an attitude of ‘all or nothing’ power
grabbing, is profoundly problematic. Being in the slums of Nairobi, during the
riots, would have been existentially challenging and experientially overwhelming,
but would you really want to be there? Relatedness can be violent, repressive and
destructive; and it can produce epiphany, illumination and existential value, or it
canbe anything in between.
A homogeneous or single theory of otherness is a self-contradiction, because
it would negate the very multiplicity and difference Other refers to. One cannot
define ‘openness-to-an-Other’ without destroying it, and thus explanation or trying
to conceptually pin-down the gaze is a performative contradiction (Derrida, 1978).

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Affectivity assumes that the gaze will happen; awareness in relationship will occur;
self and other will intertwine, researchers will respond (Berlant, 1997, 2008a,
2008b, 2008–9; Clough, 2004, 2007). Ethnography, via the turn to affectivity
attempts to open the research space needed to record such events and relationships
(Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). It leaves the ethnographic researcher to attend to the
question, ‘What is the nature of the affectivity of this specific circumstance, at this
very moment, and between these persons or groups?’ The proximal position of
ethnographic research means that openness to affect is a possibility: the researcher
can own to having been startled, felt fear, shown interest, been angry, had sensations
of distress, burst into fits of laughter, undertaken acts of care, or expressed joy.
At its best, as we have seen, this can be extremely powerful. Belinda Straight
analyses her description of the death of the little girl in her car and she (2007) suggests
that affect leads to the Other of the Lacanian ‘Real’. The Lacanian ‘Real’ represents
a social-psychological and developmental perspective on lived experiential ‘truth’,
which is a necessary psychological category of human existence. Humans, as they
mature, discover the ‘Real’ or the circumstances, conditions and beliefs of their shared
existence. The ‘Real’ can be thought of as hypothetical or even as so many images
on the wall of a cave (an apt metaphor for cinema and modern media?) but the ‘Real’
operates as a necessary social device, which co-creates and maintains the possibility
of human experience. It encompasses all the assumptions, ideas and convictions
that make human sociability and culture possible. Thus, the ‘Real’ provides the pre-
conscious order that allows communication, allowing the cooperation that, together
with other pre-conditions, makes society possible. The newly-born child does not yet
possess a ‘Real’ – the ‘Real’ co-develops with relationship. Formation of the ‘Real’
is comparable to the ‘mirror stage’ in psychology, where the self gains an image
and awareness of itself when it cannot find another child behind the mirror (image)
and has to (pre-consciously) conclude that self and representation go together to
form one identity. For Lacan, self is not primary (for instance, given at birth), but a
product of a development process, wherein language plays a major role. The ‘Real’
is both the cause and effect of affect, since affect is a crucial precondition and means
of the ‘Real’. Whether we actually feel the same things is not provable, but that we
believe that we do, and thus share the same ‘Real’, is essential for society and culture
to exist; if the belief in the ‘Real’ breaks down, anarchy and chaos ensue.
Affect feeds the ‘Real’. If persons begin to disbelieve their affects, for instance by
taking the gaze of acknowledgement to really be one of greed, or thinking that care
hides perverted lust, or seeing joy as thinly disguised despair, then trust disintegrates
and sociability is jeopardised. Ethnography of the contemporary ‘Real’ seems to
reveal that success, achieved through material reward and power, had become a
hyper-dominant affect, which some observers do not believe is sustainable.
Alfonso Lingis’s writing (1984, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2005,
2007, 2011) indicates the potential richness of the turn to affect and of proximal
ethnography. He wrestles with the issues of researcher intentionality – in what

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sense can you choose for affect and its social ethics – and what ultimately do you
owe in proximal research to the other, to circumstance, to chance, and to life itself?
Lingis (1994, 2004) provides us with richly experiential and engaged texts, which
illustrate affects of engagement, and have in turn further inspired the ‘turn to affect’
in ethnography (Stewart, 1996, 2007).
Lingis’ ‘philosophy of responsiveness’ reveals “the intensity of circuits, surges,
and sensations” involved in affective attunement (Stewart, 2007: 7). In the ‘turn
to affect’, ethnographies represent sights and situations to reveal “attachment,
intimacy, exhaustion, and the unlivable but animating desires for rest or for the
simple life,” which are often coupled to a “world saturated by jumpy atunements”
(idem). Affectivity, in Lingis, is sought out, deliberately researched, and used to
“demonstrate or propose an extreme trajectory” (Stewart 2007: 40). Lingis pursues
the outer reaches of affectivity; he inspires, challenges and defies. He has consistently
pushed the boundaries of what might be possible in ethnographic research to their
limits.
There are many differing possibilities of affect and a vast variety of possible
forms of relatedness. Affectivity is not inherently good or bad, and there is far more
between heaven and earth than mutuality, confirmative awareness and positive
regard. Affectivity can produce guilt, aggression, repression and anger (Butler, 1997,
2004), as well as the positive emotions that many like to present as part and parcel
of the ‘turn to affect’. Any assumption that affect is intrinsically ethically affirmative
is naive.
Kathleen Stewart has asserted that Alphonso Lingis’s writing makes us aware of
the complexity of affect. Lingis’s own turn to affect came after he had translated and
interpreted Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Levinas’ ethics (Levinas, 1969,
1998, 2001; Merleau-Ponty, 1969; Lingis, 1997). Lingis (1984, 1994, 1995, 1998,
2000, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2011) has developed an ethnography of affect that is much
more radically mutual than is the gaze in Levinas, and much more experiential
than the flesh-of-the-world in Merleau-Ponty (1968). Lingis writes short descriptive
chapters, headed by a photograph, focusing on an encounter. On the surface, the
texts are miniature ethnographies leavened with (self-) reflection. His work returns
repeatedly to five key themes: the ethico-logical imperative (Kant), intentionality
(Husserl), the gaze (Levinas), embodiment (Merleau-Ponty), and (the erotics of)
being-to-death (Heidegger/Freud). His ethnographic descriptions are characterised
by a postmodern and phenomenological critique of the modern philosophical
cannon, making subjective and impressionistic use of evidence, with an emphasis
on immediacy.
Lingis argues via experiential description and not via theoretical confrontation.
Thus his discussion of the gaze takes the form of a reflection on the Easter
Island statues, whose blank expression he claims respects nature by prioritizing
environmental affordances, and man-world co-dependence. The statues show the
opposite of the hubris that claims that significance centres on the human face, and

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Lingis contrasts the ‘power and glory’ attributed to the Roman and American Empires
as seen in their statues with the mysterious mammoth (moai) statues of Easter Island:
The head of a moai is as big as its chest, and it has no feet; the thin arms and
long fingers are traced in relief over the abdomen, always in the same position.
The head very flat, is really just a face, with low forehead, sharp, square jaw,
thin, tight lips, a strong nose with wide-open nostrils carved in a spiral and huge
empty eyes. The face is turned upward somewhat; the eyes … look inward to
the island, and over the low grassy width of the island to the ocean beyond.
They are the depersonalized faces of the legendary chiefs … (Lingis, 2000: 3)
There is … no trace of the idealized anatomy of Greek anthropomorphized
gods, or of the haughty sovereignty of Roman emperors, or of the sacrificial
pathos of Jesus. The moai succeed one another along the edge of the sea and
deep in our hearts like matras. They do not direct us to be on the lookout for
another island or for stray ships full of Peruvian gold. They lift our eyes from
the surface of the island, and direct our gaze beyond the horizon. Their strong
nostrils take in the wind. (Lingis, 2000: 21)
Euro-American culture celebrates power, purpose and success; it conquers, triumphs
and changes the world. The Easter Island statues, which are almost entirely uniform,
represent continuity, similarity, and the lack-of-change. Since 1722, the Europeans
have brought sickness, (attempted) enslavement, ecological ruin, political instability,
and the destruction of the statues to the Easter Islands. In the European historical
frame of reference, the Eastern islanders were purposeless and irrelevant. Their
statues had “vacant eyes reflecting the radiance of the skies, [with] the song of the
winds and the seas … on those lips, and that those great stone faces … held the
colour of the ardent lava and of the restless ocean depths” (Lingis, 2000: 23).
Repetition and continuity, symbolizing a society that is not going anywhere, are
irrelevant to a society that is carried along on a narrative of progress. But the vacant
ocean, empty sky, and never-ending winds that the statues address (and mirror) may
be more basic and fundamental than any of the ideas of European culture. On the
Easter Islands, the restlessness of the ocean and the existential resolve of the people
meet. The statues are not a product of artists’ “needs and wants” or of “an inner
psychic will that is the will to power” (Lingis, 2000: 18). The winds and ocean
currents, and the noises of living motility, characterize life on the islands. The moai
are not purposeful; they are a human reflection of nature:
… they surge and ebb in intensity. They are vehement, raging, prying,
incandescent, tender, cloying, ardent, lascivious. It is through its irritability, its
fear, its rage, its languor, its exuberance that (nature) … become(s) visible to
us. (Lingis, 2000: 29)
For Lingis, the energy and power of nature is much more fundamental than that of
human activity:

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We assign special importance, in everyday life, to purposive or goal-oriented

movement. Yet most movements – things that fall, that roll, that collapse, that
shift, that settle, that collide with other things, that set other things in motion –
are not goal-oriented. (Lingis, 2000: 29)

Lingis asserts that human causality or intentionality is mostly inferior to nature’s.

His ecological ethnography challenges the prioritization of the knowing subject:

Everywhere humans move, we leave sweat, stains, urine, fecal matter. The
organized constructions of our sentences flatten into bromides, erode into
clichés, deteriorate into prattle, collapse into sighs, screams, sobbing, and
laughter in orgasm. What we call construction and creation is the uprooting of
living things, the massacre of millions of paradisal ecosystems, the mindless
trampling of minute creatures whose hearts throb with life. (Lingis, 1995: 256)

Lingis’s being-here is impassioned, aroused and carried away by its immediate

surroundings. Circumstances trigger an aesthetic imperative wherein aliveness is
felt: affect makes us spellbound, fascinated and enthralled through the experience
of the other.
‘The nudity of the face of the other’ (Derrida, 1996: 106), is where the ‘shimmer
of infinity’ gives value to life (Levinas, 1969: 207). Affect or empathy opens onto
immediately lived, direct contact with other, and thus affect overwhelms and emotion
carries us away: the erotic and existential force of “the depth of the body invades
the face, darkening it with ambiguity and ardor” (Lingis, 2000: 49). Affect brings an
‘ecstasy of vision’ that rinses away the solitude of the self and opens us into the joy
of the loss-of-self (Lingis, 2004).
Lingis (2011) has defined three criteria for successful affective ethnography:
(i) the ‘being-here’ or ‘at-hand’ of experience and relationship must prevail over
the ‘being-there’ of objectivity and rationalization; (ii) the research does not fall
into deadening repetition; and (iii) inspiration by the power of aliveness, rather
than fear for life, is required. Ethnography answers the other’s, or outsider’s, or
philosopher’s classical question: “Why do you do as you do?” (Lingis, 1994: 3).
Providing such answers links self and other via questions and responses and so, for
Lingis, ethnography and philosophy can be as one.
Lingis continually (re-)enacts the outsider, writing from the perspective of
the sojourner or traveller, and his books cover experiences in, amongst others,
Nicaragua, India, Thailand, Brazil, Ethiopia and Jordan. In his texts, he is almost
never at ‘home’ – that is, in the rich industrialized world, teaching courses at a
university, with family, friends and colleagues. He is instead nomadic – his gaze is
always displaced, wandering, or just passing through. His relationship to place is
intense and emotional, but always limited to a few persons, fleeting and momentary.
He is always ‘the ethnographer’ or ‘the stranger’, who examines and watches, and
is moved and enthralled, and is struck and amazed. Never really part of things, his
gaze is always directed to Other:

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What is it that speaks in these terminal and inaugural situations? Not the
ego as a rational mind, as a representative of universal reason that possesses
the a priori categories and the a priori forms of the rational organization of
sensory impressions. What speaks is someone in his or her materiality as an
earthling; one that breathes, sighs, and vocalizes in the rumble of the city and
the murmurs of nature; one whose blood is warm with the warmth of the sun
and the ardors of the night. One whose flesh is made of earth – dust that shall
return to dust – who stands facing another with the support of the earthy rising
up in him or her; one whose face is made of light and shadow and whose eyes
are made of light and tears. (Lingis, 1994: 117)

Lingis (2011) has clarified his ethics of openness to Other, which he calls ‘being-
here’, via a discussion of ‘art brut’. Naïve or ‘art brut’ artists are solely focused on
their art with no ulterior motives. Professional artists paint for galleries, benefactors,
museums and advertising agencies; they do not paint for the artistic endeavour itself.
Their goal is to sell and to gain approbation in a system where commercialization
makes art (and the making of art) into objects to be marketed and sold. It is not
prestige, money or power, but existential ‘here-ness’ that defines the outsider art of
‘being-here’ to which Lingis compares his ethnography.
In his ethnography, Lingis is in pursuit of ‘being-here’. He touches and is touched
via a ‘gaze’ characterised by ‘trust’, where “trust is the strong surge of feeling that
connects us with others. Trust is impulsive and immediate. You do not decide to
trust someone: you just trust him, or you do not. The leap of trust is exhilaration.’
(Lingis, 2011: 13). Affect entails trust; the guide in Madagascar (2004) who led
Lingis out of the jungle, or the peasant in India who brought him to the hospital
(1994), acted without utilitarian goals; they were guided by a relational imperative
of pre-conceptual humanism, which is not rationally controlled or institutionally
regimented.
Lingis asserts that the existential imperative of life is more primary than is the
subject. But, how to understand this imperative? In Dangerous Emotions (2000),
affect is engendered by presence, enthrallment, mystery and event. The force of
aliveness or of life beguiles, inspires and threatens. This is the life-force that affect
reveals, and which sustains sociability and ‘being-here’.
Being with the other requires courage to welcome the other, to engage with
circumstance, and to be affected. The ‘Other’ can bring laughter, passion and
justice; but also anxiety, fear and conformism, and so courage is needed to feel, see,
experience, write and report. Lingis celebrates the extremes of affectivity and some
readers will find what he does shocking, even offensive, while others may wish to
find him irrelevant. He will not reach all audiences with his assertions of affectivity
in all its rawness and direct power: some will be unmoved, others hostile. But, for
Lingis, the expression of affect is absolutely crucial: he believes that rationalization
and emotionless prose are refusals of life, while courage and powerful illustration
embrace it:

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Nora Astorga was born into one of the richest ruling families {of Nicaragua}
… ambitious and gifted, she went to law school. Exceptionally intelligent
and extraordinary beautiful … she restricted her practice to defending those
arrested by the Guardia Nacional of the Somoza dictatorship … [whose]
commander in chief … was known as El Perro, “the Dog”; he visited arrested
subversives in their cells, smeared their testicles with grease, and released his
dogs on them. From time to time, passing Nora Astorga in the corridors of the
courts, he murmured to her that if she really wanted to help her clients, she
could visit him privately.
One afternoon, upon leaving the court building, she left word that she would
be home that night, and if he would like to visit her perhaps he might have what
he wished. He came ... she opened the door to him herself, clad in a seductive
dress ... she poured him a drink, tasted it, and passed it, laughing, to him. She
stood close to him and abruptly kissed him on the mouth. She murmured to
him to come into her bedroom and leave the bodyguards outside. Closing her
bedroom door behind her, she laughed and dropped her dress to the floor. He
embraced her and she pressed up against him, pressing her laughter into his
mouth, holding his head tight as the Sandinista slipped out of the closet and cut
his throat. (Lingis, 2000: 169–170)

Lingis calls this mixture of sexuality, violence and justice, the “gift”. He claims that
it “seizes hold of all that is possible,” trusting what “has to be done” (Lingis, 2000:
114). The fears, thrills, concerns, conflicts, victories and defeats of lived-existence
are poorly represented in most academic writing; the lack of affect produces
washed-out, dull representations of existence. Lingis attempts to reclaim the passion
of relatedness. But identifying affectivity with courage, and rationalization with
cowardice, is not unproblematic. Passion does not sit very well with modern history,
where the risk of totalitarian affect looms large. Existential and erotic identification
with the Other may not be the best defence for repressive violence.
Lingis’s existential involvement is clearly lived. His authorial ‘I’ connects with
others via radical acts of researching. Powerful feelings of disgust and fascination,
love and hatred, decay and birth, solidarity and injustice, may be fundamental
affects of our existence; but we also live with practices and organizations, rules and
order, grammars and precedents. The horrified face of loss and the joyous scream
of delight, are affects that touch us and remain with us; but quotidian regularity
and daily responsibilities make up much of our lives. The contemporary consumer
society may be hyper-performative and hysterical; marketing may alienate and
exploit; but consumption is also a powerful affect.
Studying ‘being-here’ entails seen, felt, and observed awareness. It focuses on
what situated consciousness means for experiencing ‘I to other’ relatedness. In
many ways, the focus on experience or consciousness, as a source of knowledge
about the world, has always been with us, albeit often more readily recognised in
the arts and humanities than in social studies. Ethnography’s turn to affect has re-

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opened the existential examination of consciousness. Since we do not exist in a

world of ethically voided technique, but in one of responsibilities and relationships,
sociability and being-together, what we recognise by ‘being-here’ cannot simply
be ignored. Contemporary bureaucratic society too easily frames responsibility in
terms of procedures, protocols and rules. We need to ask if professional practice is
sustainable, responsible to others, and justifiable as a form of ‘being-here’. Affective
ethnography produces a contemporary existentialism, open to lived-relationship,
and to the ethics of addressing the self/other relationship.
For affective ethnography, the quality of the relations studied and reflected upon
is crucial. In too much research, the description, communication, and relatedness of
‘being-here’ is inadequate as research re-produces the same concepts, assumptions
and pre-reflective categories, over and over again. The turn to affect pushes the
proximal ‘being-here’ agenda to one of ‘being-touched’. Being ‘in touch’ or ‘being
touched’ requires affect and the direct physical perception of joy, kindness, fear, pain,
et cetera. Affect is tactile in that it requires direct sensory contact. This tactile theme
runs further: ethics studies tact or the questioning, probing, supporting and consoling
of contact. As a corollary, affect is relational, and in research it should be tactful.
Stewart’s portrayals of downtrodden dead-end lives provoke sympathy and, quite
possibly, some sadistic pleasure. Her descriptions of community are enthralling and
deeply touching. Lingis pushes affectivity into the dark places and the abject(s) of
action and consciousness. Affect is not necessarily comfortable; relationships are not
necessarily neatly ‘measured out in coffee spoons’ (T S Eliot, 1991). Ethnographies
of affect search for relatedness and can be(come) shocking, deviant, threatening and
frightening . One can shun all of this by avoiding the other and by limiting research to
individualist economic rationality or what is safe and known. But this entails a refusal
to see, feel, and experience the affects, for instance, of ‘being-here’ in professional
life. Fear, jealousy, hatred, competition and pettiness abound, although there is also
solidarity, altruism, integrity and love. Conventional research shuns these more than
it embraces them, and this is unlikely to change. Research that confirms the rational
monad as a calculating unit of economic self-interest will probably not turn to affect. But
descriptions of people in their relationships can set research loose, via the turn to affect.
Lingis points to the passion, dynamism and the poetics of lived agency. But his
dynamism, at least in part, overwhelms rationality and intentionality, and refuses
to be called to order. We are trapped here between Scylla and Charybdis, between
deadening rationality and potentially chaotic indeterminacy. Lingis may be right
phenomenologically, involvement may be irrational, action can be all-embracing, and
relationships are often existentially primary. But his pre-intuitive, pre-conscious and
pre-reflexive insights may not bring us closer to explanative or evaluative theories of
practice. For Lingis, care for other is grounded in pre-rational belonging, basic human
attachment, and inherent involvement. Research that deals with these themes needs
affectivity. The ‘turn to affect’ defines a relevant PhD wherein the researcher has to
reckon with being-here, being-in and being-with. Each researcher has to determine
how radical a demand the Other really is making of them, and how to sate that demand.

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INTERTEXT FIVE

Robert Earhart: A price to be paid

It’s odd talking to your PhD supervisors about supervision. It’s filled with
peril. There are two ways I could look AT my experience of being supervised.
The supervision was great in terms of overall learning experience. In terms of
efficiency, it was not efficient, but efficiency is not how judge it. I think if I had
rushed through things, or had been too methodical, or too checklist-orientated
about my approach, it would have probably killed my spirit.
I had two supervisors. But actually, I talked to everyone on the faculty at
some point. Each of them had a different perspective and gave me other ideas
and possibilities. The thesis supervision in the first year of the program was
fairly methodical, it happened mostly through set groups during the workshops,
plus a few individual conversations. After I bombed out with my initial project
proposal presented in Workshop 4, I had to rethink the thesis. From the first three
workshops, I was expecting: ‘Hooray, this is great!’ I was used to getting that
kind of feedback. Then when I got slammed down in the last workshop of the first
year, it was just so unexpected, but at the same time it was necessary. Looking
back, there was no way that my initial proposal could have worked in the end.
Anyway it would have been a clichéd and derivative piece about sustainability
that has already been done many times over. It would have lacked any sort of
depth. It would have actually produced the kind of thing that I mock, if it had been
somebody else’s. In fact, in my thesis, I mocked exactly such work.
During the second and third year, the supervision was mostly about ideas and
approaches. I spent some time in the wilderness. I read a lot of theory that ended
up not getting used. But I think that was necessary. For instance, I did a lot of
work on Bruno Latour’s actor network theory. That did not pan out. I did some
work on David Harvey and Frederic Jameson, exploring the mid to late 90’s
postmodernist approach. I did a lot of work on Gilles Deleuze; some of which did
pan out. Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman and Mikhail Bakhtin came later. In
terms of knowledge acquisition, it was very valuable. And it helped me to move
forward. Ruling things out helped me to focus. But I actually really didn’t know
what I was writing about, until the last year.
For a long time, my focus was on theory and having the ethnography somehow
reflect the theories. What ended up making me realize what I was writing about
was when I finally said: ‘OK, let’s look at the data. What does the data actually
have to say about the theory.’ That reversal or flip made the thesis (more) data
driven, and it made it my story, rather than just an illustration of theory. It still
took me a while, but then I actually figured out what my thesis was about.
Initially, I was writing about the challenges of being a sustainability professional,
trying to reconcile the theories and ideologies of sustainability with a business
world that was unwilling to accommodate them. But in the end, the thesis became

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about the ethical and theoretical vacuousness of a lot of sustainability theory.

That produced a much more relevant, grounded, story about sustainability. Why
sustainability professionals were behaving the way they were behaving, why
their world was so massively dysfunctional, why so much blatant hypocrisy. All
of that actually made much more sense and it made for a much better thesis.
A lot of sustainability theory is fairly vacuous, facile and not particularly
relevant. It is naïve idealism, combined with economic sleight of hand. In a way,
you actually have to ignore a lot of fundamental economic realities and business
practices to actually believe in it. There are lots of contradictions within the
theory and problems with sustainability theory in practice. The other aspect is
that sustainability professionals fool themselves into believing that their business
practice is all about the sustainability. That just isn’t feasible, because you cannot
be a fully sustainable, sustainability professional, and still be economically
viable. There are too many internal contradictions and contradictions with
external economic realities, to really make that feasible. What I documented in
the thesis is how in the Wild West days of independent sustainability practitioners,
the practitioners grappled with daily reality. How did they really earn the keep?
How did they interact with the organizations that they depended upon for their
breadwinning?
Sustainability ended up becoming almost completely appropriated by standard
business and professional practices, and a lot of independent sustainability
practitioners were basically left in the dust. The ones that did not adapt or that did
not somehow evolve, basically found themselves left behind. It happened very
suddenly. In 2004, when I started, it was all talk, nothing was happening; then
suddenly, BOOM, every company started doing a CSR report. So there were gigs
about helping to write sustainability reports; suddenly you had this professional
class that emerged from nowhere. But they weren’t drawn from the sustainability
true-believers. These were PR people, marketing people, people that already
had experience in banks or whatever, who were grabbing the work. Product or
consumer orientated industries had discovered sustainability as a sort of tack-on.
Sustainability true-believers did not benefit from the shift and that was another
depressing reality that I discovered when I became more data-oriented.
My supervisors initially fed me with possibilities. In the first year, it was to
have fun and play in the intellectual sand box, and I had lots of fun in that sand
box. I did incredibly well in the sand box. But I had to make the transition from
the sand box to the ‘Now you’re writing your thesis, kiddo’, and that transition
was not so smooth. It took a couple of years, and it took a lot of trying out different
things.
As I said, there were three phases. Phase one was: ‘We’re in the sand box
and having fun’, phase two was ‘We’re all over the place, with lots and lots of
different theories, exploring what might be possible’, and phase three was ‘Make
it data driven’. Actually, there was a phase between two and three: ‘Wander alone

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in the wilderness, and figure out what you are doing’. When I was preparing
for the viva (the oral thesis defence) both of my supervisors told me: ‘We knew
where you needed to go, but you needed to know where you needed to go We
tried try telling you, but you needed to find your own way there’. And it was
true. It wasn’t until there was a really horrible meeting during the wilderness
period that I shaped-up. I had turned in what I thought was a mostly finished draft
and the supervisors came back with: ‘You aren’t even close.’ I was expecting
approval. A few revisions might be needed; I might have to write a few more
pages, and they were some gaps; but to have the supervisors come back and ask:
‘What are you trying to do?’ I had around 120 pages already written, and I could
not articulate in a single short paragraph what I was actually doing. In retrospect,
I had strung together some cool stuff from Deleuze and Baudrillard, and Bakhtin,
and basically, was jumping from the one to the other. Each chapter was sort of a
separate entity, which was interesting in itself. But the manuscript was all over the
place and I was actually contradicting myself, as I went along.
Basically, I just wanted to be done at that point. I just wanted to be finished
and was thinking: ‘Okay I’m done, yeah’. Then I found out I was not done, and
what I had done up to that point did not work. One supervisor seemed almost
angry: ‘This is just fashionable bits and pieces with no cohesion. It looks like
an intellectual fashion show!’ But it was weird because the other supervisor had
said: ‘Oh it looks wonderful’. He was so supportive. I was expecting to finish
,and then I found out that I basically had more to do; it was really distressing.
That’s when I started to work with John Robert’s re-interpretation of Levinas,
as a way out of my lack of any overarching principles of coherence. Really,
I had nothing interesting to say about sustainability. I listed all the contradictions
and dilemmas, but that just wasn’t enough. That was not a PhD thesis. So
then I reworked all but one of the chapters. I more or less dropped Deleuze,
expanded on Bakhtin, and brought in Baudrillard as sort of absurdist foil. The
entirety started to perform in the way that I wanted it to. The self/other ethics was
methodologically interesting, and propelled the narrative along. And via John
Roberts, I could show the necessity of personal responsibility for others, being
a sort of deus ex machina, because there was really almost no other way out of
the ethical and performative contradictions. That was the key. It took me a year
working on it, to finally figure it out. So I could actually say: ‘My thesis is about
the impossibility for sustainability professionals to reconcile the contradictions
between their stated theories and consulting practices, and their self-perceptions,
in the context of the economic and business realities that they have to work
in’. There’s a lot of hypocrisy and there is lots of irony. And there is a lot of
dysfunction. And a lot of the dysfunction results directly from the practitioners
themselves. Within sustainability, there are lots problems. The simulacra or
simulation metaphor worked well to reveal that.

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I ended with what seemed the only way to resolve all the contradictions –
recognising that independent professionals were a dying breed. Only via encounter
with other, taking personal responsibility for one another, as well as for the clients
we were working with, could we be coherently different from all the PR flack.
And I ended with my decision to use ethics to solve a professional conflict. So I
had a one-paragraph description of my thesis and I knew what the point was. But
basically, the supervisors both said, after the fact, that there was no way I could
ever complete unless I found my way, myself. Supervisors can indicate where the
thesis leads to, but the student has to figure it out.
We met in a cafe in Paris after the horrible meeting where the supervisors
had thrashed my draft. I was despondent, depressed, seriously considering anti-
depressants, since my consulting was also in crisis. That was a really a bad year. I
had found out that not only did I not make any money off the project I’d worked
extremely hard on and had produced a good product in the context, but I had lost
€30,000 and owed it to the project manager. It had been their accounting error that
caused the loss, in the first place, but I owed the money. And my thesis was not
moving forward like I thought it should. That was all at the same time, so I was
upset at that meeting. Yeah, I remember that meeting, I remember it well.
That was rock bottom. That meeting, I was at rock bottom at that point. There
was not much further down I could go. I was alienating the supervisors, I even
alienated another student who was there to discuss his thesis. And I was late,
because I couldn’t find the café. I was just angry about everything, and my life
sucked, it was awful. I could only go up from that point.
The ‘fall’ seems necessary. Take student M for example. I’ve actually talked
to her a lot about her thesis and I’m trying to help her avoid some of the mistakes
that I made, but I told her: ‘You’re going to have to not know what you are doing,
for a while.’ Because she kept trying to make her thesis into this thing that it
wasn’t, and that wasn’t interesting, and it was horribly boring to read. She’d give
me text to read and I’d get through ten pages and conclude: ‘I just don’t care
about this. This is not interesting, this is just boring.’
M would insist that she needed to position and frame everything. It was like a
drawing where she insisted upon putting thick black lines around everything. It
is just not the way to do it. And it kills everything that could be interesting. She
actually went through about eighteen months in the wilderness. She has a much
more stable career that I had at the time, so she was able to avoid the whole life
falling apart bit. But it took her a while to figure out what she was doing. She
knows that now. Her other problem has been that she has idolised her theorists.
She was all, Bauman this, Bauman that, Bauman is so wonderful. She’s read
everything about him, she knows far more about Bauman than I do, but yeah, she
wasn’t willing to take Bauman on, or to figure out what she had to say. She was far
too in awe of Bauman. And since Bauman’s theme is fluidity and the uncertainty
of relationship, she was producing one big performative contradiction. She was

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idolizing a theorist who denies that idolizing is a workable contemporary strategy.

It took her a while to figure that out, as well. But the other problem that I had, that
I think matches all the other students that I’ve talked to, is that they need to stop
reading at some point. And when they need to pick up reading again, it needs to
be very strategic. Every student does this. They will pick up something new and
think: ‘It will be even cooler when I include this’. You just cannot include it all.
You just end up all over the place and you just are confusing yourself. That was
actually another lesson, at a point I was told by several people to stop reading, and
I didn’t listen, and I wish I had. Because then I would have been done a lot faster.
I would have avoided the whole Latour, Harvey and Jameson mess, amongst
other messes.
Not to belittle anybody’s thesis, but I think that both student R and A, in the
end just wanted to finish the PhD degree, to finish the book. So both of them were
willing to stop short of what was interesting. R had all those interviews from the
field. She had done a lot of fieldwork. It wasn’t like she didn’t do the work. And
the same with A, he had some pretty good data. But then the story, the narrative
that was constructed, never really worked. The data never took off and managed
to say something interesting. In both cases, they produced a book but when you
read them, you just wonder what does this really mean? They obviously used a
lot of theory; they’ve done their literature reviews and collected data. Everything
is in place, but there’s no soul. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a pass, but that’s it:
‘You’ve written a PhD thesis, congratulations, here’s your degree’.
Many of us wrote about where we were currently working, so we were active
participants in our research and actually were contributors to the data itself. We
were not interested in pulling the positivist move of pretending to be the distant
objective researcher and we could never have claimed that. I think if you are
going to research your own world, you almost have to have a crisis. It reminds
me a lot of coming out. When I came out to my family and friends, initially
there’s all this angst and awfulness preceding the confrontation. There’s the
awfulness of it actually happening and then there’s a few further points of
awfulness. But the whole thing about coming out was that it wasn’t really what
other people thought. It was coming to grips with it myself, and the thesis was
almost exactly the same process in terms of the price you pay. If you want to
be legitimate as to who you are as a researcher, if you want to really answer
questions and address those questions in a meaningful way, you have to pay the
price. Those who don’t are doomed to repeat themselves. I’ve noticed with the
good work that’s been produced, everyone’s paid a price. In our program, with
a good thesis, you can tell that there was a certain price of flesh taken for it.
T’s thesis was considered pretty good and he paid a price professionally. He
was in a very tenuous position, made more so by the approaches that his thesis
afforded. K as well. He looked behind the curtain and I think he didn’t pay the
price in the writing, as much as he saw things that cannot be unseen. Conventional

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pathways may not be open in the future, that’s my understanding. How accurate
that is I don’t know. But I get the impression that the university now wants to
censor the theses so nothing too critical can slip through.
Student L, same thing. In fact her process was really painful, it was painful for
her. She had to start from scratch several times from what I understand. Every time
she expected that she would have these idyllic results: school children singing
beautiful songs outside the window, the clouds parting and angels coming down,
and every single time, it was just the students that she was working, who didn’t
care. Every idealistic approach that she took, she got smacked and, yeah, she paid
the price. Her’s was good. Student S, he paid the price methodologically more
than anything. He’s a technology idealist, very theological with his approach, and
he got smacked down in his defence, apparently, that’s what I heard. Okay, so
the price has been paid there. But as far as I know, everyone who has produced a
distinguished thesis has paid some kind of price.
Paying the price also entails a certain self-transformation. You become
different. It can be a socio-economic price. Let’s go back to Ellis’ auto-
ethnography. Everybody there ended up socio-economically worse off. No better
but always worse off, but I don’t think that applies to the PhD; the majority have
gotten professorships at polytechnics.
The other thing is a certain camp-side rule that I always adhere to, which is
that you should leave things the same or better than when you found them. I think
the PhD program generally has been successful in that, most people are the same
or better off than when they started, in terms of their socio-economic status. I
think what’s different though, this might be me projecting onto everybody else,
but I definitely feel that I am more authentic in the sense that I better know what
I want. There is a weird depression that comes after finishing your thesis. You
think everything is going to be great, children singing and the sky opening up,
unicorns and whatnot. It’s actually not; you are relieved to be done. The dinner
after the defense, I was just so exhausted but so happy. But then there is the
realisation that you still have to find your way forward. Not all your problems are
solved. You can call yourself ‘doctor’ but that doesn’t necessary mean that you
get the job. And so, then, things just start all over again. But the one thing that
came out of it was that I did not want to work in sustainability anymore, because
I knew too much. It’s hard in the current project that I’m working on, to keep a
straight face. It’s hard not to be cynical, when you know too much. But I think
the groundwork has been laid for me to be a lot more satisfied with my career
choices while moving forward. I feel a lot more capable of making better choices
than I have in the past. That said, the one thing the thesis hasn’t changed is that
I’m still a horrible judge of character. I still see ‘good’ when there isn’t necessary
any. So yeah, that’s still there but I think generally, camp-side, I am better off. I’m
definitely better off in the moves I’m making to move forward.

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It seems to me that the graduates, more than average for a university, keep
contact with one another. I’ve kept contact with V and A. And H, I didn’t know
in the program, he just kind of showed up when I had the book published, but
we stay in contact. S I’ve lost contact with, but we’re friends on Facebook. I’m
trying to kind of think through who I’m really close with, but the people I was
really close to in the program, I still am concerned about and keep in contact
with. But I also think that you do rely so much more on those experiences. For
example, M and I were incredibly good friends, but actually this process has
brought us much closer together, as friends, in terms of accepting each other’s
faults. M’s put herself in a vulnerable position, I think with the work she’s
doing.
She’s basically calling the bluff on her industry, but in a very interesting sort
of way. In a way that’s not too hard, because her industry is to a large degree
bluff, but she’s called it in a way that is very unique. I’ve actually learned a
lot about the advertising industry by talking with her about it. I’m definitely
motivated eventually to supervise PhD students. It’s a horribly frustrating
process, I can tell, but it’s also quite rewarding. I think I’m sort of quasi-
supervising M right now. I mean, because I give her feedback and ideas, but
I’ve learned a lot. I think the supervisors learn quite a bit as well. So I think
that the give and take between the students and the supervisors, does cement, I
think, profound relationships.
There is a danger in being the subject of your own research and this is
particularly for PhD’s who are professionals, and not full time PhD students in
the traditional social science pose. When you do research you take risks; you do
not just take career risks, but you expose yourself and your profession or other
people. We’ve always considered knowledge to be good, but it’s not always.
It cuts both ways. Knowledge is not necessarily a good thing to have. Do you
really want to know these things? Would you be better off, not knowing? And
when you look at yourself in the context of your career, you are playing with
fire with your career and your career choices. Now, I’m not saying that you
will write something that will damage your career, but you might. If you are
really doing research you do not know ahead of time exactly what will come
out of it. You might have to assert that something has no meaning, that there’s
no fulfilment, that there are irreconcilable problems, and you might discover
that what truly drives you is something else. Then, are you willing to accept the
potential economic consequences in intellectual and cultural capital to make a
shift? There are risks with what you learn about yourself and what you perceive
about yourself, and how you perceive yourself in the world. Your self-image
may have to change. There are all sorts of little risks, they are not the hard risks,
but they can have a profound effect on you. And that effect can sometimes be
difficult or hard to swallow. If I had known all of that, when I went in, I probably

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would still do it all again, but it would make me pause, it would have made
me nervous. It’s something that you don’t know about until you go through
it. I don’t know if it’s even appropriate to warn students about these potential
effects. Can the warning mean anything ahead of time? Other students that I’ve
talked to, have had similar shifts and experiences, and they have drawn similar
conclusions.
Although you are actually, more or less, doing the same sorts of things after
you graduate as before you began, things have changed. You can, for example,
take two mobile phones with all the same functions, but the components inside
can be performing in a much different way, the one from the other. It is an internal
transformation in how you see yourself, and how you relate to other people
around you. I am a lot more patient than I used to be. I’m kinder, I think, than
I used to be. I’m nicer than I think I used to be. But I also don’t trust people as
much as I used to. I don’t trust what I’m told. I ask a lot more questions. I’m
not as easily played as I used to be. Played, as in, an arrogant male trying to put
you in your place. Because there are lots of very arrogant business executives,
when I was consulting I came across them a lot. If somebody tries to put me
down, like on this current project, it’s not so easy. A skill I’ve gained is turning
those situations back on the perpetrator, by changing the level of abstraction.
There are so many different things you learn in the process, which make you
better equipped to handle confrontation, or to avoid confrontation. I’m not saying
that PhD’s makes you smarter, but you definitely become more methodologically
rigorous. Both career-wise and socially, so I think that’s been an after effect that’s
been quite interesting.
It would have been a lot easier to do a thesis in a logical positivist tradition.
When I talk to people from that tradition about qualitative methodology, and
about auto-ethnography or ethnology in general, and about what my thesis was
about, there is almost a sort of disdain they show. But then I say, honestly, that it
would have been a lot easier to write a thesis like your’s, than to do mine. Mine
was a lot more difficult. And some of them will actually recognise that when I
talk about all the steps that I had to go through, that there’s no prescribed table
of contents that all the these follow, and that you don’t get to kill 120 pages on
literature review, and that we are working very hard. So I want to put that out
there that for those who look down their nose at this type of program, and this
form of research and knowledge acquisition, it’s a lot harder because you’re not
making truth claims that are spurious. I think epistemologically we acknowledge
our limits. It’s hard, I think intellectually, methodologically, and in the amount of
hours, and in terms of the process, much more difficult. But it has become much
easier for me to respond, to defend myself, and also to advance the robustness of
my methods.

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NOTE
1
Contrastingly, in Deleuze’s body-without-organs, relatedness overwhelms difference and the eternal
return of repetition dominates linear time. His rejection of analytic categorization, resembles aspects
of the ‘turn to affect’ but there Deleuze also rejects the multiplicity of the one and the other denying
the very grounds to respect, justice and care, crucial to Levinas.

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THE CONTENT IS THE PROCESS;

THE PROCESS IS THE CONTENT

How the graduate student becomes a successful writer of a PhD thesis is normally
well-disguised and little is revealed of the process of thesis writing. To some degree,
this may be because thesis supervision has traditionally been thought of as a very
individual relationship between a professor and a research student, and professional
prestige benefits from secrecy. However, we believe that it is important to pull
back the curtain and investigate the relationship more closely, and we identify two
issues that require particular attention. The first is how graduate students change
from uninitiated to competent researchers, including the ‘pedagogy’ of learning to
write a PhD thesis. It is ‘pedagogy’ because it is not a matter of classroom teaching
and schooling, but of the relationship between an academic supervisor and graduate
student, and, in this relationship, the graduate student changes. In fact, a successful
PhD thesis requires considerable personal change, since it is not just a matter of
mastering skills, or of successfully displaying competencies, but of the development
of an authorial ‘I’ or the persona of the researcher. What has to change, and how it
changes, is the focus of the pedagogy of graduate research.
The second issue is that how the research text is created is an essential part of
what the thesis has to say. This contention demands consideration of a wider debate
as to what the PhD thesis is for. There is a managerial perspective that sees PhDs
as the epitome of skilled knowledge workers, with the goal of aiding economic
development as efficiently as possible. By contrast, a democratic humanist
perspective posits critical relatedness and/or communitarianism as the ideal outcome.
The alternative to the managerial focus of aiding the knowledge economy entails
creative research methodology and passionate engagement in scholarship. We can
see how this demarcation has played itself out within the so-called ‘culture wars’ of
American academe, where anti-traditionalists faced off against traditionalists, or in
the parallel debate between ‘realism’ and ‘social constructionism’. Both arguments
were ferocious, and went to the heart of what academic study is. Starting with Bill
Readings (1996) critique of the contemporary university (a text that we have already
met several times in this book) the question has been: ‘What sort of truth does
an American university aim for?’ Is it individuality and the promise of economic
betterment within hyper-capitalism linked to mass democracy? Or is it to deliver
innovation and a necessary critique of the status quo? Since the author of a thesis
has to take sides, the arguments point up that one’s authorial perspective always
has been (and always will be) a political issue – one where there has rarely been

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much tolerance for opposing positions. Given the money, and institutional power
structures, that cleave to the status quo, social studies, in general, has clung to the
mainstream, although there are some (fairly extreme) pockets of radical and critical
intellectualism. Circumstances unavoidably circumscribe what is written.
This implies that thesis supervision is, de facto, part of the thesis’s methodology
and identity. From this comes the question: was the writer invited to express their
own ideas, or was there an anxious emphasis on conformity to some ‘professional
canon’? One way of looking at this is to consider the PhD thesis as a multi-voiced
product. There is a PhD candidate (obviously), but there is also the supervisor, other
faculty members, a peer group and the researched. Relationships between all of these
are constitutive of what is and can (or cannot) be written.
This chapter illuminates two different traditions in the pedagogy of graduate
scholarship. One comes from the Australian critical scrutiny of supervision,
undertaken in a context wherein the PhD is a very recent development (starting
only in 1948), and where a very rapid development of practice-focused graduate
education has taken place1. Here, debate rotates around the relationship between the
PhD researcher and supervisor. The other tradition centres on individual opposition
to conformity and comes from the American body of radical and critical scholarship –
here personal creativity is championed. Both cases illustrate how PhD scholarship is
co-determined by how it is supervised.

PAIDAGOGOS / PAIDAGOGOß / PEDAGOGY

There has been an effort to define the pedagogy of PhD thesis writing (Green, 2009;
Lee & Williams, 1999; Lee & Green, 1995), but the turn to paidagogos is really
rather surprising. The paidogogos, in ancient Greece and Rome, was a slave charged
with supervising the rearing of boys (such as brothers), from the higher classes.
The paidogogos brought and fetched their charges from school and kept a close
watch on study, friendships, and behaviour. Until reaching the age of manhood, boys
were not allowed outside the house without their paidogogos. The paidogogos has
come down to us, though art and literature, as a grumpy old man who curtailed the
fun and adventures of his young charges. Young, dynamic, and useful slaves were
merchants or moneylenders; pedagogues were past-their-prime and of low status.
Since they would often have been war-booty, they typically spoke highly accented
and imperfect Greek (or Latin). The term paidogogos was used because it centred
on the inexperience of the student and the ‘care’ that needed to be taken of him (or
her). Given its historical origins, we can see that there are gender, privilege and
dependency issues surrounding the term, right from the start.
Admittedly, all of these issues have been raised in the discussion of PhD thesis
supervision, but it still sometimes seems faintly ludicrous that anyone would want
to see the paidogogos as their model. The embrace of the term, ironically enough,
probably has to do with the low status of education as a field of study and as a
profession. It seems incongruous to see PhD research and school teaching combined,

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and the propagation of a ‘pedagogy’ of PhD study. In fact, since the 1990s, there has
been a shift from the study of thesis pedagogy, to a focus on ‘graduate education’ in
terms of curriculum. However unlikely the paidogogos model is, graduate schooling
as it has developed, may be even worse, stressing rapid completion, failsafe
methodologies, and ‘best practices’ with ever more rigid and homogenising effects.
Our discussion of PhD pedagogy begins with a special issue of a journal
“Postgraduate studies/postgraduate pedagogy” (Lee & Green eds., 1995) published
in the context of a vibrant debate on poststructuralism. The discussion of supervision
focussed on three assumptions; namely, that one should: (i) take social complexity
seriously, (ii) refuse to oppose the individual to the social, and, (iii) include power
and politics in one’s thinking about practice (Lee, 1992). Graduate education is
thought of as a social practice that is messy, muddled and indefinite. The effects
of any form of pedagogy are indeterminate; at any one moment there are so many
things happening in the learning process, so many people involved on so many
aggregation levels (cognitive, aesthetic, political, economic, et cetera), that a simple
locus of control cannot be realistically assumed. Insight into practice must succeed,
not through reduction to simple nostrums, but through complexification. The richer
one’s picture of practice is, and the more possibilities the learning environment
offers, the greater the chance for learning to occur.
This is not an argument for chaos, but for complexity, intending to pay attentionto
inclusion, reflection and awareness. Part of the complexity entails seeing self and
other as mutually determinate; individual awareness and culture, and the roles of
the researcher and researched are co-created and co-evolve. All of these have to be
communicated in language to exist in the PhD process and its results; understanding
and thought are linguistic processes, as indeed ultimately are culture and society.
Societies, to persist, have be (re-)created and (re-)produced, requiring both individual
engagement and the transmission of content from one generation to another. Taken
to a practical level, this suggests that the effort to understand practice has to examine
self and other, particularity and sociability, agency and structure. This vision, then,
sees the PhD and its supervision as multi-causal, socially constitutive, and inherently
linguistic.
In research, learning is socially produced; it does not just happen. One has to
work for results and it takes power to make research, and for thesis completion to
happen. The ‘productivity’ or ‘performativity’ of research is thus grounded in its
politics of inclusion and/or exclusion of facts and/or norms, of instrumentality and/
or relationality, of nature and/or nurture, and of linearity and/or non-linearity. Our
study of thesis supervision has itself emerged from such a ‘poststructural’ vision of
research, learning, and pedagogy.
This line of examination of thesis pedagogy was highlighted by an article by
John Frow (1988), a University of Melbourne Professor of English, in which he
put the depth psychology of graduate research on the agenda. The study of English
literature has been controversial for some 80 years, since I. A. Richards’ provocative

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calls for practical criticism. Aspects of fierce debates have more recently spilled
over into communication, cultural, and media studies. Literature, from Chaucer to
the Brontes, by way of Shakespeare, is sometimes lionized, and often under attack.
For instance, at the University of Toronto’s English Literature PhD program, one
of the two required courses is called ‘Critical Topographies’ and addresses gender,
critique of capitalism, and media studies, with Derrida, Laplanche, Freud, Agamben,
Winnicott, Foucault and Butler (amongst others) forming the required readings. And
at Melbourne University, the English Department is a part of the School of Culture
and Communication, where British literature shares space with American, Australian
and indigenous literatures, with themes such as post-colonialism, psychoanalysis,
feminism, popular culture, theatre and media studies, flourishing. Contrastingly, the
University of California at Berkeley’s program starts with “Problems in the Study of
Literature” and follows that with required courses in Medieval literature, literature
in the 17th to 18th centuries, literature in the 19th century, and literature in the 20th
century. During the last twenty years, there has been a debate about: (i) whether
English is about British literature, or do other literatures get equal billing; (ii) if
the canon is gender-determined and should feminism assert alternatives; (iii) do
textuality, communication, and media gain the attention that their social prominence
indicates; and (iv) whether theories of writing, reading, signifying and sense-making,
constitute a ‘turn to language’, requiring new, non-traditional form of investigation.
This battle has raged fiercely (but inconclusively) within academia, occasionally
exploding into wider discussions in the popular press.
Frow has been in the middle of this tumultuous row. In his 1988 article, he lets
himself be inspired by Lacanian psychology and Foucault’s concept of ‘discipline’.
‘Disciplines’ produce and engender, as well as control and restrict, and they produce
desire for an object of study. But what exactly is the nature of the graduate researcher’s
desire? Is it fear driven, creatively inspired, or slavishly copied? Is it an effect of
supervision, or a result of the researched on the researcher, or a product of writing, or
something else? To better understand desire as research motivation, Frow turned to
Lacan. If the researcher is Other to the researched, and to the faculty supervisor, and
to academe, how does the student handle these relations? The researcher is expected
to describe, interpret and draw conclusions; but the researcher’s warrant is fragile,
uncertain and revocable. The researcher has to produce what Lacan calls le sujet
supposé savoir, or the subject who is supposed to know. But the PhD student’s own
authority is unstable and precarious.
Lacan studied le sujet supposé savoir in the therapy situation. In therapy, it is
thanks to transference that the analysand’s projections actually establish the analyst’s
‘knowing’. Transposed to the PhD, this suggests that the student produces the
supervisor’s knowing-ness. The student needs the supervisor’s ‘authority’ to handle
the insecurities of the research situation. Multiple projections permit the researched
to assume that the researcher understands is said in interviews or is observed. The
researcher assumes that the supervisor understands the nature of the research site, as
well as what is written. Graduate students know that they do not yet know how to do

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research (why else would they be doing a PhD?). The idea of research assumes that
something is unknown and that is why it is being researched. And faculty supervisors,
if they are at all wise, know that in a Socratic sense, ‘They do not know’. So all the
principal players both know and do not know. The assumed, le sujet supposé savoir,
works to reassure them that knowledge exists, that it is possible to reach it, and this
(partly) assuages their fear.
Thus a temporary (or maybe even fictional) investment in ‘knowing’ occurs,
permitting the researcher to write and the supervisor to give advice. In transference,
the analysand ‘loves’ the therapist, where the therapist becomes the analysand’s
Other; an ideal object of desire, constituted by the analysand’s personal history,
identity and self-interpretation. When the analysand works through, interprets, and
defuses their desire, the analysis is achieved; and the analyst successfully plays a
catalytic role. But if the analyst, via counter-transference, sees the analysand as
their ideal Other of desire, the analyst will restrain the analysand from transcending
dependency, and this makes change impossible. In terms of the supervisor/
graduate researcher relationship, if the supervisor ‘desires’ researcher dependency
as part of an ideal Other, or sees the student as the one that they would really
want to be, the graduate student cannot develop and mature. In such situations,
being a graduate student can be a stultifying and juvenilizing experience, with
the graduate student terrorized by the faculty supervisor’s desire. This desire for
control and confirmation threatens the graduate student’s identity. If the faculty
supervisor genuinely remains open for Other, and welcomes change, difference
and the exploration of the not-yet-known, then the research student can replace
their initial supposé by a real savoir drawn from research possibilities of garnering
independence and knowledge.
The place in one’s own identity, of the (internalized) Other, is always provisional,
always open to interpretation, but it is also always a question of desire; which might be
a desire for contact, relationship, awareness, identity, certainty, doubt, predictability
or creativity. A successful thesis is one where the author has successfully tapped a
source of desire – that is, the researcher has found a way to want to know, investigate,
observe and write. Relatedness between researcher and researched, writer and reader,
observation and theory, then flourishes and the student finds a way to identify with
their work. The student reaches a successful form of identification with Other. The
researcher internalizes the research process; it becomes part of their own identity.
The transference with the supervisor and the university is successfully resolved,
and the student discovers a self that can include the Others of her of his thesis.
Students hereby gain conviction in the validity of their observations, their ability to
describe, and their potential to make insightful interpretations. The goal, to resolve
the transference in the supervisor/graduate student relationship, has been successful.
But if students are only given stable meanings based on a solid system of truths,
and the force of hierarchical power has been imposed on them, then there may
be little or no possibility for successful transference. The student may remain the
object of supervisory power, lacking a living sense of self in the research process.

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Supervisory desire in such cases is destructive and the supervisor can become an un-
negotiable block, to researcher independence and identity. Some PhD students never
resolve their transference and are therefore left for the rest of their careers attempting
to impose the resulting need for counter-transference (or need for confirmation and
power) on others. Graduate students, who have been the victims of destructive
supervision, often go on to impose the same violence on others.
The managerial solution to all this psychological mess is to deny the processes of
(counter) transference and to impose depersonalized bureaucratic control on thesis
supervision. But by denying transference, one forces it to go underground. What the
Lacanian perspective on the supervision relationship reveals is that doing a doctorate
is a life-changing event. In some essential ways, one really does become another
person by writing a PhD thesis. The person becomes knowledgeable of her/his own
‘desire’ to exist as knowledge, as text, in ideation, and as an artefact of authority via
their PhD.
Undergraduates are controlled by means of mechanisms of rewards and
punishment via grading, norms for classroom behaviour, and peer modelling.
Teachers ask questions, students answer them, and teachers then evaluate students.
The system is based on the Other of control, discipline, and regimentation; and
not the Other of independent self-judgment. Undergraduates are made dependent
in order to discipline them into rational thinking, to teach them expert knowledge,
and to make them (hopefully) employable. The PhD is meant to transcend all these
dependencies and to achieve a generative self/Other dynamic. Undergraduate
education is reproductive, the PhD is meant to be productive.
Inspired by the post-Lacanian issues of identity and relationship, doctorate
pedagogy has been developed in Australia especially by Alison Lee and Bill Green.
The themes of relatedness and community are linked to Deakin University where
Green had worked. Lee2 was a feminist pedagogical scholar, who did her PhD in
1992 (at Murdoch University, where Green had moved to) as a mature student, on
gender and the production of the subject in secondary school teaching. Deakin,
for two decades from around 1975, was a hotbed of critical pedagogy and action
research/learning. It was a place where social justice and innovative creativity, were
seen as more important than playing-it-safe (Tinning & Sirna eds., 2011). The role
of the public intellectual was emphasised; it was asserted that social science should
offer criticism and provide proposals for meaningful change. Collegiality, intense
discussion, conviction and motivation were cornerstones of the culture. ‘Critical’ at
Deakin, meant anti-technocratic, the rejection of instrumentalism, the disparagement
of positivism, and being open to ethics and leftist politics. Naïve assumptions
that ‘critical’ is ‘good’ were acknowledged to be too simple, and even dangerous.
Deakin attempted to live up to its preached ideals by striving to be an open, polyglot
and lively centre of thought and learning, bolstered by supportive interaction and
postmodern reflection. This produced a shared model of ‘supposed knowing’ that
was activist, emotional, liberatory and communitarian.

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Graduate pedagogy can thus be seen as a way of being together. In their Introduction
… [to] postgraduate pedagogy (1995), Lee and Green defend “genuinely significant
social productivity” against “notions of accountability, efficiency, performativity,
professionalization and vocationalism”. A focus on economic issues may demand
and deliver “a multi-skilled, flexible, informed workforce,” but in the process, it
produces a desperately under-theorized vision of research. Research is a social
process, which must always remain work-in-progress. PhD research never stands
alone; it is a product of a novice writer and experienced supervisors of a research
climate and institutional arrangements. Its pedagogy is an amalgam of knowledge
and learning; there is both teaching and research in thesis supervision.
Creating and enforcing a division between knowledge reproduction in teaching
and the production of knowledge in research stymies interaction between researcher
and supervisor, which will make the PhD student more fearful and self-centred in
contact with the researched. If the researcher does not learn from the supervisor,
openness to the researched will be more difficult, and the thesis may not emerge.
Knowledge is not the property of one person: it is a social process of recognition
and relationship. Ideological ‘knowledge’ (itself an oxymoron) does not listen or
discuss – it imposes. Modes of address that are not sensitive to the actual social
positioning of others make for bad research. Openness is very clearly political, in
that it calls on the process of knowledge-production to embody respect, recognition,
justice and fairness. The positioning of the researcher, researched and supervisor in
the production of the text needs openness with engagement. Local ‘pedagogies’ of
relationship, based on lived occurrence instead of closed arguments or truth claims
that are alien to experience are vital. The process of research and its results need to
be synchronous.
To insist on the pedagogy … is to recognize a more transactional model
whereby knowledge is produced not just at the researcher’s desk nor at the
lectern but in the consciousness, through the process of thought, discussion,
writing, debate, exchange; in the social and internal, collective and isolated
struggle for control of understanding; from engagement in the unfamiliar idea,
the difficult formulation pressed at the limit of comprehension or energy; in
the meeting of the deeply held with the casually dismissed; in the dramatic
moment of realization that a scarcely regarded concern, an unarticulated
desire, the barely assimilated, can come alive, make for a new sense of self,
change commitments and activity. (Lusted, 1986: 4)
A pedagogy capable of doing justice to learning in the processes of researching is not
readily at hand, and contributing to the development of such a pedagogy is one of the
goals of this book. As Keith Hoskin (1993) argued, far too often disciplinarity defines
who the researchers are and how they are supposed to think. Open processes of
negotiation, encompassing regard for the researched and experience-based reflexive
questioning, need to be strengthened. Disciplines, departments and programs
reproduce themselves via the PhD, and therefore the emphasis on maintaining

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predetermined identities is strong. Emergent structures of questioning, supported

by a radical pedagogy of learning and investigation, in which the institution does
not impede research but champions it, are needed. Supervision would be a key part
of this, in helping to define and develop PhD research. Supervision therefore needs
to be open and discussed, rather than being seen as some sort of dark secret, never
revealed to outsiders.
In a 1999 article, “Forged in Fire,” Alison Lee (writing with Carolyn Williams)
claimed that conventional PhD education is directed to producing a ‘rational
autonomous subject of disciplinary knowledge’, with an enormous cost in emotional
integrity. Relationships, emotions and subjective awareness are written out of the
researcher’s persona, as phenomenal sociability is abjected in PhD ‘underlife’.
Much is lost in human terms; the thesis experience and its results lack existential
quality. Rationalization produces ‘efficiency and effectiveness’; but the resulting
text lacks feeling, is incapable of acknowledging Other, and is unable to support
aesthetic or ethical awareness. “Trauma, abjection, isolation [and] loss” abound.
The authorial persona or ‘I’ of the thesis becomes a totally rational, independent
agent – and therefore inhuman. Human attributes of cooperation, support, solidarity
and affection are banished from the writerly identity. Interpersonal identity is not
acknowledged within the text; there is no (con-)text or text of and with others. While
the subject position of the PhD researcher is all discipline and control, it is possible
to maintain the “apparent stability, seamlessness and coherence” of rational identity,
but this takes its toll on the researcher (Lee & Williams, 1999: 11). Traumas of
depression and despair are frequent when disciplinarity overwhelms self. Candidates
who do not produce the mirage of self-directed autonomy are told that they are not of
PhD mettle, experience neglect and abuse, and feel rejected and isolated.

To become the autonomous subject that is the successful graduate, a process

must be undergone which first requires a submission to the authority of a
supervisor who in some manner disciplines the candidate into a mode of being in
relation to the scholarly work and the production of knowledge. Paradoxically,
it is through this submission that the candidate learns the practices and
capacities of self-regulation and independent judgment. This apparent paradox
involves processes of separation from a previous self; in psychoanalytic terms,
a ‘breaking-down’ of the old self (Frow, 1988) and the development of a new
self. Through the practices of candidature and supervision, the student must
learn ultimately to overcome the dependence which is at first required of them
and that they, in some sense “need.” (Lee & Williams, 1999: 17)

In gender terms, the feminine is repressed and the masculine celebrated. Emotion,
affect or embodiment are abhorred, while appearances of autonomous reason are
championed:

In thus banishing the emotions and the embodiment of the individual, the fantasy
of Reason, according to Jessica Benjamin (1990, p. 185), is ‘patently linked

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to the split between the father of autonomy and the mother of dependency’.
The rational autonomous individual establishes his identity by separating off
from, and in opposition to, this mother and by ‘splitting of certain human
capabilities, called feminine’. (Benjamin, 1988/1990; p. 189) (Johnson, Lee
& Green, 2000: 140)

A corollary to the pressure to demonstrate ‘being in control’ and of exerting

intentionality, thereby driving affect and attachment underground, is that the “free”
and independent self is profoundly “unfree.” The PhD researchers are socially
integrated into academe, insofar as they confirm the hyper-masculine self of research,
but the fantasy of reason leaves the self exhausted and burnt out.
Johnson et al. (2000) contend that, behind the conventional successful thesis,
there is a trauma of depersonalization and rejection. Writing the thesis is effectively
defined by the emotional distress produced by isolation and disjunction. The ‘self’
of the thesis, and its authorial ‘I’, are socially disconnected and over-rationalized.
This problem is not one of research methodology, but of the authorial self that the
PhD experience demands of the candidate. Methodology is explicit, can be openly
discussed, and therefore at least partly negotiable, but the writerly ‘self’ is implicit,
hidden, and therefore non-negotiable. Different, much more participatory, openly
emotional, and reflexively more developed forms of expression are needed.
Sadly, in examining what this ambitious pedagogical agenda has delivered,
we have to admit to being disappointed. Increased relevance to employers has
overwhelmed the call for doing justice to researcher subjectivity, since the radical
problematizing of the researcher/supervisor relationship has been replaced by the
focus on efficiency (Lee, Brennan & Green: 2009). The pedagogy scholars ultimately
did not manage to create an alternative PhD program, with supervision integral to
research methodology allowing researcher self-reflexivity to be productively dealt
with. The Lacanian analysis, showing how ‘supposed-knowing’ frustrates research
and supervisory autonomy, was not surpassed in practice.
Green (2005) illustrates this in a deeply cynical article, making use of Kim Stanley
Robinson’s novel Antarctica. Part of the novel concentrates on two scientific groups,
the Stabilists and the Dynamacists, who compete for paradigmatic hegemony: “the
simple truth is that science is a matter of making alliances to help you to show what
you want to show, and to make clear also that what you are showing is important”
(Robinson in Green, 2005: 156). Research is ‘subjection-subjectification’ and thesis
writing is identity work, where to be successful, you have to align your identity to
‘authorized’ power. For the PhD researcher, scientific ‘truth’ is always ‘deferring’ to
power, since one can only complete successfully if one submits (by complying with
and acquiescing to disciplinary demands) and hands in an appropriate text. There is
an unstated appeal to Derridian ‘deferral’ here – all text, in order to signify, has to
defer to extant meanings and paradigms. But in Derrida, deferral can be researched,
examined and reflected upon, and it can be made productive by opening the text to
interpretation, examination and critique. In Green’s article, the deferrals are purely

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repressive, since research is no more than enforced alignment. If the PhD researchers
do not do the required identity work, they fail.
Green wrote the concluding chapter to Boud and Lee’s edited book on doctoral
education wherein he (2009: 246) returns to Lacan (via Knorr-Cetina): “She draws
on Lacan … referring to ‘a structure of wanting’ which, as she says, ‘implies a
continually renewed interest in knowledge that appears never to be fulfilled by
final knowledge’ (Knorr-Cetina, 2001: 186). Lacan’s idea of ‘wanting’ is here an
anthropological and epistemological principle – that is, it is simply how humans
are. We desire and we lack; we search, but we never find. Played out in this way,
pedagogy has become an expression of humanist doubt and limits, instead of
providing an activist agenda for how PhDs should be supervised. In stressing this
existential ‘lack’, Green remains more dynamic than most – many of the others in
the Boud and Lee book (2009) simply focus on knowledge management and accept
a commodified vision of research.
Alison Lee (with others) recently edited four books on doctoral education
(Boud & Lee, 2009; Aitchison, Lee & Kamler, 2010; Kumar & Lee, 2011; Lee &
Danby, 2012). For anyone attached to the pedagogical agenda for the PhD where
research relationships, supervision, and methodology form an interrelated triad, the
new work is upsetting with its stress on knowledge management, employability
and efficiency. While Lee and her co-authors claim that they want “to redress the
dominance of policy narratives that limit and constrain what doctoral education is
for,” their practice provides scant evidence of any such activity (Boud & Lee, 2009:
4). Lee’s contribution contains little more than what is proffered by some ‘how-to’
guides, such as write early and often (Boud & Lee, 2009). Apart from claiming LPP
(legitimate peripheral participation), explaining how the novice learns by relating
to the professional at work, she has done little with either practice or the activity-
theory tradition (Boud & Lee, 2009: 96) despite her claims to the contrary. Her
definition of practice is far too thin: what exactly do PhD research students and
their supervisors do; what really are their practices, how are they displayed, and
what is their significance? Is the ‘knotting’ or inter-relatedness precarious, traumatic,
identity-changing, or complementary? Detailed description of learning and teaching,
of activity and reflection, as required by activity theory, is not there. Instead we are
delivered vague claims as to what the ‘knowledge economy’ demands:

… a generalized requirement to grow numbers of enrolments and completions,

enrol increasing numbers of students from other cultural and linguistic
environments, build flexibility into enrolment patterns, and, above all, to
address an increasing range of ‘generic’ skills and knowledges …. in line with
human capital conceptions of the doctorate, which harness it increasingly
strongly to rhetorics of globalizing knowledge economy, forms of education
are required that could make explicit what doctoral graduates know and can
do, as well as what they can produce. (Lee & Danby, 2012: xxiv)

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In this view, it appears that contemporary society depends on ‘knowledge workers’

to produce welfare, and that the PhD is a key component in economic success. But
there is no serious examination or critique of the knowledge economy, knowledge
work, or knowledge management. We would argue that the ‘knowledge economy’
concept, represents knowledge as a commodity and commodities are, by definition,
saleable goods and services. Thus, if the PhD is a commodity, it is for sale, whether
it be to industry, to government, or whoever else is willing to stump up the money.
A PhD, when seen in the context of the knowledge economy, has no more intrinsic
value than any other goods in the marketplace. Further, commodities are fungible
in that the buyer sees them as interchangeable and has no interest in who produces
them. We don’t care if our Volkswagen was built in Germany, Slovakia, the Czech
Republic, Belgium, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Spain or Italy – to limit the list just to
Europe – nor do we know or care who built it. If we turn to a pure commodity, like
oil, spot prices are set daily in Rotterdam, and the origin is completely irrelevant.
Thus if we claim that PhDs are a commodity, where does this lead us? That it no
longer makes any difference who carried out the research? Of course, we could point
to a further refinement by continuing the parallel with the car industry: Volkswagen
is a brand, and brands have value – Volkswagen perhaps more than Kia and less than
BMW, and that is reflected in their price. Are PhDs similarly branded with, say, a
Harvard or Oxford imprint more valuable than those stamped by the University of
California at Santa Cruz or the University of Leicester? By this logic, the actual
researcher, the supervisor, and the resulting book, count for little – the brand is all.
Thus if research techniques can be standardized and thesis writing commodified;
then it makes no difference who wrote the thesis nor who supervised it. Mass
diffusion of knowledge in higher education can be achieved, perhaps through the
industrialization (or, as it was so popular a few years ago to say, ‘McDonaldization’)
of knowledge. Dandy and Lee compare the PhD to being in a shop:
… while analysts might have issues to do with theorizing the constraints
and possibilities of behaviour in the shop, members daily go about shaping
their everyday behaviours within the shop, and routinely play out their parts
within the social orders of that interactional space. The members know how
to ‘do shopping’ … similarly, we can draw on this same analogy to consider
the concept of design within the practices of doctoral pedagogy. Design
supposes an orientation to shaping what follows in guided ways. Members
(those involved in the doctoral education) have methodic, everyday ways of
organising (designing) doctoral conduct … that of being a doctoral supervisor,
doctoral program coordinator, or doctoral student. (Lee & Danby, 2012: 8)
The graduate school supposedly affords designed, controlled, administered and
explicit research where: (i) doctoral pedagogy entails the management of publically
accountable social actions; (ii) the goal is the artful design of the boundaries and
possibilities for PhD candidates; and (iii) change requires modification in the design.

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The PhD is a designed learning opportunity and the key players have the ability to
determine and maintain the design.
The implicit claim is that in the advanced economies, we can produce, control,
and design knowledge. The human infrastructure needed to produce learning and
knowledge dissemination can be managed in order to deliver the desired results.
Sections of the workforce, supposedly possess the advanced cognitive skills needed
to function in the hyper-competitive, globalised economy. But this implies that the
pay-off occurs because knowledge is not so commodified that everyone possesses
it. Competitive advantage only arises when there are a restricted number of players
who possess the attributes needed in the knowledge economy. Knowledge is then
a potential source of competitive advantage for the rich post-industrial, mainly
northern hemisphere, societies, in their competition with the rest. And within those
wealthy societies, the knowledge workers are thought of as an elite. But who in the
rich North profits from the knowledge economy, and who then loses out if knowledge
is commodified? In a knowledge economy, knowledge is applied where and when
it is profitable. It is to be used and traded, controlled and exploited. The knowledge
worker is not intrinsically valuable, they are only valuable when they can be used to
create exchange value, leading to profit. The traditional holders of knowledge, we
submit, may well be the losers – the PhD students and their supervisors. Universities
may like the knowledge economy rhetoric, because it seems to claim that knowledge
is valuable. But, in this reckoning, knowledge is valuable only in terms of commodity
production, and if we cannot apply knowledge to enable other products and services
to be sold at a profit, then it is valueless. Green fields exploitation, speculation and
curiosity, will not return any direct profit. Research for research’s sake has little or
no status in the knowledge economy. Research in the social studies as the ethical
pursuit of justice, well-being or relational integrity will, logically, be squeezed out.
In any industry, risk must be calculated and managed, and this is no different
within a knowledge economy. Knowledge production is costly, tying down some
of the best minds in society, and such scarce resources need to be wisely employed.
Projects and supervision need to be made calculable, to ensure that research goals
are economically viable. Program management then needs to be oriented towards
guarding against “the distribution of ‘bads’ (what can go wrong) rather than [focusing
on] on the distribution of the ’goods’” (Manathunga in Lee & Danby, 2012: 49).
Thesis proposals “must be evaluated according to risk levels” and “increasing
regulation [is needed] in order to manage the risks of poor supervision and student
attrition or overlong times to completion” (ibid.). Supervision needs to be managed
in such a way that knowledge production will be optimal – and given the complexity
hitherto existing in the production of a PhD, the process has to be rendered into a
series of visible, reckonable activities that can be assessed against benchmarks.
The later Lee books base their vision of the PhD on this questionable view
of the knowledge economy, which we would suggest is unwise. The attention to
completion rates, efficiency, and effectiveness to deliver economic relevance,
reduces the university to just another corporate R & D centre. Directing PhD study

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to current economic concerns makes for short-sighted and uninventive practice

while intellectual vision, ethical goals, theoretical purpose and research content are
never addressed. The revenge of paidagogos / paidagogoß seems complete – a new
pedagogy of containment and restrictive paternalism has taken over.

IN PRAISE OF THE INDIVIDUAL

The pedagogy movement attempted to portray the PhD as a collective project. The
next tradition we explore is much more individualistic. It tends to centre on how
individual writers propose and develop their personal experience as a model. The
form is typically: ‘This is what happened (the truth); this is how I dealt with it;
draw your own conclusions.” Jane Gallop is an exemplary figure, here, and she will
help us define an American-led prototype of becoming a scholar/researcher. In 1992,
she was accused by two female students of sexual harassment (Malcolm, 1997).
In her essay about the incident, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997),
she introduces her perspective on research pedagogy, which she developed further
in the book: Pedagogy: the Question of Impersonation. Feminist students picketed
the conference from which the book emerged, handing out bumper stickers stating:
“Distinguished Professors Do It Pedagogically.”
The shift in her title to “impersonation” was significant, because it introduced
the question of relatedness. Both the pedagogy book and the sexual harassment
book are all about the nature of graduate student/professor affinity, and particularly
the question of the double interact: if the one touches the other, and the other
reveals themself as touched, does the first acknowledge the relatedness? Or does
the one touch the other, without reciprocal awareness? One can take each person
into consideration, one at a time, serially, without having to reckon with shared
awareness. ‘Impersonation’ specifies relatedness; it requires imaginary acts of
relational identity. In ‘impersonation’, people mimic, copy and fantasize about one
another, but they are not really one another, or in the sense of Levinas, ‘responsible’
for the Other. Imaginary or ‘desired’ relatedness is invoked, but not successful self/
other interaction.
The turn to ‘impersonation’ critiques the assumption that “identity is supposed
to be personal, idiosyncratic, something you do not share with anyone else” (Jay
in Gallop, 1995: 122). Self, supposedly is essentially private, not plural, and the
‘I’ is a matter of individual freedom, unrestricted by the straitjacket of convention.
Identity modelled on acknowledgement of the Other would: “limit what the person
wore, ate, said, kissed, worshipped, wrote, bought or sold. Modern entrepreneurial
individualism, or consumer identity, considers [identity choices] … as entirely
relative to the fundamental project of the self’s acquisitive freedom” (ibid). The
argument is that in the American consumer society, the self is invisible to itself,
and there is only one hegemony: that of consumption. One’s identity position is
defined by consumption if one is a normal (prosperous) American. Treating identity
as indeterminate, variable, and uncertain flies in the face of this paradigm. Otherness

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as gender, class or race threatens to upset this safe consumerist homogeneity. An

approach, such as deconstruction, which questions the identity of the text, writer
and researcher, is deeply irritating, and incompatible with the assumption of a single
mono-culture. Deconstruction cannot exist for those who ascribe to the principles
of American ‘universal liberal personhood’. You either have to accept the consumer
society and its homogeneous mono-identity, or become a cultural outsider; there is
only one acceptable consumerist model of the personal, and alternatives are beyond
the pale.
The creation of the thesis’s authorial ‘I’ can be thought of as an impersonation of
the supervisor, as ‘supposed-knowing’, or as an ideal self. One needs to produce an
individual, seemingly self-actualizing, authorial persona. For instance, the concept of
authorial ‘voice’ asserts that the writer, to achieve truly good work, has to find her or
his own ‘voice’, in which the researcher’s ‘I’ is consistent, personal and distinctive.
Using Bakhtin, one can call for heteroglossia; that is, let the authorial ‘I’ be
complex, dynamic and relational. ‘Voice’ can then be conceived of as transactional,
interpersonal and negotiated and reflective of a fragmented, angry, pacifying, sexy,
engaged, reflexive and abstract identity. There are many assumptions about ‘voice’
that play themselves out when thesis writing is assessed. For instance, the writer has
to “achieve rationality and unity …. hav[ing] learned to accept change, acknowledge
contradictions (without contradicting themselves), endure but also transcend … [set-
backs], show themselves in possession of a salutary self-consciousness. The result
is not so much truth as a special sort of appearance of truth” (Otte in Gallop, 1995:
150). Writerly success may effectively amount to: “You must show that you are like
us.” And that is where impersonation comes in: the researcher’s individual, particular
authorial voice has to make all the academic moves and literary gestures prescribed by
its con-text, and the ‘I’ has to answer to the context’s social others. Voice has to be in-
voiced (from the French envoyer, to send) and is essentially ventriloquism. One takes
the other’s identity, but in so doing, loses independence, freedom and self-respect,
while the one whose identity is taken is profoundly strengthened in their narcissism.
Developing researcher identity in the (con-)text of thesis writing is very
problematic. Jane Gallop tries to tell us how to do it in “The Teacher’s Breasts,” by
using the Chodorovian model of gender as her foil. Chodorow opposed Lacan by
arguing that autonomy is not a product of the development of the self, but comes
from without. Chodorow is an object-relations theorist, putting her closer to classical
Freudian psychoanalysis than to Lacan. Lacan’s psychology centres on the social,
relational, language-based development of self, where the possibilities for identity
and consciousness are grounded in the strengths and weaknesses of linguistics.
Lacan is notoriously difficult to read, partly because in his writing he attempts to let
the reader experience the convolutions, precarity and tenuousness of language-based
individuality. The Lacanian ‘self’ is social, in the sense that language is inherently
social. By contrast, object-relations theorists see the social and the developmental
in terms of the child’s experience of connecting, separating, and reconnecting with
others. Chodorow, as a feminist psychoanalysist, broke with Freud’s emphasis on

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the Oedipus complex wherein male development through the boy’s relation to the
father is the norm. Chodorow argues that the power of motherhood and the infant’s
relationship with the mother is critical, asserting that female development is positive,
moving from sameness to sameness, and identification to realization. By contrast,
masculine identity is troubled, moving from sameness (symbiotic, the baby to the
mother) to otherness (male to female), and from identification to difference. Girls
feel connection and continuity with their mothers, boys uncertainty and disjunction.
Gallop counters that Chodorow has made desire unthinkable. Gallop argues that
it is an error to focus analysis, drawn from developmental psychology, on maternal
caring, for this marginalises passion and desire, when they should be the centre of
attention. Gallop further asserts that feminist pedagogy is unable to deal with real-
life relationships. The feminist lecturer wants to ‘mother’ her students by being
supportive, anti-authoritarian and feminine, but, if the students do not accept her
rules for affirmation and non-assertiveness, she tries to command them to order. For
Gallop, it is not the nurturing breast, but the cleavage of desire that propels learning
and development.
Gallop’s Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997) is a manifesto for
celebrating the link between the intellect and the sexual. Sparked by the complaint
that two women students made against Gallop (which Gallop denied, and ultimately
she escaped with a mild reprimand for having had ‘a consensual amorous relationship’
with one of the women). By all accounts, by 1982, Gallop had stopped having sex
with colleagues and students, living together with her partner, Dick Blau, a professor
of film and photography. But there was ‘the kiss’. In her book, the kiss is only
described towards the end, after the theoretical position is explained:
This is hardly a work of confessional autobiography … Gallop has represented
herself not as a real person but as the precision instrument of an argument. She
reveals nothing about herself that doesn’t serve her polemic. She gets laid or
flirts or engages in “sexual banter” because this is the job her character has been
assigned to do to propel the book’s argument along. This functionalism gives
the character its interesting and curious chasteness. We are never embarrassed
by Gallop. We are sometimes astonished by her, and we sometimes find her
absurd, but she never makes us cringe, because she never invades her own
privacy. Her subjects are sex and pedagogy, and every story about herself is
a single-minded fable constructed to demonstrate the essential connection
between the two. (Malcolm, 1997)
Writing, researching, investigating and thinking creatively, are possibilities of human
existence. Conformity, fear, dullness and lack of imagination are not inevitable.
Passion, desire and aliveness can overcome obvious limits, and propel one to read,
think and create. Learning to write a PhD thesis needs to be a process of becoming
impassioned, empowered and committed. All of this may be ‘sexy’ if not sexual.
Gallop’s position is, more or less: ‘I like sex, I like students, I like power, I like
excitement’.

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She suggests that since the intellect is part of the body and the brain is of itself
physical; ideas are affective, writing is passionate. It is therefore deadly for the
production of new and interesting knowledge to deny the power of desire as a key
component in creative work. Researchers are not successful because they are objects,
but because they act as desiring subjects. PhD supervision is therefore about awaking
the candidate’s yearning for knowledge and power. For Gallop, research is an erotic
enterprise: research is portrayed as phallic and penetrating. Researchers, women as
much as men, need success and pleasure, and research offers some release. Powerful
writing is ‘sensational’ – it generates phenomenal involvement; it shocks, astounds
and horrifies (at least some); and it is engaging.
Gallop’s book “is a great piece of performance scholarship” (Sanger, 1997-8:
1855). Her theme is thought, shock and spectacle, and within this, ideas have to
be powerfully performed for them to make an impression. Creative scholarship
provokes anxiety – maybe we have not understood, perhaps things are not the way
we thought they were? Learning therefore arouses passion and is intimate – which is
erotic. Gallop claims to have seduced her thesis supervisors – just wanting (literally)
to see them naked. She claimed it empowered her, made her feel ‘cocky’. Power
and gender inversions give the graduate student something-to-say (‘voice’) and the
phallus (being the ‘cocky’ one) something to wield, and demonstrates agency. If
Gallop is taken literally, the discussion becomes less interesting – is she reporting
on consensual or on (un-)wanted sex? But her pedagogy of seduction – the opening
up of the one to the other, and the embrace of involvement and creativity – is what
is important here. Her emphasis on emotion, affect, and the fundamental physicality
of existence, is intriguing while her choice to make a spectacle of herself is merely
a didactic and rhetorical device. The preference for excess, the use of over-the-top
provocation, we believe is understandable within the context of American academe.
In a noisy and fractious atmosphere of ‘culture wars’ and contentious ‘identity
politics’, understatement is likely to mean being unheard.
The kiss happened post-conference in a bar:
[Professor Gallop] ‘mashed her lips against mine and shoved her tongue in
my mouth’ …. When I kissed my advisee in a bar for all to see, I was making
a spectacle of myself … the spectacle was meant to shock and entertain, and
to make people think … to produce a sensation. Not the hollow kind where
sensation is achieved at the expense of thought. But the best kind, where
knowledge and pleasure, sex and thought play off and enhance each other
(Gallop, 1997: 100)
Gallop’s pedagogy is extremely individualistic. Her mind was awakened as an
undergraduate by feminism and sex; she was eager to sleep with creative intellectuals,
and to study hard to become one. She did not become embittered, depressed or vengeful,
but came to productively identify knowledge and desire. Creative scholarship is
exhilarating, and we all (should) want PhD theses to be breath-taking, awing the
reader. But the sheer force of Gallop’s will, realized in physical as well as theoretical

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spectacle, can be destructive. The authority of her ‘self’ seems overwhelming. She
claims to physically and theoretically embody desire as her inspiration; although she
claims to want the potential of the researcher to be liberated, she may instead crush
the other’s egos. Gallop invites the other (imaginatively and physically) to enter into
the transference of desire, passion and creativity with her – but can this transference
be resolved? In the case of the book, it was not; at least not for the complainants.
One complaint for sexual harassment was dismissed out-of-hand, and the other saw
the plaintiff reduced to an ineffective object by the creative scouring of Gallop’s pen.
The case is not satisfactorily resolved – the psychological conflict was transformed
into a legal one, whereby justice was jettisoned in favour of law – and everyone lost
the possibility of psychological resolution.
PhD research may need to be passionate, creative, physical, immediate and felt;
and supervision exists (in part) to make these things happen. But as long as the self
fundamentally can only be realized individually through a struggle for proactivity,
creative intellectual work will be fraught with pitfalls and dangers. Gallop, by all
accounts, is an exceptionally inspiring teacher, and she writes beautifully. She is
right, in that pedagogy and passion are two sides to the same coin. We also write
for relatedness, care and a communitarian stance. But Gallop overestimates the role
of individual passion and self-transcendence. One probably cannot be effective
without passion; but the balance between self and other is very different for us than
for Gallop. Research, or thesis results, are indeed a product of the social environment
and process assumptions of those involved. The thesis is indeed con-text – a text of
relatedness that defers, as Derrida would put it, to the people, places and purposes
that the graduate student shares, and contributes to their development.

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INTERTEXT SIX

Chris Kuiper describes his path through the PhD

I’d love to talk about my PhD, the supervision and the writing of the thesis, but
it could be a little bit embarrassing, because ‘harassment’ is part of it. The first
part of my experience was what I would call fighting my way in. I applied too
late to join the PhD program and the workshops had already begun. There was a
more-or-less standard program. By ‘more-or-less’, I don’t at all mean that it was
standardized, but there were fixed times for workshops and seminars and there
was a set entrance procedure. I had missed the start of the academic year, due to
personal circumstances; both my parents had become very ill and died.
I was promoted to a professorship3 at that time. For my inaugural lecture, I
wanted to talk about ‘meaning’ on the individual and organizational levels. I was
confident about what I had to say about the former, but felt unsure of myself
about the latter. I contacted Prof Ruud Kaulingfreks and attended his MA course
at the UvH Utrecht on the meaning of organization to help me to prepare for my
inaugural lecture. I was looking at ‘meaning’ as a concept in what I would now
term ‘the humanist tradition’. I loved Kaulingfrek’s course. It created a strange
friction in my mind. In my original training for occupational therapy, the story of
the Paris jail cum hospital Salpêtrière was described as the moment that morality
finally reached treatment, and the imprisoned were let free. But that same story
was told from Foucault’s perspective in Kaulingfrek’s course, this time as a case
of repression. Since it is the originating story of occupation therapy, and the two
perspectives didn’t overlap at all, it created a very strong friction in my mind. I
loved that friction; it inspired me. When I decided to enrol for a PhD, I knew what
would be the place for me.
I wrote a research proposal and made an appointment with the program
director, Professor Hugo Letiche. I was really too late; the first two workshops
had already taken place. When I came to the university for the entrance interview,
I entered the professor’s study and he said: “I have read the fifteen or twenty
pages you wrote and it does not make much sense to me. We’re not going to talk
too much about that. You’ve written about paradigms and not, as you claim, about
‘meaning’.” I was confused. I thought I was quite well informed about Kuhn and
scientific paradigms. I had written about professional values and professional
paradigms. What was Letiche talking about?
I had proposed to evaluate evidence-based best-practice. Letiche said,
“Evidence-based best-practice has very little to do with experienced ‘meaning’.
If ‘meaning’ is really your theme, you can better look at it from a more
phenomenological perspective, and start all over again. … You’re admitted.” It
was a very strange meeting.

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The interview took about one and a half hours and it was quite extensive. It
was serious, I felt was taken seriously. But on a few points, I felt neglected. It
resembled the experience I had had with Foucault versus the occupation therapy
version of the Salpêtrière hospital. So in the end I said to myself, “OK, it’s a good
thing, I will enter”.
The second or third friction occurred during the first workshop I attended. The
homework was to write a few pages on ‘Your intellectual hero’. I wrote about
Cheryl Mattingly and the narrative research she had done as an anthropologist.
In the end, that really became an important part of my PhD. I was flabbergasted
that there was no program schedule; there were no aims, no goals, no outcomes.
Nothing except a few really interesting lectures from researchers about their
research. I could not put the week together into a single story; but separately, the
elements were interesting. I do not remember, off the cuff, which lecturers I heard
that week. There was a lecture about our inability to capture data. And Rolland
Munro gave a very strange Foucauldian performance. He refused to give any
answers, and produced a very strong vision that I found felt very uncomfortable.
The first two or three workshops raised lots of questions. I know at one point I
wrote in my diary that it was as poisonous as Picasso and as playful as Miro.
Poisonous because I hate Picasso, he was a nasty ugly man. I felt I was being
asked to become like an artist in his atelier. I was encouraged to come with all
kinds of artistic and poetic ideas. I was especially inspired by Steve Linstead, who
presented his BBC4 tapes of the ‘radio ballads’ and discussed oral ethnography
with us (2006a).
The last day of the week’s workshop was dedicated to rounding off and
evaluation, and discussion in the ‘set groups’5 as they were called. The first few
times, for me, the set groups did not feel that rich, not as worthwhile as I had
expected them to be. Afterwards, when I reread my notes, lots of small sentences
that I had written down were very helpful in thinking through my research.
What happened that first year? I was sensitized to narrative truth; narrative
truth sometimes as opposite to traditional scientific ways of looking. I struggled
with the downplaying of scientific methods, although I knew that in quantum
mechanics the ‘truth’ is uncertain. Sometimes I thought that the generalisations
about scientific truth were too broad. But one of the reasons many years ago I had
changed from physics to occupational therapy was that systems theory makes
those electrons seem so odd. I could cope with the remarks made about ‘science’,
but it felt sometimes like I was being accused personally. So it was a strange
experience.
I was used to doing all kinds of research. I would start with something and
revise and revise, and revise my research plan. I felt quite lonely now while
developing my methodological approach in an environment that did not prioritize
planning, and I blamed the professors and the university for not being precise
enough. But they urged me to start quite early with data gathering, or rather story

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collecting, or narrative collecting. And that was the moment that I think made the
biggest shift in my thinking. The richness of the stories amazed me. I just entered
the building, took notes, shot pictures, made videotapes, started conversations.
I had never expected that data could be so rich. I saw such people regularly, I
worked in this type of environment, everyday. But never had I experienced it as
such a rich environment. I realised that I had never asked a colleague of mine
what was the relevance or the meaning of their work? Why did they, as a person,
work in the way that they did, and was it good to work that way. I had never asked
normative, ethical questions. I thought that I was sensitive to dilemmas, but I had
never realised that lots of my colleagues didn’t encounter the same dilemmas as I
did. So that was a moment of change. The guidance, to start with data collection
was wise. The first time I entered a set group with notes, data and a transcribed
conversation, I realised that this was the best way to talk about practice. Go in,
step out and be critical about what you have seen. What happened in that set
group was that other people read my transcript out loud, and I heard other voices.
Literally changing the voices let me hear different layers in the text. The moment
the text came alive, it told other perspectives of the same story. In the set group,
afterwards, or in the first supervision meeting, Letiche commented: “I read in
your data a story about a quality manager talking ten, fifteen minutes about what
she did. And what in effect did she say: that she had forced all the therapists to
write in all official letters as ‘HE’ even if it was a she writing.” You have told us
that she is a practicing physiotherapist, that she has recently done a Masters, that
she manages the site you are studying, that she is into quality management, and
then she talks ten minutes about this same, rather strange subject. What is going
on here? That was the first time that I realised that re-reading a transcript could
really raise new, very different questions. I had never experienced this.
The examples, the living examples, supported me in exploring different ideas
when reading the same text. I started to really think about the so-called death-of-
the-author. I had always seen research as looking through a window at reality and
now I realized that it was me who was writing about the people and circumstances,
and that I had responsibility for how and what I wrote. Words, language, writing
had always seemed self-evident and now I realised that I was telling stories. I was
performing in writing.
As someone coming from a scientific background, I had to trust myself in this
strange landscape or leave it. Doing research feels quite safe in an area you’re
more or less familiar with, and coming from another research area, doing another
kind of research, feels very odd. My main experience was in quantitative research,
doing surveys with clients coping with rheumatoid arthritis, or sensibility
problems with people with hand injuries. I had done qualitative interviews in a
more or less action research model, but always starting with structured interviews
or instruments where standardisation and generalisation are important. Even in
my qualitative research, in my use of grounded theory, I looked for similarities

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and sameness, not for the exceptions or diversity. Making a shift from looking
for sameness, to being fascinated by uniqueness, was challenging. I stopped
believing in applicability as the be-all and end-all of research.
To use a metaphor, it was like entering a plane, where you don’t know the
destination, you don’t know the flight time. You take-off and halfway the
direction changes, and you don’t know whether you have been hijacked, or
perhaps there’s a new destination. So it’s a very uncertain journey. It’s not like
checking-in at nine fifty, leaving at eleven fifty, flying over the sea and knowing
that in three hours and twenty minutes, you will be at your destination. There
are PhD trajectories that perhaps are not that straight, but you know the flight
schedule, and you know that there could be a delay or perhaps some changes,
but nothing all that dramatic. Sometimes, I even doubted whether I was in a
plane. Sometimes I doubted whether we were making any progress. Sometimes
it looked like there were four pilots in the plane, and I didn’t know who had the
throttle, and I didn’t know where my seat was. Was I a co-pilot or even a pilot?
In the metaphor the uncertainty becomes clear. And now, as a PhD supervisor, I
still don’t know where the projects end, which turns and twists will come. But I’m
very confident that by gathering stories or data, that the researchers can excel in
awareness, presence and thoughtfulness. In any practice, there are lots of things
going on, when you really question what is going on, really bocome critical, lots
of plots or lines, or contrarieties or whatever, emerge. What you are looking for,
it’s there. I am confident in that, I am confident that I am capable of handling the
differences and similarities. If it’s not today, it might be in four months, but I am
capable of doing that.
Entering a PhD program, you are not confident, that comes towards the end.
When I entered the PhD, what I loved about it was that it was new, it was now,
it was strange, and it was attractive. It broadened my scope. Teaching research
methodology, being department chair, and being a graduate student all at once,
was confusing. I had to trust that somewhere there would be an end. I had to trust
that it was worthwhile and relevant. What happened proved to be very relevant.
At first, just asking questions made something emerge; just by being at my
research site things occurred. I never really thought, what a strange building, there
is something worth researching inside it. When I began interviewing – or rather
having conversations with the physiotherapists about their training, practice and
ideas – I was amazed to realise that almost never had anyone put those questions
to me. Strange, why did I do it? Is there some logical linear story in it? Taking the
time to really listen to someone’s story, and reframing that story, and coming back
over and again to that story; that was what I eventually did.
The intention was to listen and understand. The conviction grew that there
could be an end. It was worthwhile what I was doing, whether or not it would
become a PhD or whatever, what’s going on was relevant in itself.

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I doubted myself in the end, when I discovered that of the five people who
were central in my research, four of them changed jobs and only one had stayed
behind. Had I unknowingly dislodged them, made them uncertain and destabilized
things? Was it ethical to do research if my gaze disrupted things? I still don’t
know whether I can answer that question. My thesis added to practical knowing,
narrative knowing. The organisation contacted me two years later and asked me
to help them to strengthen client-centeredness in their organisation. I had changed
my style in writing for professionals. I had become more narrational, showing
more friction and dilemmas, instead of being the all-knowing author. I think it’s
relevant that students read about dilemmas in practice, as well as how to solve
problems. I’m still not quite confident whether I’m able to plan the airplane’s
route myself, and I’m questioning whether I will ever be. You need both self and
other to get a broader view of how, in a constructive way, to fly that airplane.
At a certain point, I just got on with the research and with writing. I was
quite self-sufficient. I could do lots on my own, and I think I did, until I came
to the methodological part. That’s the moment that I turned to Steve Linstead.
His idea of the ‘poetic moment’ fascinated me. What is the moment of the ‘ah-
ha’ insight; what does that mean? How do I choose the words and frame the
stories with concepts? Linstead looks for a balance between theory, practice,
context and methodology. There were all kinds of questions to consider, about
what he calls the research diamond.6 It was at that moment very helpful for my
own confidence, and I think that helped me to balance more or less the elements
of the final thesis. From that moment, I started to feel confident about writing.
The supervision meetings felt like we were overseeing a production process,
and I was asking for permission to go on. Most of the times I got permission,
but a few times I did not. The ‘pauses’ were not actually about the production
process, but about more fundamental questions. Questions for instance about
why I saw a difference between manageralism and client-centredness, wasn’t it
really the same construct? The physical therapists, when they say they are ‘client-
centred’ are actually managing their clients in a particular way. ‘Client-centred’
means doing what you think is right for the client and has very little to do with
what the clients think is right for them. And if the physical therapists are barely
professionals, or really aren’t professionals at all because they do not have an
independent knowledge base, what are the grounds for their actions? If I galloped
forward, the professors shouted: ‘Think about it first!’
The supervision constructed friction in my head, forcing me to be clearer in
my argumentation, and helping me to find my own voice and my own statements.
In the supervision, I was challenged. The professorial stance was to look for the
most extreme possible consequences, objections, and exceptions to whatever
I claimed. In the end, I wrote in my thesis a few sentences about what I call,
‘looking for the balance and looking for the extreme’. At the time, I said that the
professors were from the generation looking for the extremes and I was from the

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generation looking for balance. The extremes and looking for the extremes, I
used in my thesis as: ‘the therapist as a terrorist’. It was the ultimate extreme. It
helped me to find a balance; I needed the extreme to find some balance in my own
position. At the time, I acted more or less like an adolescent, protesting against
the community of critical management theorists, or scientists, or whatever. They
supposedly were just talking to each other, and did not talk to the rest of us.
I experience now in my daily life, every day, the struggle between traditional
science and more postmodern ideas. The differences are between the languages
of the healthcare workers and their management. In the field, stories abound,
affect counts, and ambiguity dominates; but in science, everything is orderly,
causal, and explainable. When I first heard the protests against ‘scientism’, they
seemed to me to just be talking nonsense. A few years later, I now see that those
discussions are on-going at more and more places. That’s why I now call my
reaction then, adolescent.
I needed space. I needed to separate myself from the group of critical
management studies, or from science-based healthcare, I needed to find my own
place, identity, feelings and to position my work somewhere in between critical
management studies and healthcare studies. I’m glad that I got the space and time
to do that, because I needed it in the process of positioning myself.
At that moment, I was quite confident that I knew what I was writing about,
and what I was doing. This was the moment I was invited to come to discuss the
final draft at Letiche’s summer house in France. It was a very strange moment.
It felt like a second moment of fighting-my-way-in. When you are allowed to go
to the house in southern France, you belong to the group, the promising group.
It felt like his wife, Maria, was in a position to give her blessings. So it was a
strange feeling, interfering in my life. At that moment, I didn’t dare ask if it was
my fantasy or a truth, or your truth. It was a strange moment in the process. I was
not that enthusiastic to go to the house.
Having a whole day in France to talk about the draft version actually was very,
very worthwhile. It was a bit tiring, the space, the distance, the focus on the work.
Total concentration on my text, and nothing but the text, was indeed a very nice
moment to experience. That was the moment the title of the thesis just occurred
to me; it emerged from my own voice. I mentioned it to myself. I think that was
the intention, allowing the time and the slow pace, to let me get it clear what the
essence was of thie thesis. And then you can grasp it in words. The second round
of fighting my-way-in, turned out to be, not a constructive friction, but more or
less an ideal.
What was questioned and answered was: ‘What’s the essence, in an almost
phenomenological way, of what you have researched the last years?’ It gave
me the power to revise what I had written, to sharpen up my statements and
arguments. I think it was a few weeks before Christmas that I thought: ‘OK, I’m
ready, this is my thesis’. At that moment, the last round of fighting-my-way-in

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occurred. I sent my draft thesis to Steve Linstead. Who said, ‘OK it’s a PhD’;
this is the moment that I will judge it using English standards. He had some
remarks, three, four pages. He asked me to write a few pages on what’s an ‘event’
according to the philosophical literature, and what’s ‘best-practice’ and what was
my professional standpoint. He asked me, more or less, in my opinion at that
moment, to provide more justification of what I had done. It took some time and
courage to add it all, but in the end, I did. That was it. I got compliments and it
was accomplished. I was very delighted.
Then, in Paris, there was a meeting of French and Dutch PhD research students
and graduates. In that workshop, a sort of confrontation emerged between different
ideas of working on a PhD, and what happens in a university, and what happens
in group dynamics. What happened was a sort of compressed rendition of what
I had experienced during the whole PhD process, working in different groups,
confronting differences in group dynamics, meeting with different professors,
seeing differences in cultures, trying to understand various visions of research,
and it felt like an initiation rite. Like OK, I’m part of the community now; I am
accepted. I had grown. The switch in my ideas about supervision, education, group
dynamics, organisation, and lots more, had changed during those three years. It
was a lot more than just writing a PhD. It changed my ideas on organisation and
on didactics.
The idea of creating ‘proto-events’ combined work and education for me. In
a ‘proto-event’ there is enough structure that everyone shows up, ready to go to
work, but there is little enough determined, that possibility is well served. Hans
Becker from Humanitas7 calls it, ‘Use it or lose it’. We make an offer to you:
‘You can use it, if you don’t, you lose it. It may be a waste, but take the chance’.
For instance, you can try postmodern narrative research and explore affective
investigation, or you can leave it by the wayside. If you do not give it a try, you
lose the awareness that such a research experience can provide. Organization
and self-organization pose possibilities, which do or do not come to fruition,
depending on what you do. The proto-event is a possible event; the participants
decide whether it will really be an event or not. Lines of activity occur and
emerge. Living communities produce different lines; they feel different and
lead to alternative actions than do traditional control-directed organizations. By
putting on proto-events, you facilitate ideas, alternatives, and initiatives. You can
trust a group to organise themselves by providing proto-events. There are places
and situations of meeting, acting, and relating that invite collective action. Proto-
events are another idea of organisation than the traditional way where everything
is pre-organised by the leader.
I call them ‘proto-events’ because they are ‘not-yet’ and ‘as if’. ‘Real’
events just happen; they emerge from inside circumstances, histories, places;
they just are. You cannot organize them. You can try to create possibilities, but
an ‘event’ will or will not occur. Proto-events resemble what David Boje calls

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‘ante-narrative’. There is a wager that what is said or written will lead to meaning
and to the assertion of significance. But ahead of time, you cannot be sure if
meaning will or will not emerge. The ante-narrative is a ‘not-yet narrative’; it
is too short, too little contextualized; not yet ready to be shared, understood or
embedded. Proto-narratives promise that events will follow – they are ante-
events. You do not really know whether that promise will become a reality, and
for whom, and when.
A pedagogy of proto-events focuses on listening, paying attention and on
the will-to-know. Motivation has proven to be more important than I had ever
expected it to be. The discipline needed to criticise and to question yourself, and
to question the other, has proven, I dare to say, to be much more important than I
had expected. Openness to self-reflective questioning is crucial.
Since my thesis, I have written several books for front-line health professionals.
I try to put reflexive questions to them, challenging them to question themselves
in their contexts and to be more open with themselves and others about their
work. I hope they will pay more attention to what they do and think. In one
publication, I listed twenty reflexive questions and I tried to suggest as many
possible discussions as I could. In the end, I think it’s more worthwhile to question
yourself instead of researching a question that you pose before you begin.
I have learned to take issues of power, in what can be questioned and what
answers can be considered, much more seriously. Within educational settings,
only some questions are permitted and most are rejected. I’ve had to acknowledge
that everything is politics when it comes to research questions and research. In my
professional life, I have seriously studied everything from quantum mechanics to
critical management, and visual anthropology, and doing surveys. This breadth
has deepened my idea of the different stories that can be told, I hope that I do not
overvalue the one above the other. In principle, I refuse to ‘believe’ in any one
approach. I do not overvalue the systematic review of quantitative research, nor
do I exclusively champion qualitative research.
My life in research has changed by having to cope with difference. The
research story is itself polyphonic. The proto-events of researching are numerous
and varied. But when an event emerges, I think you have the obligation to follow
what occurs or emerges from that event. It’s a hard job, but I feel it’s an obligation
to follow the polyphonic truth of research.
Research gives me the opportunity to have a dialogue with different groups,
but that makes me an outsider in all those groups. So it makes me lonely. Writing
a critical self-reflexive thesis is alienating, alienating from my work-place which
I’m still a part of. I can no longer see the work as self-evident or unproblematic.
I’ve lost the ability to not think about what I or others are doing. Not ‘not-knowing’
sets you off from many practitioners. I also feel distanced from management. They
seem to be so narrowly functionalist, with no real interest for ‘Who’ or ‘Why’.

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I am now member of a new group. The people who enjoy researching healthcare
and want to discuss its dilemmas. It is a virtual group; it is a construct. We meet
every once and a while at some seminar or conference, but mostly we are linked
by discussions and debates. I have lost the enormous concentration of the thesis.
My vision has broadened, as my distance to my own thesis has also grown larger.
It is just one piece of work, however all absorbing it was for a while.
The process of researching and writing the thesis was amazingly intense. I
gained another belonging. The belonging part is strange; belonging to everyone
and to almost no one. You study Other; you identify with paying close attention,
being present, and attending to other. But at the same time, you are an outsider to
them all. Your very focus on Others distances you from the world of routine and
common places. You belong to the Others as a focus of attention and in reality
you do not belong to them at all.
In the end, coming back to the first conversation, you do and do not know
about paradigms. The strange thing about paradigms is if you belong, you do not
at that moment know it. Paradigms supposedly say nothing about the connatative.
I never framed it that way, but that’s the essence of belonging. You believe that
what you see just is; you deny that it is a product of your way of seeing, of your
paradigm. The research as I did it was a kind of a denial of the hegemony of a
single paradigm. The paradigm of incorporating no paradigm, of course, is a sort
of paradigm. It is the aporia or the impossibility of ever achieving theoretical
closure. Indeed, no paradigm can fit everything in, so thinking in paradigms is
just what I don’t like to do. There’s a strange belonging feeling to paradigms.
Kuhn wrote: It’s impossible to belong to different paradigms, you can only cope
with one, that’s difficult enough.
By rejecting accepting any one traditional research paradigm, I quit the
Kuhnian tradition of belonging. The idea of belonging and the idea of a group
setting the rules for doing your research, or knowing how to do your knowledge
construction, is a strong idea. It is a quite strong feeling, being allowed to belong to
a group. I wasn’t prepared during that whole process of writing for the alienating
effect of it all. All text is so metaphorical, always indefinite, unsure, and multiple.
If you openly acknowledge that, you do not belong any more.
Now I am supervising eight PhD projects. It’s very intense, it’s much more
personal than I had expected it to be. I experienced the changing of the relationship
during the trajectory. A month ago, I was laughing at myself. I asked one of the
PhD students to come to my house and to have a debate in my library, between
the books. I questioned myself; ‘Am I playing Hugo?’, but I’ll never invite them
to my country home, as I don’t have one. The idea of constructing frictions is a
very important part in what I’m now doing. The focus on what’s happening in
practice, and starting the research with what you see happening, I firmly believe
in. Of course reading books is important. But you need to know what you are
looking for and what you are reading for. Write, listen, look and discuss; that is

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what it is all about. That’s how my ideas of supervision changed, and that’s what
I valued in the end the most. I had been called a kind of walking bookshelf; I
always knew a book or an article about whatever subject. I could always advise to
read this or that. Now I start with the motivational part, what do you really want to
research, and why are you so interested in it? The ‘Why’ is crucial. It is really the
only reason to do it. You can always give some other reasons for the polyphonic
part. Any theme can be approached from another perspective; any idea can be
examined in another way. Relevance for the researcher is more important; look
for what is unique, individual and particular. Focussing on answers is not enough;
questions are crucial. The practical relevance, and the relevance for the person,
and the relevance as a professional; they need to be addressed.
There is always a politics to the framing of the concepts, the ideas and the
questions posed. I didn’t use those ideas five years ago. When you do practice
based research, or whatever you call it, questions of relevance for the person,
profession and the context, are important. All the inside truths, or whatever you
call them, are context based and person based. So it’s all about: Do you have
access?, How do you handle the political questions?, Who allows you to have
access or who restricts it? I do not tick boxes in the thesis supervision. But I
do cover the questions. I never had the feeling that the boxes were being ticked
in the supervision sessions I had, until the next to final draft was there, and the
question of responsibility was raised. Letiche said: “I am the one at the university
who is responsible for this thesis, so when I say ‘Yes’, I am responsible for you
and your work.” This was a wise remark, you can’t shift responsibility to another.
Student and supervisor both have their own responsibility, but you do not share
that responsibility, responsibility is personal.
The moment the supervisor said, “Now I have to assume my responsibility, I
have to question a few things, because of my responsibility as supervisor”, that
touched me, and it inspired my doing my work at that moment. Then a few things
were questioned. Have we touched all the necessary bases in this project? That
was the moment of ticking the boxes, that’s the only moment I felt like there
was a hidden list with boxes. This was the moment we were checking, not you,
not me, we were checking whether all the boxes had been filled in. In the first
completed draft, I think we missed an explanation of the role of narrative and
stories in my project. That is where Roland Barthes came in. That was one of the
moments I felt cooperation, co-constructing, in the strongest sense.
The second critical moment came when we discussed possible members for the
thesis committee. That was again a moment that I realised how political writing
and defending a thesis is. That was an important moment of realising that it is not
about what’s the easiest way to get a PhD, but how do we build up the argument
that this is really a thesis, and no one can doubt whether it is a thesis. So building
a solid argument is really crucial.

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As supervisor I know that I have to ask myself at key points do I believe in

the researcher and the research. You ask yourself, ‘Do I believe in this person?’
Are they capable mentally, cognitively and ethically of writing a thesis? Can
they grow without becoming alienated from her or himself? The first time you
see the student’s capability in writing is a key moment of truth. You get a sense
of whether the student grasps the ideas, gets the point, or not at all. Is there
development going on, or not? I think development occurs in jumps. There are
moments you have to wait and wait, and nothing occurs. Those are the moments
that I doubt: did the person in front of me ever listen, did they hear what was said,
are they capable of understanding what I was saying, and will there be moments
of illumination? And the other way around, ‘Am I the right person to ask these
questions and to be connected with this person?’, because thesis supervision is
intertwined. When I ask myself, is he or she capable of doing a PhD, I have to ask
myself: ‘Am I the right person for them, and is this the right university for this?’
Gathering stories and writing them up, producing extensive raw data – that can
be done at a Masters level. So the real questions start with, what are you going to
do with what you’ve gathered. I expect that is a moment that the supervisor either
doubts or is convinced. This is a crucial moment; is it going to be something?
The last phase of doubt, is when you look at the first complete draft, the complete
story, the argumentation, does it hold together? At a certain point, ethically, you
have to say: ‘Yes this will be it, and we are now co-constructing, co-working;
this will really be a thesis’. There is a moment as supervisor that you have to
connect to the thesis and in another sense take on another responsibility. The first
responsibility is as teacher or supervisor, and later there is your responsibility
as co-owner, co-constructer, or whatever. The PhD student becomes a doctor, as
well as the supervisor becomes someone who has supervised a thesis.
You can say ‘No’, but there is a point of no return. When you have the final
draft, you have to say, ‘This is it.’ You should be able to fight for it. Otherwise,
you should never have let the project come so far. If the student doesn’t do the
reading, if the data is not authentically original, if there is plagiarism, of course
these are potential reasons to stop.
The practitioner PhD was an adventure. To be honest, the choice ruled out
becoming a professor in Nijmegen. Some pasts were cut off, because of what I
chose. So the implications in my professional life are big, even bigger than I had
expected. Trust in the ethical, is it good to join this path, without knowing where
you are going, and whether you are capable of making the switch in your mind,
in your performance, that makes the choice for ethical research in a strange way
more responsible. You can’t be responsible for my luck, I am responsible for my
own life. The change in my career or life is a strange dependency. I don’t like the
word ‘dependency’, although it felt almost like that. The words ‘to trust’ seem
better. I am responsible for choosing this path. I doubt whether you ever have
enough information to carry full responsibility.

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Consequentialism doesn’t work. It’s a utopia to think you can be completely

informed in whatever choice you make. For me as person, it was a big step, a
change in my professional life, and my way of doing things. In essence all I did
was to decide to listen to Other. I became aware after two years that something
big had changed. Halfway through the process, I realized that it was not only me.
I had to be invited into the community, but I invited the community into my life.
When I got my PhD, Letiche told me about not knowing me as a person. I think
what was happening, all the time, was the struggle of do I allow the community
to come into my life, do I trust it and everyone enough? In that story, that I have
worked through more and more, now I see that it was about allowing others into
my ideas, into my vision, into my life. It’s not only about getting and giving
feedback; it’s also about opening up.

NOTES
1
In one sign of activity, the key journal Higher Education Research & Development, is edited in
Australasia; but in its thirty-year anniversary number (vol 31 no 1 2012), there is little mention of the
critical tradition.
2
Alison Lee died of cancer 4 September 2012.
3
This post would be roughly equivalent to that of a full professor at a second tier university, such as San
Francisco State in the US or Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. Typically, one of the conditions
of such an appointment is that the candidate swiftly completes a PhD.
4
British Broadcasting Corporation; the ‘tapes’ were of Radio Ballads, where ethnographic interviews
with diverse groups such as miners, fishermen, polio patients and gypsies were intercut with folk
songs drawing upon the participants’ observations. The original Radio Ballads were recorded and
broadcast in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
5
The ‘set groups’ would normally be held on (and take up most of) the last day of the workshop. Broken
into smaller groups with a core tutor, the participants would each be allocated a proportion of the total
time, which was theirs to do with as they chose.
6
Linstead’s research diamond presents theory, problem, context and method as standing at individual
corners of a diamond. Looking at the links between the corners, the model suggests that there are 6
problems that need to be considered in the research process: the ontological problem; the ideational
problem; the methodological problem; the feasibility problem; the political problem; and the
epistemological problem.
7
Prof dr Hans Becker was the Director of the Humanitas housing and care for the elderly and a part-
time Professor at the UvH Utrecht; he is a pioneer in alternative care concepts.

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CRITICAL COMMUNITARIANISM

We have argued that a PhD thesis is a creation of shared identity, in which the writer
becomes someone else through self-exteriorization. This happens via relationships to
the written text and the many Others of; colleagues, the researched, supervisors, and
other Others. On the one hand, the researcher is exteriorized by placing content into
text, whereby self becomes increasingly visible to self and other; and on the other
hand, the researcher interiorizes concepts, observations, theories and writing, from
self and other. Thus the thesis both creates a movement outwards into exteriorization
and inwards into internalization. As we saw in Chapter Six, the introjection of a new
or changed researcher identity has in the literature been described as a traumatic
process, but in the numerous testimonials of researchers in this book, it has also been
described as rewarding, pleasurable and successful. This, we believe, is because
research as described in this book is part of a critical communitarian activity. A
research community produces something very different from an individualizing and
isolating social regime. Self and other, as investigated in this book, are linked in
an ethics of presence and recognition, and these values we defend as our ethics of
research. They are also the principal characteristics of a university as if it is a critical
community of research. We submit that the relevant PhD is both a connotative and
performative concept.
The step from community to communitarian is not extraordinarily large, but much
of what prominent communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre (1984), Michael
Sandal (1998), Charles Taylor (1994) and Michael Walzer (1983) have argued, is not
our message. We do owe some allegiance to Amitai Etzioni (1994), Seyla Benhabib
(1992) and Robert Bellah (2008), who have stressed affective respect and social
justice in their thinking. Communitarianism is a reaction to individualistic liberalism,
and in particular it is a critique of John Rawls’ (1971) Theory of Justice. Rawls
portrayed justice and democracy as if they were universal principles or concepts.
Communitarians reacted against this universalism, protesting that specificity and
territory must not be lost. The particular things which make community count get left
behind when the ‘good and just life’ is portrayed as a set of principles, instead of in
terms of specific encounters. Furthermore, the prioritization in Rawls of individual
‘life-plans’ or of the possibility of an autonomously chosen ‘good life’, strengthens
in us the sense that he over-values the individual.
In other terms, there is no gaze in Rawls. Rawls takes conceptual possession
of all of mankind and sets forth a social-political agenda. The otherness of Other
is repressed in this universalization of one specific political model. Whatever the
virtues of the model, lived relationship is defined out of it. In Levinas’s terms, the

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fundament of ethics is gone. Only grounded acknowledgement, direct relatedness,

and lived awareness of Other, can preserve the social humus of respect, care, and the
bonds of community. The processes of relatedness are easily overlooked, and many
so-called communitarians have overlooked the presence of Other, producing a social
ethics coalescing into a defence of the family, marriage and the church.
Levinas does not propose that ethics be grounded in particular social institutions,
but in self to Other relatedness. His ethics is not written in defence of habits and
traditions. Specificity does count; ethics has to occur in actual times and places,
between flesh and blood people. Universality may seem to work when condemning
gross crimes, such as slavery, genocide, murder, torture, rape or arbitrary detention,
but many universalisations are simply tautologies, and often do very poorly in actual
practice. The social grounds of reverence for life, caring watchfulness and respectful
affectivity, may or may not be present in concrete circumstances. This is not a
question of abstract beliefs, but one of lived relatedness. Universal norms that are
not directly experienced as ways of being-together break down far too easily when
put under economic, social or political pressure. Levinas grounded his post-holocaust
ethics in direct relatedness because that was the existential firmament that he believed
had survived the violence, repression and dehumanizing circumstances of the 1940s.
We are convinced that the relationships of the contemporary marketplace further
instrumentalize attitudes and erode relatedness. Psychological communities of face-
to-face interaction are crucial to trust, co-operation and democracy. The political
stream of communitarianism tries to defend civil society and community – from
Michael Piore and Charles Sabel (1984) to Robert Putnam (2000), the necessity of
local gemeinschaft for human well-being has been stressed. Territory or shared social
spaces, where trust, acknowledgement, and presence can be realised, are crucial to
well-being. Such communitarianism matches our own commitment to practitioner
research as a shared project.
We have claimed, with the use of Jacques Derrida, that democratic civil society
needs universities that are as if every question can be asked. In such universities,
practitioner PhDs can flourish by attending to the quality of human bonds and
honouring connectedness. Research governed by an ethics of relatedness, honouring
self/other interaction, needs to be enabled.
We know that like-minded scholars, such as Dian-Marie Hosking (Hosking &
McNamee, 2012) and Steve Linstead (2006b), ask their PhD students early in the
research process questions such as: “What is your ontology and epistemology?”; or
“Is the world, in your conviction, radically relational; and is knowledge always a
process of shared communication?” In this book, we follow a somewhat different
path. In our experience, post-experience graduate students are engaged in practices
they want to illuminate, understand and evaluate. They arrive at the university full of
half-defined questions, doubts, challenges and concerns. We begin supervising with:
“What has impassioned you in your practice?”; “What have you experienced or seen
that you cannot forget and that you really want to react to?”

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Research ethics, identifying self/other relatedness, as if it determines and justifies

how to investigate comes later. We have worked from researching to awareness,
asking researchers: “What fundamentally works for you and the researched, in your
effort to know about ….?” This process has led to what we in this chaptercall ‘critical
communitarianism’. Here we focus on what is needed to flourish in a just society of
fair practices, characterized by empathy, affiliation and integrity. The ethics of self
and other – whether researcher and researched, academic and practitioner, manager
and employee, or friend and colleague – we believe, underpins the legitimacy of
research. The social ethics of relatedness forms the performative gestalt of the
relevant PhD.
Researchers discover that gestalt in their research; it arrives as the connotative
result of careful, engaged investigation, while attempting to do justice to self and
other while here, at the end of this book, we will try to stick some more labels,
of sorts, onto the relevant PhD, and to verbalize more explicitly our position. An
illustration:

Why did I do the research? Why did I want to highlight the mind-set of teachers at
the beginning of their career? My goal was to examine the culture of contemporary
schooling. Are schools dominated by consumerism and disinterest, as some
commentators maintain? I’ve heard so often that the children are mesmerized by
TV, social media or computer games. Supposedly, it is the fault of the children
that the teachers have it so difficult. But I wonder if the teachers are really so
different from the children? Perhaps the children are passive and intellectually
uninterested, but are the teachers really any different?
Pedagogical relevance for me is a dialogical concept. It applies to the uses of
research results, but also to the nature of the research relationship to the researched.
I have tried to get as close to the education students as was possible. To do so, I
used Master’s level students as go-betweens. One of the most crucial issues was
of the ‘authenticity’ of the data. In how far is it possible to gain access to the
viewpoints of teachers-in-training? I trained MA students to do open interviews.
They were close in age and background to the undergraduates. Participant
observation in seminars and lectures was also used to observe student behaviour.
Writing assignments from composition classes, where only writing skills and not
opinions were graded, provided more data about favourite activities, intellectual
curiosity and learning. Long conversations, between the MA researchers and
undergraduate focus groups, were taped and transcribed.
But even with all these sources of data, I still wondered whether the results were
trustworthy. There was certainly a lot of data available to support the analysis. But
after-the-fact, Professors of Education attacked the research as unrepresentative.
Of course, despite all the data, it is true that it was research done in one institution,
even if it was the largest department of education in the country.

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To my amazement, the reflexive, largely autobiographical chapter, which was

equally critical of student attitudes, did not meet with the same methodological
criticisms. That chapter was framed more as an auto-ethnography. When I said:
“This is what I have seen, experienced, and recorded,” the methodological
resistance was much less. Perhaps it is surprising, but the political attack on the
more structured and ‘objective’ research was much greater.
The bottom-line was that the Professors of Education were unwilling to accept
research that ‘showed’ that most of their students were crassly uninterested,
entirely philistine in their attitudes to knowledge, and exceptionally disrespectful
of the university or polytechnic as an institution.
Was the research sound? Probably. The amount of data was tremendous. But
the politics of research are such that if one states that one’s project is a case study,
or an ethnography of a singular place, event or circumstance, which describes a
single situation, one meets with much less resistance. But if one dares to claim
that the data paints a fairly generalizable picture, the nature of the content is
open to censorship. For political reasons, relevance seems much easier to pursue
in the single case, or qualitative and (auto-)ethnographic mode. This is not a
philosophical issue, but a pragmatic one.
Of course, qualitative research creates room for speculation, reflection
and theory. And relevance often has to do with the quality of relationships.
Researchers have to demonstrate their insights and ability to deal with what they
have discovered. How can I gain the political muscle to speak-out about teacher
disinterest, apathy and vacuous conformity? Teachers are supposed to be ‘good
guys’, idealists and professionals, who ‘love’ children, even if masses of data
shows no such thing.
Most of us work in large-scale bureaucratic organizations, and live in a
globalized economy; limiting research to the ethnographic or experiential level
can amount to self-marginalization. An auto-ethnographic thesis about a lecturer
dealing with chaos in the classroom, and anti-intellectual and anti-democratic
attitudes amongst education students, remains one story, one description, one
claim. It is much easier to ignore than research making statements about beginning
grade-school teachers in general. Relevance is dangerous stuff – too much of it
and, as a PhD researcher, you get your fingers burned.
There are many disfunctionalities in schools, social welfare institutions,
companies and governments, that professors and their professional allies are
determined not to let see the light of day. As a PhD researcher, you have to decide
how far you can go. At a certain point, research and whistle-blowing overlap as
activities, and we all know that most whistle-blowers get severely punished. So
I repressed almost all the data, wrote a qualitative essay with illustrative quotes,
and got the PhD. My PhD career ended up being a performative illustration of the
issues I thought I was going to confront in my research.

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In Chapter 3, we introduced Derrida’s use of the performative and connotative.

Research not only makes truth claims, describes events, and has ethical content; it
also supports causes, evokes actions, and (however modestly) makes things happen.
Too often, PhD research is presented as if it is only connotative and that the rules
of investigation and representation are all that matter. But as can be seen in the self-
description above, the performative dimensions of the thesis are crucial. Many PhD
students conform without giving it too much thought to the performative demands
of their supervisor and university, but post-experience students are often too savvy
for that. They have often witnessed how research can be used to reward some and
punish others, to further some careers and block others, and to create a managerial
structure that does little to further thoughtful investigation.
Research is always contested terrain, principally over which causes should
be served. Differing underlying social philosophies prescribe various courses
of action and justifications for research’s performative role. Gibson Burrell and
Gareth Morgan (1979) distinguished four different paradigms for social studies
research: functionalist, interpretative, radical humanist and radical structuralist.1
Functionalism reproduces unitary assumptions with the key research focus on
how unity, order, leadership, strategy and corporate success are achieved, or how
successful organizations are led and produce wealth. It assumes that the achievements
of managers within capitalism produce material success, leading to social stability
and enhanced welfare for all. A researcher working within this paradigm would be
expected to accept that capitalism is the only successful economic system, and that
free market values provide the best way of organizing society.
The interpretative approach assumes a pluralist stance. Research occurs in a
complex field marked by a plurality of desires and needs, with different agents having
different levels of power. Researcher subjectivity is crucial to understand these
dynamics, since self and other in research form a complex relationship of acceptance
and denial, awareness and ignorance, shared and hidden motives. Understanding is
complex as are the relations between the researcher and the researched. The research
relationship delivers data that can only be understood through careful analysis and
reflexive (self-)examination. Research is about change, dynamics, involvement and
relationship.
The radical perspective is subdivided in two: the radical structuralist and the
radical humanist. The former takes a Marxist spin on the unitary/functionalist
model. As in functionalism, social reality is considered to be pre-determined and
research exposes social conflicts that are objectively verifiable. The researcher
identifies and analyses the social fault lines created by capitalism. Theories drawn
from political economy provide the framework for social development which is
fraught with conflict; researchers are meant to analyse these conflicts in the data that
they uncover.
Radical humanism is similarly sceptical about capitalism, believing that the
contemporary version is in crisis, being characterized by a debilitating lack of
sustainability, which produces a consumerist culture of destructive nihilism. Direct

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relatedness and self-awareness reveal the nature of the contemporary human drama,
with immediacy and authenticity as crucial values. Critical communitarianism can
be seen as a form of radical humanism.
In the same period (the late 70’s), Ian Mitroff and Ralph Kilmann (1978) produced
a similar four-part model, but one that was slightly less politically charged. Their
categories were: analytical science, conceptual theorist, particular humanist and
conceptual humanist. Here, the analytical scientist maps onto the functionalist, whose
research is analysis driven and coupled to causal investigation, and leads to increased
control and prediction. Conceptual theorists study the laws of social organisation,
psychological interaction, or economic development; laws that are assumed to be
impersonal and objective. Particular humanism centres on the knowing subject’s
experience, while conceptual humanists develop social critique, for instance of
the contemporary hyper-capitalist consumer society. Critical communitarianism
is humanist and particular in its ethnographic pursuit of lived experience, but also
theoretical in how it evaluates and analyses practice.
The descriptors, in both systems, create meta-stories about research. They do
not tell us how to do research; they tell us about the worldview that research is
expected to conform to. One conclusion that can be taken from such paradigmatic
categorisation is that much research runs the risk of slipping into tautology, since
the most important conclusions are pre-determined before the research ever
starts. Gibbons et al.’s (1994) New Production of Knowledge merely re-baptised
functionalism/analytic science as Mode 1, and interpretive/particular humanist
as Mode 2, and shed all the rest. Radical Humanist/Radical Structuralist, and
Conceptual theorist/Conceptual humanist research formed no part of the analysis,
meaning that normative social awareness, and social philosophical reflection, were
rendered irrelevant and unseen. The focus on values, that characterises normative
professionalism, is made unimportant; and social-ethically inspired research (our
Mode 3) gains no legitimacy. Although The New Production of Knowledge claims to
be an empirical study of what researchers do, it makes unfounded assertions, in that
it suggests that research can only exist within two categories: research is either neo-
positivist (Mode 1) or centres on pragmatic professional problem-solving (Mode 2).
In comparison to Burrell and Morgan, or Mitroff and Kilmann, the possibilities as
to what research might be, or what it might achieve, have narrowed dramatically.
In a prescient article, Martin Parker and David Jary (1995) identified creeping
managerialism in the university, as part of a series of wider changes in how universities
operate, and suggested that research was being pried away from its attachment
to social and ethical ideals. Rather than being evaluated against a standard of
conceptual or disciplinary meaningfulness, or of social and ethical justice, research
was being measured against benchmarks for outputs and ranked in league tables.
What the actual research was, or the insights garnered, as essentially qualitative and
unquantifiable, becomes ever less important. Communities of research populated
with engaged and involved scholars, have become increasingly isolated and fragile,
as unbridled careerism and a competitive struggle to survive has predominated.

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Researchers have become more entrepreneurial, focusing on the exchange value of

ideas, and their personal output rankings, to the detriment of long-term communal
endeavour. Scholarship that expresses doubt, or questions existing orthodoxies, has
become ever less welcome. Such research is ever less easy to place and to fit on the
scales of measurement. Political or theoretical opposition has become heretical and
increasingly impotent. Academics focus on churning out papers for the highest rated
journals to survive, and since only the ideas that senior reviewers of those journals
embrace get published, it is increasingly career suicide to veer away from anything
but the most anodyne restatement of accepted theory.
Craig Prichard and Hugh Willmott (1997) have argued that the game might not
yet be over since subtle and covert resistance may prevent the Parker-Jary dystopia
from being fully realised. But fifteen years on, the dystopia sounds all too familiar
and the alternatives are increasingly scarce. A particularly interesting point that comes
from Parker and Jary is the insight that researchers were becoming different people.
Researchers have internalized the values of the market and of consumerism, positioning
themselves in competition with others, recognizing the need to market themselves.
As Paul du Gay (1997) has claimed, the ‘entrepreneurial self’ no longer sees
this pressure as an external force, but merely as a taking of legitimate skills and
products to the marketplace. What one believes about the inherent meaning of
one’s work has become almost irrelevant; it has been replaced by cash value and
the benefits to career. Academics that provide the ‘right-stuff’, or inventions and
innovations capable of producing wealth, are valued and thus are valuable. Others,
who are not producing such value are merely a cost, an expense to be cut. In effect,
the assumption that research is just another consumer product is shared by the
researchers, the researched, and often the readership.
Paul Jorion illustrates this from a very different field. Researching for his economic
anthropology of fishermen on the island of Houat (a small island off the coast of
Brittany), he discovered an illuminating contradiction between the written record
and a fisherman’s ideological statements (1983, 2012). Jorion was interviewing the
last person with living experience of la pêche à la voile (fishing from a sailing boat).
The fisherman still had his account book where he had recorded his catch and what
he was paid. The fisherman explained that what he received was based on supply and
demand: if the wholesale fishmongers needed more fish, his catch was worth more;
and if the day’s catch was small, the price per fish would rise; and so on. But, next
to almost two thirds of the entries, was written (in French) ‘taxation’. Jorion wanted
to know what that was. Reluctantly, the fisherman explained that this was a price
that was based both on what he and his family needed, and what the fishmongers
could pay while still managing to run their businesses. It was therefore a socially
negotiated price, based around meeting both parties’ basic economic needs; rather
than a market price determined by supply and demand. The fisherman insisted it was
exceptional and was almost never used. Nonplussed, Jorion pointed out, “But it is
marked here two thirds of the time!” But the fisherman persisted in arguing that the
market, through supply and demand, determined the price.

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What was happening here? The data was clear; the socially determined price
was the most common course of action. But the ideology of markets and economic
rationality determine that prices could not be based on ethical arrangements, but were
outcomes of interactions between economically self-interested players. Anything
else, supposedly, is absurdly irrational. The fisherman acted to solve the cognitive
dissonance between actual arrangements and the hegemonic ideology, by sticking to
the ideology. Maybe, if the interview had occurred in 1920, he would have answered
differently; but the sheer disconnect between the record of economic behavior
and his statements is notable. The absolute and pre-given priority of free market
economic ideology was impenetrable. This was not a question of research design,
the same ideological constructs could be repeated (although maybe not revealed so
clearly) with other research tools, such as questionnaires or structured interviews.
It appears that the pêche à la voile fishermen, and their wholesale buyers, were
part of a system, where prices and wages took fairness, empathy, and solidarity into
account. Contemporary economists would point to such a system as hopelessly
naïve, perhaps even claiming that the rapid demise of the fishing fleet was evidence
that the market economy always prevails. But such economists also refuse to look
at the eventual outcomes of the ever-widening global economy. A globalizing
market, driven by economic rationality, has led to ever-increasing concentrations of
wealth, with ever more people excluded from the benefits: 50% of the (American)
population now lives close to subsistence level. Investment in productive capacity
has little or no rationale, when there are less and less people able to buy the resulting
products, and the ability to generate an adequate return on capital investment is so
risky. Particularly when speculation in financial instruments seems to offer greater
returns.
Economists and financiers adhere to a discourse that neither addresses
unemployment, nor economic crisis. Locked into an account wherein an unfettered
market will always lead to optimal conditions, social and normative rules are
axiomatically declared counterproductive. But since the economic crisis makes
it manifest that the model is faulty, economic decision-makers are struggling to
find a response to the crisis. This does allow some space to re-open the discussion
about the economy and society. Should we be looking to explore sustainable and
just relationships, such as those that seemed to exist between the fisherman and
their customers? Surely these relationships were normatively superior to a zero-sum
game leading to social and economic crises? Older traditions of (social) morals,
characteristic of David Ricardo, or the writings of Adam Smith, encompass, but
go beyond, arguments for free trade and the invisible hand, as do Karl Marx, Max
Weber and Emile Durkheim. Perhaps it is time to pick them up again.
Contemporary society does not have a way of practicing a social-economic
version of what Aristotle called philia – that is, of getting along well with the other.
Instead, we have the empty disregard of the autonomous economic agent. But this
is perhaps not the only viable option: Prichard and Willmott (1997) appealed to a

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political-intellectual strategy of John Fiske. Fiske is particularly helpful, both for

Willmott and Prichard, and us, because of his understanding of ‘habitus’:

The … “habitus” contains the meanings of habitat, habitant, the process

of habitation, and habit, particularly habits of thought. A habitat is a social
environment in which we live; it is a product of both its position in the social
space and of the practices of the social beings who inhabit it. (Fisk, 1992: 155)

The term ‘habitus’ may be best known from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, but
the celebration of the place-based locale is Fiske’s. Fisk focuses on the place-
based practical know-how of ingenuity, shrewdness and inventiveness. This is in
distinction to institutionalized power, which is formal and works through planning
and deliberation. Fisk, in effect, identifies habitus with ‘metis’, which is an ancient
Greek term that refers to cunning, wit and trickery. The contrast (as voiced by de
Certeau) is between top-down, goal-directed strategy; and bottom-up tactics that
are spontaneous, serendipitous and self-organizing. This leads to two positions with
markedly different goals and abilities. The powerful may lack imagination, but they
are able to master a rule-based ‘over-organized army’; while the weak are resourceful
and ingenious ‘agile guerillas’. Prichard and Willmott see possibilities for researchers,
via shrewd and tactical ingenuity, to resist the forces of repressive bureaucratization.
Strategies of ‘joyful wisdom’ like ‘metis’, which are based on creativity,
imagination and resourcefulness, seem sadly dated. The particular or radical
humanists, and the conceptual humanists/radical structuralists, if they still exist, lack
the wherewithal to assert their ideas and to be heard. The radicals no longer have
political clout; and there are few humanist public intellectuals listened to with deep
respect.
Of late, there has been an attempt to organize opposition to repressive power
around the concept of the ‘multitude’, and hereby to assert alternative ways of
economic organizing through the ‘commons’:

Actually it is better to speak of the age of the post-modern or of the “common.”

Because the new form of accumulation of capital currently functioning repeats
for the first time the processes of expropriation of the common typical of
the beginning of modernity. It’s a process that attacks life and the common
that the century of worker struggles before us built; the “commons” that
have become the basis of our existence, from welfare to the new capacities
to produce, act, and build common languages other than the technoscientific.
Resistance acts against this new accumulation, and this is a central point of
Commonwealth. We call it “the one divides in two,” indicating a bifurcation
that resistance builds in the present. An absolutely central “bifurcation,” then,
that is founded on the defense of the common, and the attempt to valorize,
against the new primitive accumulation, the value of the commons. (Lucchese
& Smith, 2010: 9)

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The quote is from an interview with Antonio Negri, whose books Empire, 2001;
Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire, 2005; and Commonwealth,
2011 (co-authored with Michael Hardt) fiercely advocate the commons. Historically,
the commons was a part of English village life, which was shared and could be
used by all. Typically, this would include forests, rivers and open areas, where
villagers would harvest wood, fish, and graze animals. Many rights to common land
were given as part of medieval manor tenancies, but the more relevant commons is
probably the village green, whose use was not restricted to tenants. Commons were
once extensive but their acreage was diminished through enclosure. Rights were
privatized and the commoners (i.e. those who had rights to use the commons) lost
their traditional entitlements, most intensely through the Enclosure Acts from 1750-
1860. Today, although commons still exist, traditional rights are rarely exercised by
commoners; the most visible remaining signs are village greens and public parks.
However, for Hardt and Negri, the commons provides a desirable social model.
The latter day commons, borrowing a term from economics, is ‘a public good’,
with unrestricted access. The commons has been redefined to include both physical
and intellectual infrastructures, which are necessary for society to function, and that
can encompass roads, literacy, protection from toxic materials, coinage, care for
children and the aged, fresh air and clean water, to give but a few illustrations. If the
commons is commodified or privatized (that is, employed to deliver rent on capital),
it ceases to be inclusive or a commons.
Ever since Garrett Hardin wrote his “Tragedy of the Commons” in Science
(1968), wherein he propagated the concept of rational economic agents acting in
their own self-interest, there has been a widespread view that individual selfishness
will inevitably destroy the commons. It is supposedly in the interest of livestock
owners to overgraze, even when this diminishes the ongoing grazing value of the
land. Although variations on this argument had previously been used to justify
enclosure, Hardin was himself making a case for the commons, but claiming that
better management was needed (though the historical record reveals that this was far
less of a problem than economic theory might predict). Even if Hardin’s point about
managing the commons was to hold, Hardt and Negri wanted to say something very
different. They claimed that there is something markedly different in an intellectual
commons to one that is based around physical resources. Knowledge increases
by sharing; ideas get stronger in discussion and experimentation. The essence
of a book or song does not diminish, no matter how many times it is copied. Of
late, technological or internet forms of the commons have attracted considerable
attention; Linux and Wikipedia are frequently cited as two examples, while the row
between Wikitravel and Wikimedia demonstrates that battles over enclosure still
occur, even in cyberspace.
Allied to the notion of the commons is that of ‘the multitude’. The multitude
is not “a unitary people but a plurality of heterogeneous subjects, proud of their
specificity” (Joseph, 2005: 28). It is an ever-shifting grouping, where “language,
abstract thinking, disposition towards learning, plasticity, the habit of not having

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solid habits,” are put to work (ibid: 29). For a creative commons to work, intelligent
knowledge workers, coming from the multitude, supposedly are needed. Anti-
capitalist opposition is not as clear here as with Marxist analysis. Paul Virno, like
Negri a spokesperson for the Italian autonomist movement, asserts that there is a
“society of control” on the one side, and the new public sphere of the commons
on the other. Proponents of the commons do begin with a bifurcation between
capital and labor. But intelligence via mental competencies, skills and capabilities,
is seen as the principal productive force. The theory is post-modern in the sense that
industrial production is no longer identified as the primary driver, and labor through
mental ability has replaced labor as physical endeavor. We have already witnessed
in Chapter 2 a knowledge economy analysis of the ‘turn to practice’, where it led
to a focus on intellectual productive capacities, especially those of knowledge
workers and management. In the theory of the commons, the knowledge economy
is described as an ongoing struggle between labor and management, but the workers
possess the capital that knowledge represents, while management has the means
of bureaucratic control. The supposed, growing prevalence of knowledge work is
understood here as the key change factor.
Knowledge mining, knowledge management and the ‘the turn to practice’ all
assume that management can get control over knowledge and exploit the knowledge
workers, while proponents of the commons think that the new knowledge economy
can lead through action to radical social change. Both analyses insist on the primacy
of knowledge work, although they valorize opposing interests and social groups.
Both approaches are anti-humanist in the sense that knowledge work, or the category
of labor representative of the times, forms their key assumption. These are theories of
labor or of the social terms of employment, and not theories of belief, awareness or
being-with Other. What in (neo-)Marxism was called the ‘subjective factor’ or what
the researchers and researched experience, is here of little import. Key productive
characteristics of the knowledge economy form the backbone of the analysis and it is
not the human subject but social-economic structure that is the determinant.
There is a fundamental difference between knowledge economy postulates, and the
experiential-ethical line of thought that forms the backbone to this book. As understood
here, lived perception is crucial to the human situation and well-being. We situate our
ethics in concrete events and emphasize their relational and participatory qualities.
We see research as ‘place-based’, whereby (re-) territorialization and the details of
relatedness in the specific circumstance, are treated as crucial. This necessarily reduces
the possibilities of generalization, as attention to the uniqueness of events with all
their differences in conditions, militates against scalability. We consider the specific
to be important. Depth analysis of lived circumstance leads to the development of
significant insights. The emphasis on the particular, without the desire for totalizing,
produces a particular humanist perspective that is an anathema for Hardt and Negri,
with their commitment to political-economic causality.
We believe that normative professionalism is a promising and important ground
for doing social science research. Of course, various forms of structuralist analysis,

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from Marx to Bourdieu, and on to Hardt and Negri, have played a fundamental role
in social studies; but we have never encountered a post-experience PhD candidate
who was dedicated to creating, testing or applying new structuralist theory. Our
students could not make structuralist ‘grand narratives’ productive in their research.
Mastering structuralist theories to the level that one can justifiably criticize them and/
or apply them critically, rarely emerges as a successful option for our students. But
working from the ground-up, using experience and paying attention to the quality of
relationships is an option capable of delivering excellent results.

From the “Rapport préamble à la soutenance de thèse” L’Université Management

SudParis et Val d’Éssonne2:
I recommend the thesis «Mouvement: Individuation et Transformation, Une
approche ethnographique de l’Odin Teatret» by Isabela dos Santos Paes, for
defense and unreservedly support it for the granting of the degree.
The thesis is well written and very accessible. As the principal body of the thesis
is an (auto-)ethnography, as a radical form of participant observation, the quality of
writing and of the description is a crucial criteria for its success. One never doubts
that the author ‘has been there’ and that this key criterion of quality in anthropological
research has been met. The evocation of the place that has been studied is very
successful and it convinces the reader that the author really has ‘seen what happens
there’. The authorial ‘I’ of the ethnography is powerfully asserted, but this opens
several theoretical questions. A primary ‘ego’ position is asserted in the text, wherein
‘presence’ is understood in terms of self-recognition and self-acknowledgement. The
author writes with passion and energy about art, theater and truth.
The second success of the thesis is somewhat paradoxical; it succeeds in
provoking my profound disagreement. I neither agree with the analysis, nor with
the theoretical framing. This is a success, because clearly a powerful conceptual
perspective has been achieved. I now know a lot about Odin Teatret3, but is it
really as unique as Paes asserts? They may be anti-materialist and disdainful of
money alone; but does that make them anti-capitalist?
The thesis evolves though three stages, or theoretical ‘moves’. The first is
inspired by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Odin Teatret is described in detail
via “thick description.” Odin is portrayed in terms of Boltanski and Chiapello
as a 1960’s rebellion, which still continues. The question is: “Has capitalism
successfully incorporated its oppositions, making terms such as ‘authenticity’
into a commodity marketing-tool?” Is the culture of anti-establishment in Odin
Teatret a source of new profitability? The author seems to assume that Odin
has escaped the mechanisms of incorporation, but what is the evidence for this
assertion? She claims that if there are managers who rationalize production and
consumption, and they control input and output quantitatively, there is capitalism.
But identifying capitalism with a managerial regime is questionable. Haven’t
Boltanski and Chiapello’s asserted that management and capitalism have made

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the ‘freedom’ culture of the 1960’s productive? And is this not exactly what
Barba, the principal director of Odin Teatret, has done? He rules via ideological
control – via a collective belief in expression, innovation and creativity. He does
not need bureaucratic control; he is a master of the ideological. Odin Teatret’s
actors tell us that if one follows Barba’s will, one will be ‘alive’, and if one does
not, one will be ‘dead’. Artaud’s vocabulary of authenticity versus repetition, and
passion versus sham, produces here a regime of ‘biopower’ characterized by total
(self-) control, wherein the actors work themselves to exhaustion. The actors go
through physical and mental barriers to reach a ‘freedom’ of total immersion.
In terms of Geertz, do the ‘actors exercises’ – described proficiently in the
thesis – stand for the beliefs and relationships characteristic of Odin Teatret’s
(organizational) culture? Each performer is evidently called upon to break through
his or her deadness or asleep-ness to achieve ‘aliveness’. But if this ‘aliveness’
is determined by the director Barba, can Odin be understood as a sect where
the founding figure or ‘guru’ is the master of the players’ professional life and
death? Is Odin Teatret a charismatic totalitarian organization structured around
the power of a single god-like figure? If Boltanski and Chiapello are right, Odin
Teatret merely shows capitalism’s power to absorb potentially disruptive socio-
religious movements, and to (re-)make them productive. The ethnography details
an extreme exploitation of labor – labor that believes it is free, while producing
theater in a very cost-effective manner. A regime of ideological control has made
belief economically productive and performative.
The author describes her experiences in Odin Teatret as artist/researcher. We
are privy to her presence and sentiments. But, has she ‘gone native’? Is the text
methodologically really more an auto-ethnography, than representative of the
‘turn to affect’? In Carolyn Ellis’ auto-ethnography, the author produces a plot
that makes the ‘scene’ visible to the reader. Odin Teatret is a place of chosen
participation via total engagement where the claims of work supposedly are
freeing. In Kathleen Stewart’s ‘turn to affect’, the author observes her responses
to the surroundings. Here the daily flow of response, identity and emotion is
recorded. How people talk their worlds into existence is examined. Paes seems
more to ‘experience’ than to ‘observe’ – that is, she is more inside than outside
of what she describes. We feel with her, when she precariously has to perform
in high heels, making her task much more difficult, and forces her close to her
breaking point. She is not our observer; she is the most important subject to be
observed.
Odin Teatret is examined from the perspective of Bernard Stiegler and his
concept of the pharmakon. In what sense is Odin Teatret a ‘cure’ and in what
sense a ‘poison’? Paes sees Stiegler as a depth therapist of the relationship society/
identity, self/other, psyche/culture. Co-identity or circumstantial emergence is
thus what happens in the interrelationships between individual and group. Thus,
how does the group make the individual in Odin Teatret? And how does Odin

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Teatret’s image of society and of itself as ‘rebel’, co-define Odin Teatret and the
surrounding society? The ‘rebel’ can only exist in relationship to the surrounding
society as its Other. Is Odin Teatret’s relationship to that surrounding culture/
society frozen in terms dating from the 1960’s? For Stiegler, identity and context
are dynamic mutual co-creations. He might champion Odin Teatret as a (re-)
territorialization – as an organization with a strong sense of place, identity and
community, but he would stress the open culture of the ‘commons’ more than
Paes does.
Ultimately, was the goal of the thesis to show the ‘commons’ in practice? In
Negri and Virno, the society is post-Fordist and post-modern, which here means
that ingenuity, intelligence, flexibility and creative skills are the productive
forms of capital. But will capital be controlled, disciplined and dominated in the
interest of the ‘power-bloc’ or are we moving towards a society based on labor-
value? In terms of Odin Teatret, this means that the role of “ideological control,”
“biopower” and the “commons” is crucial.
The audience is almost absent in the thesis. The actors are defined in terms
of their love for aliveness, but not in terms of an audience’s love for them.
For Boltanski and Chiapello, and Stiegler, humanity’s necessary self-love
is endangered by the proletariatization of the ego; that is, by the loss of felt
independence, uniqueness and identity. Odin Teatret can be seen to be a system
of control to serve performativity, wherein the director possesses, controls, and
distributes the fruits of capital. Was capital really socially and collectively owned?
Were the acting exercises perhaps a manifestation of shared knowledge and of
mutual intelligence, or were they ultimately an aspect of an imposed regime or
episteme of managerial control? Paes’s understands Odin Teatret as the presence
of the performers to one another and to their artistic work.
Can we really decide all these issues with the use of ethnographic research?
The thesis is scholarly, important, and original; but the verdict is still out whether
the commons as a workplace can be ethnographically studied to determine its
relational significance. The commons supposedly thrives on autonomy – on voice,
innovation and chaos – but its anti-capitalist significance cannot be determined
in a disorderly, self-contradictory or haphazard manner. The thesis gives us more
agency – self, description and presence – than structure, de-proletariatization,
(re-)territorialization or autonomous communism.
In conclusion, the approach to theory was entirely appropriate to the radically
inductive ethnographic path followed. The ethnography has impressively
succeeded in demonstrating the individuality of the author’s perspective. But I
doubt that Odin Teatret has escaped capitalist hegemony and hierarchy. Opposing
labor (hands) and leadership (heads), the quotidian or merely bodily to the alive or
spiritual, is not liberatory. I have a debate with this thesis on a theoretical level; it
has indeed succeeded in posing demanding questions with its use of ethnography.
Thus, I am happy to recommend it for the defence.

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Relevant theses in our experience have been concerned with the commons in the
sense that they focus on relational experience and self/other co-construction, and
the importance of place and circumstance, and win-win forms of professional
cooperation. How shared practices of the good (as opposed to ‘good practices’) are
developed, implemented, communicated and justified, is a repeating theme. But the
‘commons’ as an explicit term or concept has only appeared rarely.
The critique of excessive individualism points to something that could be called
‘responsive communitarianism’, where research into affect-laden relatedness
illuminates professional responsibility. The study of moral or virtuous behavior in
professional practice is a recurring theme in practitioner investigation and research-
led action. Of course, this encompasses and allows research into economic-driven
behavior. The contemporary morality, of self-interest and personal enrichment,
is a morality; albeit partial and inadequate. In our experience, practitioner social
research, sensitive to respect and participation, is a realistic option. We ethicize
social research only insofar as all social research inevitably entails social relatedness
and must attend to its quality of interaction. The question is not one of whether social
research has an ethics; but, rather, which ethics? In our experience, practitioner PhD
students want to understand what makes for good, or ethical, practice. They are not
simple-minded utilitarians, but more often than not, sophisticated reflective thinkers.
Relevance for them has to do with justice, fairness and respect, and not just economic
success. But all too often, students are told that a PhD can only be written in Mode 1
and that the only alternative is an ‘unscientific’ Mode 2; we thank that what we call
‘Mode 3’ is a viable alternative for such shortsightedness.
Mode 1 emphasizes the connotative side to research; it is focused on epistemological
issues and tries to give answers to radical doubt or to: ‘How can we know this is
true?”. Mode 2 emphasizes the performative side to research; it emphasizes pragmatic
and utilitarian themes or tries to respond to: “What is to be done?” We assume that
research is not complete either when grounded in connotative or in pragmatic goals,
but that it needs to be ethically embedded. Ethical embedding demands being with
Other, acknowledging the Otherness of other, and accepting the complexity of
human social existence. Research, we believe, is not just (clever) thought; it requires
presence, openness and affective care. The content of the research and the research
process have to be woven together to identify and produce ethical relationships. Social
research is an activity that requires performative consistency between its processes
and contents. This entails (re-)territorialisation or the production of shared lived-time
and space. Social research produces relatedness, which it then describes, analyses,
and problematizes; all the time taking care to respect the quality of the relationships
upon which it depends. Another way of describing this process is to call it ‘care for
self’ or ‘care for self and other’. These entail care for the construction of identity (or
self) and attention to the being of relationship (or care) that make identity possible.
Care, as we understand it, has to be critical. It has to examine its assumptions
and their social grounds. Many ideas and actions are self-serving in that they
produce more income for professionals defending them, or they defend the interests

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of supporters against those of detractors. Defense of such ideas can, of course, be

perfectly honest and well-founded, but nonetheless the underlying structure of self-
interest is omnipresent. But not all interests are equal, and very few researchers take
note of the interests of the voiceless subalterns, preferring instead, deliberately or
inadvertently, to champion management’s interests. Social studies research always
has social ramifications, sometimes monumentally so. Famous examples are those
of the IQ test being developed to efficiently muster an army to fight a World War,
or the studies of leadership that strengthen the effectiveness of organizational
hierarchies. It is not enough to just identity the interests that underlie ideas – one
has to make it explicit why and how one chooses one interest over another. Support
for a cause, identification with a group and allegiance to a movement, if adequately
reflected upon, are all legitimate possible courses of action for a researcher, but the
researcher must engage in active cycles of self/other reflection, attending to thought
and learning, observation and reflection, theorizing and ideas have changed.
We believe that the ethical purposiveness of research comes from the self/other
interaction. Research manifests and reinforces the threads of relatedness between
now and the past, here and there, different persons, generations, and cultures. While
some animals, such a chimpanzees, make use of tools, and can pass some skills on
from one generation to the next and do communicate verbally; humans exteriorize
their ‘minds’ to a much larger degree in their texts, art and artefacts. Human memory,
thought, ideation and experience, is unthinkable without such exteriorization.
‘Mind’ is a product and activity of sense perception (primary retention), and memory
(secondary retention), and tertiary retention (media and culture), producing self-
awareness and texts about self-awareness (Stiegler, 2010). We invent ourselves in
the texts we create, and thereby tell about ourselves and each other. Identity comes
through a process of shared, collective individuation, and is a product of how self
and other are exteriorized and acknowledged.
Critical communitarianism takes this further, by assuming that identity is
inherently a co-creation, happening at specific sites and between concrete flesh-
and-blood persons. Mode 3 social research has the ambition of producing new
understandings between researchers and researched via the gaze – that is, via shared
understanding, investigation and reflection, entailing ‘territorialization’ or being
together in circumstances. But such being together is only possible if the otherness of
the other is recognized. Acknowledgment and attention to difference and connection,
illuminates the site of research; the (re-)territorialisation of social existence follows
in consequence. Acknowledgment of one another’s gaze co-creates the places of
identity and involvement to which communitarianism is dedicated.
Bernard Stiegler, the French philosophical sociologist, can be seen as a
spokesperson for the sort of critical communitarianism we champion. Research,
inspired by Stiegler, explores the ethics of trust, relatedness and co-individualization.
Social research is therefore a matter of relationship. The researcher has to be open
to relatedness, which requires acknowledging the otherness of other if the research
relationship is to succeed. Far too often, researchers merely project their ideas

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and prejudices onto the researched and the ‘research question’ is little more than a
tautology. What can be discovered and analysed has already been pre-determined.
For instance, research into ‘worker motivation’ assumes the divide between
management and workers, and that such a psychological category as ‘motivation’
exists. But if ‘motivation’ really amounts to workers doing as managers want them to
do, as quickly and cheaply as possible, then such research merely affirms managerial
thinking without connecting to that of workers at all. The terrain is prefigured in
such a way that the workers are made voiceless. The researcher imposes a set of
assumptions; the relationship is one-sided and manipulative.
Stiegler investigates the social psychology of contemporary ethics, delving into
the question as to what sort of mindset and what possibilities of relationship are
characteristic of present day society. He attenuates this through consideration of
the ethical ramifications of the economic crisis at the beginning of the 21st century.
This crisis, he argues, is not just an economic issue of banks and currencies; it is a
cultural crisis, which threatens to destroy one form of relatedness and to replace it
with another. But the new relatedness of atomized economic individuals, he finds,
is deeply inadequate in its possibilities for socialization and the forms of sociability
that it generates. The communitarian relationships, or lack thereof, between identity
and society, consumer society and self, researcher and researched, form the basis of
his research agenda.
Stiegler’s communitarianism is framed around ‘adoption’ versus ‘adaption’. The
‘self’ constantly changes, continually ‘adopting’ new identities with concomitant
perspectives and goals. But just as events get exteriorized as ideas, and labour is
exteriorized in machinery, identities become exteriorized as ideal types. Humanity
adopts what it proposes to itself. ‘Identity’, then, is both cause and effect – people
make things happen and then take cognisance and possession of the results. As long
as activity produces results that can be introjected as identity, the living processes of
change and alteration continues.
There is a danger with adaption that blind self-maintenance through opportunistic
plasticity leads to a regime of the lowest common denominator and a logic of
mere survival. The cycle of activity and identity can grind down to a snail’s pace,
as the self adapts to circumstances, instead of internalizing change and forging
new possibilities. Through adaption, key elements of becoming-human get lost,
as identities stop bouncing off of each other in a creative process of change and
adoption. Adaption locks the elderly into weary loneliness and imprisons the young
in the excitably immediate, producing a barren society that lacks the dynamic
driven by the continual creation of new identities. Contrasting adoption is a logic
of transformation; new forms of ‘self’ constantly result from changing possibilities
and relationships.
‘Adoption’ is Stiegler’s word for what we would call ‘relevance’. Humans
produce ‘self’ and ‘identity’ in their exteriorizations; mnemo-technical systems are
created and used to perceive, define, remember, communicate, share and sediment
changing experiences and self-awareness. The PhD thesis can be seen as one such

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mnemo-technical system. It is a mental technology, developed in the 19th century,

and as with all technics, it is continually changing and evolving. The thesis is one
possibility of introjection: a way to take action, to learn from what one does, and to
internalize that learning in one’s and other’s sense of self.
In the last twenty years, there have been substantial shifts in our mnemo-technical
systems: computerisation (including, specifically, word-processing), social media,
computer games and TV/film/video on demand have become ever more intrusive
and important. For research in the social studies, ‘cut and paste’ technologies
have facilitated original writing and editing but also boosted the possibilities for
plagiarism. On-line access to libraries and publishers has made articles much more
readily available but has probably also hastened the decline of the book. Data
storage, analysis and potentially sharing has been enhanced, although the battle over
intellectual property rights grows ever fiercer. Some argue that one consequence is
that attention and memory have been scattered and put in jeopardy; and others think
that they have been broadened and made richer. This is potentially crucial since the
Self/Other relationship centres on paying attention while research itself is a question
of concentrated attending to the Otherness of sites, events, themes and issues.
Modes of research favour different technics of memory, producing privileged
connotative dimensions, or statements of ‘so-it-is’. Mode 1 has the questionnaire,
Mode 2 the case study, and Mode 3 the ethical-evaluative ‘turn to affect’. Similarly,
every technic has its performative or intentional dimension. Mode 1 defines
universal laws and rules whose application are meant to be unproblematic; Mode
2 describes and defines models of professional best-practices; while Mode 3
investigates exemplary self other relatedness providing criteria for shared activity.
Mode 3 research hasas its goal, creating relationships of care between researchers
and the researched, between authors and readers, and between discussants and future
texts. In this way, writing, reading and discussing are all technics of research and
research can be seen as being about connectedness; these technics of social bonds
are what technology cannot reproduce. Computer supported research can categorize
interview data, but it cannot do the work of co-constructing mutual understanding.
The performative goal of the relevant PhD is to exteriorize practitioner activity in
order to facilitate normative professionalism as an exploratory and reflexive function
of democracy. We realize that many contemporary mnemo-technical systems can be
readily identified and connected with consumerism and the unfettered pursuit of
profit, but we believe that tertiary memories of care, affect, and recognition, although
they lie largely outside the wave of digitalization, remain deeply significant. Thus,
to put this in a concrete context, our effort has been to encourage researching ‘care
of self’ – research that cares, that is about caring, and that produce care of self and
other, in what we call Mode 3 research. We have argued that ‘relevance’ is to be
found in the care for self, other, circumstance and society. But it is hard enough to
make a practitioner PhD program work as if it was a commons, not to think that one
could extrapolate the model to all of society.

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INTERTEXT SEVEN

Kim Tsei: Whose community?

Context
I am researching political refugees in Holland, particularly looking at what happens
to those who achieve ‘official’ refugee status and are granted permission to stay.
This brings conflicts – prior to achieving such status, they can be incarcerated as
near criminals, but once they are ‘official’, they are cast loose from the certainties
of the institutional setting and are forced to confront the myriad complexities of
an alien state.
One of the respondents is an Iraqi, a former general under Saddam Hussein.
Placed in a camp in the rural east of Holland, his 10 year old son had entered
mainstream Dutch education. However, the father found that his son was being
bullied at school and, even worse, that the teacher was encouraging the other
children to round on him. When the father tried to talk to the teacher, she brushed
him off and refused to engage.
When I was told about this by the father, I decided that I would go with him
to speak to the teacher. When I did so, the teacher did not deign to defend herself
– instead she used racist arguments to castigate the child. Shocked, Iwarned the
teacher that she would take this to the head-teacher and to the school governors. I
found the head-teacher unwilling, or unable, to do anything, but that the chair of
the governors (who I knew personally) was prepared to act. Within a few days, the
governing body had written to the teacher suggesting that there was potentially
a problem and that she was not acting within the Christian statutes of the school
(potentially very serious, and one of very few potential grounds for dismissal).
Ultimately, however, the situation was resolved when the child was placed in a
different school.
When I presented this story as part of my data to a workshop of fellow PhD
students, a substantial part of the cohort reacted with anger. Not about the treatment
of the child, but in support of the teacher, and railed against mymobilization of
resources against the teacher

My Story: Writing the Thesis

What is the process like of undertaking a PhD? For me, you can use the metaphor
of going on a journey or starting a journey, almost in a way that wasn’t planned.
Because the way I remember it goes right back to the seed that was planted in
my head. I had never thought of it at any stage before. The seed was planted
in my head during my first conversation about my Masters thesis, when the
supervisormentioned it. At the time, I didn’t have a clue what doing a PhD would
entail. I’d never thought about it. I thought it meant: Do you want to take your
Masters to completion and get the Masters. To which I replied: Yes, of course.

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And then afterwards, when I was back home and I said to my husband Janus:
He asked, do I want to do a PhD and I said Yes. What does that mean? And
Janus said: Oh, that means you just told them you want to do a lot more work. So
that was the first time the seed got planted. And it started to grow on me, firstly
through the Masters. At first, I thought yes, then I thought no. Because the idea
of doing the PhD doesn’t fit with the idea I had of myself, and of my identity of
coming from a lower working class background and not being very academic.
Probably I was smart enough to get the Masters, but I shouldn’t be looking to
doing anything much more. So the idea started to grow and I think the process is,
like I said, a journey, but one I think is particularly full of good moments. Always
good in the sense of learning, but often there is confusion: not being too deeply
involved in the stuff; probably not having enough background; not being able
to step back enough; confusion in not knowing if I am doing things of any real
value, have I got anything to say, have I got enough intelligence to get through
such a process, have I read enough.
I have been quite surprised, pleasantly surprised, at the reactions to my writing.
Especially for the Masters and for the pieces I’ve written afterwards. I’ve found
a renewed joy in writing, and especially doing creative writing and trying to see
how you can bring some of that into the accounts of people’s lives. So it’s really
been a process of discovering my own potential and discovering the things I’m
attracted to and not attracted to. I wouldn’t say it has been a struggle, but I have
been trying to get to grips with idea that maybe I’m good enough to do it, so I
should just go ahead and do so. But still I have doubts about how can I ever have
read enough, or know enough, to actually make a contribution. There are a lot
dilemmas and questions.
The role for me of writing is that really it’s only by writing that I can discover
what I actually know, and what I’m thinking. Talking things through helps to a
certain degree, but it’s not nearly as helpful as when I start to write things down.
And I think that is what I have discovered from doing the Masters, and from
doing research in this way. In doing participant ethnography, you are constantly
writing things down. Then, when I take the time to write longer pieces, it’s at that
moment that my thoughts get collected, and that I actually start to put things on
paper, and see: Oh yes, I can connect with that.
Even for my paper for the ethnography conference in Liverpool, I left the writing
to the last minute, so I only had two days to write the paper. The writing itself goes
very quickly. Collecting the stories, brooding about the ideas, procrastinating,
they take time. There is absolutely no problem with the writing, but there is this
constant kind of doubt about using the theory, and have I got enough theoretical
ideas. Because just writing a piece, with all the experiences I have had in terms of
practice and work, and having kept these notebooks for years. Even from before
I ever started to do the Masters I’ve got enormous amounts of material. I can pull

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out all sorts of stories and creative bits and start. But it’s then this question of
how am I going get the theory in, and do I see the paradigms. I still have a feeling
that I can only just now, in the last six months, say the word, ‘epistemology’ and
know what I am talking about. So it’s only now that I’m starting to learn certain
bits of language, but I can now pull together some academic language, and have
a reasonable conversation with somebody. But there still is the doubt about how
much do I know and how academic it is.
Of course, I am very happy that my paper was very well received. But I don’t
think I have a problem with talking about the practicalities of the refugees. I
know these people very well, I have had a lot of experience with them. So it’s
only if people start to question, ‘What do I mean by affect?’ that the nerves kind
of set in. I think maybe people will ask, ‘What is affectivity? and what if I can’t
come up with a good answer because I don’t have enough background? But if it’s
about practical experience and telling about what happens to refugees, that’s fine.
There is an element of surprise that this work interests people because, being in
it for so long, I live and breathe it daily. Sometimes I forget how few academics
really get out in the field. I was talking the other day to a lady from the Dutch
refugee service, she has been working there for sixteen years and she said, ‘I can
see you actually know these people quite well’. That’s always a surprise because
I have lost my distance. It is hard for me to judge what the value is of what I
know because it seems so normal to me. So there is a kind of paradox about my
knowledge; I think everybody knows that anyway, so what is so special about it?
But of course, most do not have that knowledge at all.
Actually writing the thesis is lonely. When the workshops and course work is
completed, and you just have to write, then you start a process alone. But I don’t
feel it as a sad kind of loneliness, because I am the sort of person who shares what
I am doing. Of course, I look especially to my supervisors to help me to push
things further, to introduce new ideas but, at the same time, I am not afraid to get
other people’s opinions. So I have some contact with people in Leicester, such
as Agnus Cameron, who occasionally sends me information. He’s doing a paper
on witchcraft for example. We’ve discussed a few things around it. So it’s not
lonely in the sense that I feel totally isolated. But what is lonely is that I am not
surrounded by people who have done a PhD or who think on that abstract level.
So, even Janus, my husband, who has a Masters in literature, is doing totally
practical work. So there is no conversation about abstract concepts, because he
can’t grasp what I am trying to say. So in that sense, because you develop, your
language changes, you start talking differently, you develop new ideas, you look
at things in a different way. Then it can be lonely because people around you are
not doing things like that, or talking about things in the same way. So there is no
local support as it were.
What I find extremely encouraging about the supervision is the very positive
way of giving feedback. I don’t ever feel that is negative or that faculty are saying:

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‘You don’t know anything’. So there is none of that. Even though I may feel
unsure. And there is the enormous variety and the generosity of knowledge, and
of pushing me further to explore new ideas. That is, for me, the most important
thing. That there is a generosity of sharing, and of not forcing me into this corner
or into that corner, or making me feel that I don’t know enough. So that’s I think
the one of the biggest compliments, especially for my relationship with faculty.
With my second supervisor I would say it’s a bit different. I get the impression
that he is afraid to give really hard criticism, or to say that something just won’t
work. So he says: Try this, try that, don’t worry and just do that. So it’s not as
focused or as critiqued as it could be. But at the same time, he definitely offers
moral support. But the relationship is not the same and I see him less often.
I don’t think there is much I could or would complain about, because the
structure is there if I need it, and planning that is very much down to me. And my
own experience is that when I have questions they are answered. So I don’t have
the feeling: Oh, he leaves me alone and never gets in touch. Both supervisors
travel. When they are away, I know that they are away and that email still works.
And some faculty offer a Skype session, if I want one. So I don’t feel abandoned,
and I feel the criticism and feedback is extremely uplifting, and helps to push me
further. It’s as I said, the generosity of sharing is important for me.
Other graduate students are very much on the periphery for me. They are on
periphery in terms of the type of input, or giving me ideas where I would say:
That sparks something off in me. In terms of sharing literature, I do have that
kind of relationship. So when I’ve mentioned things to others, they have sent me
stuff. With one participant there has been a more general kind of sparring session,
talking about how we are getting on and stuff like that, but there is nothing where
I could say: Oh, this spurred me on or gave me new ideas or helped me. It’s
more knowing that they are in the same process, so that has an effect on the
motivational aspect; seeing them or knowing that they are also hard at work. But
I don’t feel an intellectual stimulation coming from them. That is mainly from
the supervisors and from the different contacts I may have had with people at
conferences, or I met when they were guest lecturers.
I keep contact with Professor Simon Lilley at Leicester. It is not much on
the level of: I want to talk to you about this or that but on the level of: How is
it going with you, and what’s happening. There’s email contact probably every
few months: How are you doing and what’s happening. But he put me in touch
with Angus Cameron and there the contact is on a more intellectual level. Angus
was interested in concepts of lostness and borders, and he gave me a lot of tips
on readings. Then I have, of course, my good friend Jean-Pierre in Lyon. He likes
to read those things, is very involved in refugees, and refugee issues in France.
He was head of an organization for the homeless, he’s done work for refugees
and asylum-seekers, and he reads a lot of French philosophy. Now, he’s retired.

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He retired early, I think two or three years ago. I do have, here and there, some
contacts, but the main input is, as I said, really from my supervisors.
I’ve always written by simply sitting down and writing at least fifty pages
in a week. I think the problem for me with writing in the manner of: Let’s do a
few pages here and a few pages there, is that I do not feel then that I am getting
enough out it. I want it to be flowing. So now, of course, I’ve got all of these
loose bits everywhere. So I think the way which it works for me is really going to
be: I decide to write an extended piece on one of the refugees I have followed. I
just have to do it chapter by chapter. I’m not saying I’m going to write the whole
thing in one week, but it will have to be done in prolonged periods of writing
and getting chapter-by-chapter the whole thing out the door. And then getting
feedback and seeing am I on the right track. It won’t work, Let’s just write a little
account here and a little account there. Because, like with the conference papers,
I just sit down and I write it.
Before I start to write, what I’m going to say is not entirely thought out, and
that’s my problem. This was one of the main problems, also during the writing
of the Masters. One of the professorial comments about the MA thesis was: The
structure needs to be much better but the content is really good. And I think I
have this problem with structure. It must be something psychological with fixing
something in advance, and trying to keep to a plan. So, in all the things I wrote for
the Masters, there was absolutely no plan. I just sat down and wrote for five days,
in the order that it popped into my head, and that’s what you got.
That’s why I tried to write a statement of purpose for the PhD thesis. I have
been trying to get myself into a mode of planning, because this should be more
meaty. But in the things I’ve done up to now, the idea of a structure hasn’t work
for me.
My writing just kind of comes out. And then the question unfolds, whilst I am
writing, the topic emerges. It’s often when I get maybe three quarters or half way
through the paper that I see: Oh this theme is actually emerging or this is what is
coming out of the writing. And in the past I have rewritten very little. It all just fits
together. Maybe it has to do with all the field notes; often there are hundreds of
pages of material in the background. And there are piles of books on my desk, all
open to various pages where there are quotes that I might want to use. I will pick
out a quote and then I’ll start from there. And my desk will look like a total mess
because there’ll be literally piles of books everywhere and what I’ve started to
do now, which I am hoping is going to be helpful, is make these little index cards
with quotes on them. And I’ve got my new e-reader, so I can pick out highlighted
texts. I don’t like it, but I decided to give it a try. But I don’t of course remember
the quote exactly, but I can remember, or I think I can remember, that there was
something good in that book, which relates to this. So the desk will be full of
books, articles, papers. Sometimes it’s a bit haphazard when I need to start. So
I start with, Let’s find the quote. This book is on the top. Let’s pick it up, open it

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and see what’s in there. But in my case, there’s not a planned structure. It’s all a
bit haphazard, I am afraid
But it does not come out haphazard. And it does not look like that when you
read it. Maybe I have a strong sense of intuition which draws my hand to a
particular book at a particular time. But a lot of the times, I just open the book,
because I thought that there was something on this page with which I could start,
and then I take it from there.

NOTES
1
In Chapter Four their categorization of research into ‘unitary, pluralist or radical’ was noted; here they
split the radical category in two.
2
When a PhD thesis goes to the viva exam (oral defense) in France, a preliminary evaluation of the
manuscript is required from several Professors who recommend that the thesis is ready to be defended.
This is an abridged version of one such evaluation.
3
Odin Teatret describes itself as a theatrical ‘laboratory’ which ‘has so far created 74 performances,
performed in 63 countries and different social contexts. In the course of these experiences, a specific
Odin culture has grown, founded on cultural diversity and the practice of “barter”: Odin actors present
themselves through their work to a particular milieu which, in return, replies with songs, music and
dances from its own local culture. The barter is an exchange of cultural manifestations and offers not
only an insight into the other’s forms of expression, but is equally a social interaction which defies
prejudices, linguistic difficulties and differences in thinking, judging and behaving.’ http://www.
odinteatret.dk/about-us/about-odin-teatret.aspx (last consulted 19.04.2013).

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TAKE-AWAYS

In the previous chapters, we have described the relevant PhD, complete with
theoretical background, and here we want to suggest what readers who have followed
this journey might like to take away from the text. Such recommendations are
necessarily fraught: we have shown at different points how precarious perspectives
and means of research have been, when they offer an alternative to mainstream
disciplinary preoccupations. We would not be being truthful if we said that there
are easy options that can simply be spelt out that will, in turn, lead to better, more
engaged research. Supervisors and programme coordinators may find suggestions
here that help particular students and theses but we would be chary of implying
that any programme based on the principles that we espouse will be necessarily
well-received within the academy, especially an academy that is ever more geared
towards quantifiable, marketable results. Nor, indeed, would we wish to put forward
a set of rigid principles that any programme must adhere to, since one of our core
beliefs is that the research relationship is always a work-in-progress and that if, at
any point, the participants think that it is finally settled, then it is probably time to
think again.
However, perhaps the first key tenet is that we need to continue to pay attention
to the relationships involved in engaged research. This takes many forms, of course,
but the relationship between the researcher and the researched is an obvious place
to start. How can the researcher do justice to the researched is a question that many
of the sub-disciplines of social studies research have considered, particularly within
those areas that have grasped the potential of ethnographic research. Yet we would
suggest that many that advocate this approach, although their work is insightful and
useful, often do not go far enough. What we suggest is that the starting point should
be an ‘openness to the Other’ and that this, if it remains paramount throughout, will
infect all other aspects of the research process.
Research is all about understanding people and their circumstances – to really
comprehend experience demands openness and careful attention. Practitioners are
already alive to the issues that are important in their professional practice, but for
worthwhile research into these issues to happen, they must make sure that they are
and remain open to the researched. This is not just a question of gathering good data
(although such openness is required if rich detail of lived experience is sought), but
a recognition that the researcher owes a duty of care to the researched, which entails
respect and fairness. In addition, in attempting to explore the ethical assumptions
of what underlies good practice – the general theme of most practitioner PhDs –
the researcher will need, in order to avoid performative contradictions, a careful

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consideration of their own ethical practices in relation to those researched. We

suggest that the starting point for such ethical debate, which should inform the whole
thesis, could well be grounded in the work of Levinas, Simondon, Lacan or Derrida.
In this, then, we point out that a reflexive consideration of ethics is inextricable from
the relevant PhD.
The openness and attention to the researched will help to ensure that the thesis is
part of a communicative co-construction between researcher and researched – the
thesis of a relevant PhD is not derived from abstract thought applied in a quasi-
scientific manner to a particular set of variables. But co-construction does not stop
there – the thesis is also a product of the interactions between supervisors and
students. Openness to other is a charge that we would lay upon those who would
supervise theses: one that demands that the process of supervision allows the student
to develop their own authorial identity. More than simply permitting this to occur, we
suggest that since this process is so central to the creation of a successful thesis, we
avoid the temptation to write out this vital dimension from the final text. This is not
to argue that the portrait painted has to be a Cromwellian ‘Warts and all’ but if there
is to be critical self-reflection of the process of developing the authorial voice (and
how the relates to the research and the researched), then it is, ineluctably, a part of
the thesis that should be adequately integrated. This attention to the developmental
change in the researcher we see also as an important part of the ethics of ‘care of the
self’ that also underpins the relevant PhD.
With practitioner research, we are not looking for reports from journeys to the field
that can be translated into an academic discourse that will travel just within scholarly
circles. Nor do we seek a managerial codification of practitioner knowledge that,
ultimately through reduction to a checklist of procedures and techniques, reduces the
autonomy of professional knowledge. Both of these categorizations, loosely aligned
with what is typically called Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge, strive towards the
achievement of a pseudo-neutral objectivity in their results. However, the worlds
inhabited by the students studying for a relevant PhD are resolutely value-laden
and the purpose of the PhD is to engage with, and understand, those values. It is not
practitioner knowledge per se that is sought, but to strive towards understandings of
what might be the ‘good’ in ‘good practice’. Such understandings are always going
to be proximal, always grounded in the concrete and the experiences of practitioners
in those specific circumstances, but they are capable of delivering recognizable
accounts and of provoking debate and discussion with other practitioners. They may
even supply specific calls for action that will produce meaningful change in the
contexts examined.
Such attachment to local context flies contrary to many of the prevailing winds of
change in academic knowledge, which is become ever more driven towards a narrow
conception of economic utility, delivered through research programs supposedly
designed to create competitive advantage. A simple focus on care, on care of self and
on care of self and other, seemingly has little purchase in such an environment. And,
although such a path may be perilous at times, we take the ethical position and argue

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that researchers should attempt to act as if the university where they find themselves
still adheres to ideals where care can count.
In such a way, we would hope that an active, committed and engaged research
community of scholars and students could re-territorialize at least some of the
ground snatched away by market pressures and managerial demands. Although
we might be witnessing some of the last ivory towers standing above the scouring
sands, the university is not yet in ruins, and there still are possibilities for action.
Engagement with practitioners, restructuring the research relationship so it neither
falls into prioritizing Mode 1 or Mode 2 knowledge (or even some ghastly hybrid),
offers alternative Mode 3 directions for research that may reinvigorate professional
practice, frequently denuded by the same market-driven ideologies that render
universities into knowledge factories. We contend that such an engagement has
the possibility of ensuring that the value-laden world of practice is recognized,
and can be theoretically interrogated by practitioners to provide an impetus to both
professionals and to the academy.
Our manifesto, then, is not just one that we believe will assist professional
practice. Our concern throughout these pages has also been with what the university
is for and what it does. Following Derrida, we need to treat the university as if it
adhered to ideals, where anything could be thought or said, as if it was a space where
the best cooperative, shared investigation takes place. This sharing, and consequent
debating of ideas is important, and it is essential that it is based on participation.
We aim for the democratic development of reason, itself imperative if a functioning
democracy is to exist. Thus, for the university to play its very significant role in
social life, it must not, cannot, function as an adjunct to corporate development,
merely schooling the next generation of knowledge-workers. Instead, it must engage
with the world, re-territorializing areas that are of concern to all of us. This means
avoiding simple categorizations that hide more than they reveal, by concentrating on
the rich diversity of the concrete and local, understanding what the possibilities are
in those contexts, and discussing potential actions. Without a relationship between
the thesis and its readerships, research will not be relevant.

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 AFTERWORD

What is special, perhaps even unique, about this book is that on one level it is a diary
of what we actually did. Our text can be integrated into the critical pedagogy of
PhD thesis writing, but our story is one of successful cooperative research wherein
graduate students investigated what they wanted to and made what they, we and the
academy see as (their) relevant contribution to knowledge.
Research in respect of I/Other relatedness is participative. We want to thank the
many practitioner researchers who worked with us to make this book possible and
whose texts are scattered through these pages.

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