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Знание и социальная трансформация
Elena Trubina (Russia). On narratives and voices: is there something epistemology can learn from the predicament of qualitative
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Второе заседание


Знание и социальная трансформация


Second session


Knowledge and Social Transition


Елена Трубина (Россия). О нарративах и голосах: сложности качественных исследований и эпистемология


В докладе рассмотрены некоторые проблемы, с которыми сталкиваются представители академической общественности в России и на Западе в условиях, когда и наука и высшее образование испытывают давление новых политических и экономических конфигураций. С одной стороны, в течение последних трех лет научный дискурс претерпел радикальные трансформации, описываемые иногда как «лингвистический» или «интерпретативный» поворот. Эпистемологический словарь обогатился такими понятиями, как «местоположенное знание», «социальная конструкция», «метанарратив». Были пересмотрены Дихотомии объективного/субъективного, факта/ценности, семиотического/ материального, деятельности/структуры, реального/сконструированного.

Основываясь на высказываниях экспертов в отношении ситуации в области качественных исследований в США и в России, характер оценки ими статуса этой области и рефлексия имеющих в ней место сложностей проанализированы как симптоматичные для тенденции слияния консервативных управленческих и идеологических тенденций с новым мэнеджериализмом и либерализмом. Новый виток регуляции исследовательской деятельности выдвигает новые вызовы как для научного сообщества, так и эпистемологии. Если занимающиеся качественными исследованиями авторы исходят из того, что для современных исследований характерно множество познавательных контекстов, их критики мобилизуют арсенал традиционной эпистемологии в целях легитимации государственного регулирования научной деятельности.


Elena Trubina (Russia). On narratives and voices: is there something epistemology can learn from the predicament of qualitative studies?


The fact that the world has radically changed within the few last years casts its shadow on everything we do. We live now in the aftermath of September 11 and the Beslan tragedy. While politicians and governments try to combine their efforts in fighting terrorism, we, as academics, become increasingly serious about actions we can and should perform, what end states we should pursue, what virtues we should cultivate. The production and distribution of knowledge is inevitably involved in the multiplicity of economies and work cultures and in the complex networks in which harsh economic necessities, institutional limitations, cultural changes, and emotional and imaginative investments (the scientists’ folk epistemology, for one) are intertwined. This contribution will address a few of the challenges the academics both in Russia and America now face as the systems of higher education and the academic institutions in our countries find themselves under the pressure of the new political and economical configurations. In particular, I would like to consider the predicament in which qualitative studies find themselves lately by presenting the initial results of a study of experts’ views of qualitative research. Specifically, I address the ways in which individuals in established schools and research institutions assess the status of their field and reflect on the difficulties they face. In what follows, I first briefly locate the overall qualitative inquiry project in the context of contemporary scholarly discourse and then address two discussions of qualitative methods, published in American and Russian scholarly magazines that are symptomatic of a following tendency. Whether they are the problems of social welfare, education, culture, or science, the conservative tendencies and forces that are aligned with new managerialism and neo-liberalism come to the fore. The politics and contexts that surround the federal regulation of scholarly activities in both countries, turning research to the service of policy, pose, I believe, the interesting challenges both for the community of researchers and for contemporary epistemology. My observations reveal that while qualitative researchers systematically refer to the proliferation of epistemic frameworks as characteristic for contemporary scholarship, their critics as well as the statecraft directly put in motion the assumptions and principles of traditional epistemology in order to legitimize the new strategies of government support of scientific research.

It’s been already three decades since scholarly discourse underwent a radical transformation related to what is called a “linguistic” turn, then “interpretive,” “narrative,” “rhetorical”, and “cultural” turns. Such terms as “social construction,” “discourse,” “situated knowledge,” “master narrative,” “subject position,” and even “vulnerable observer,” have entered the epistemological vocabulary, portending a sense of change with regard to established procedures and a sturdy base of scholarship and problematizing the traditional concepts of knowledge, truth, and rationality. Regardless of how different from each other are the above-mentioned turns, all are related to the developments in the human sciences and in the poststructuralist philosophy during the twentieth century that prompted scholars to reconsider the role language plays in the social reality, in history, and in the social sciences. Language, meaning, and interpretation have come to the fore. No reality, it is widely admitted now, comes to us linguistically unmediated. As a result, the traditional positivist assumptions underlying the social sciences were challenged, as well as the dichotomies of objective/subjective, fact/value, semiotic/material, agency/structure, and real/constructed. Consequently, when social scientists, historians, and anthropologists started using “interpretive” concepts and methodologies in their respective fields, it became apparent that the methods, values, and knowledge contained in their disciplines were not all-embracing but socially constructed and therefore culturally and historically specific.

The growing opposition to totalization which was so characteristic of modern scholarship has led to increasing the attention of contemporary researchers to fragmented over coherent, disjunctive over continuous, particular over universal, local over global, contingent over causal, and the like. The greater the emphasis on meaning and interpretation as central to understanding people, the smaller the role of causation. Thus additional sources of evidence were mobilized, and alternative approaches emerged. In order to introduce multiple viewpoints into scholarly discourse, the “normal” paradigms in social sciences were revisited, and a new vision of what a research can be appeared. The third-person viewpoint as previously predominant was combined with a first-person perspective when the subjects of investigation were engaged in the resulting discourse as co-authors. When the limits of causal models of explanation became apparent, qualitative or mixed methods came out and quickly gained respectability. What may be blatantly described as deriving first-hand data from respondents and participants, by now represents a flourishing field comprised from diverse and sophisticated techniques and strategies. Interviewing and participant observation, grounded theory and action research, phenomenology and conversation analysis, focus groups and narrative inquiry, and case studies and sampling, to name just a few, have come into being during the last thirty years. By now, qualitative studies are understood not only as a set of techniques but as overlapping of fundamental assumptions, sources of evidence, and larger views about society, humans, and the purposes of scholarly work, as “the complex, interconnected family of terms, concepts and assumptions that surround the term qualitative research” (Denzin and Linkoln, 1994). Valuing people’s voices and their understanding of their problems presume no “omnipresent narrator,” transcendental scholar, nor authoritative interpretation. Special techniques have been devised and subject-to-subject discourses developed in order to give a voice to the previously under-represented groups of people or to individuals, in order to represent and to narrate their different histories and mindsets. The various processes of quantitative data collection work as a means of making visible the otherwise taken-for-granted beliefs of social actors. By giving the participants a chance to talk, the subjective meanings they hold about the world become known within the public knowledge. Forms of knowledge gained in everyday and personal settings have been transferred to the academic and professional discourses.

When researchers turned to matters of interpretation of the first-hand, often private and intimate, experiences, the integration of different modes of thinking and multiple perspectives proved necessary. Hence the interpretive models and explanatory strategies that have been employed in the framework of qualitative inquiry resulted in revision of disciplinary practices in the world of academia. Interdisciplinary projects, practices, and research institutions became a pervasive form of knowledge production. While some of those practices just aimed at resolving the particular problems by means of combining two or more disciplines (technology and music, physiology and nano-physics), certain interdisciplinary configurations, and “cultural studies” in particular, questioned the very categories and methods, the authority and objectivity of traditional social knowledge. According to one assessment (Bonell and Hunt, 1999, 3):


Cultural theories, especially those with a postmodernist inflection, challenged the very possibility or desirability of social explanation. Following the lead of Foucault and Derrida, poststructuralists and postmodernists insisted that shared discourses (or culture) so permeate our perception of reality as to make any supposed scientific explanation of social life simply an exercise in collective fictionalization or mythmaking.

While cultural and literature theories migrated to the social sciences and humanities, scientific theory was questioned as a privileged form of discourse or, better to say, science as a model of theory for the social sciences was turned down. Even in the texts produced in economics and political science, those who study the rhetoric of inquiry have found a lot of textual strategies at work that serve to create the impression of factuality and objectivity as a way to represent reality (Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey, 1987). There is a sense in which Science that has long been understood as an embodiment of objectivity, of conceptual rigor, and of methodological clarity finds itself in jeopardy. Metaphors and stories and cultural conventions and literary tropes lurk in its midst and render it deficient by virtue of depriving it of the status of a “real” science – logically exemplary and un-biased. Speaking seriously, a certain demystification of scientific claims to objectivity was achieved through exposure of the narrative structures in-built in the texts of supposedly purely argumentative nature. As a result, as cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner is certainly right to suggest, “The body of scientifically verifiable objective knowledge is no longer to be so simply arrayed against the soft, suppositious, and subjective products of the humanities. Their procedures now occupy us. ” (1986: 44).

In a similar vein, Sandra Harding asserts that:

This kind of blindness is advanced by the conventional belief that the truly scientific part of knowledge-seeking—the part controlled by methods of research—is only in the context of justification. The context of discovery, where problems are identified as appropriate for scientific investigation, hypotheses are formulated, key concepts are defined—this part of the scientific process is thought to be unexamined within science by rational methods. Thus, “real science” is restricted to those processes controllable by methodological rules. (1991:143-144).

Nevertheless, when Jerome Bruner peacefully observes that now “both science and humanities have come to be appreciated as artful figments of men’s minds, as creations produced by different uses of mind (1986: 44), there is a sense in which the conflicting nature of the relationships between science and humanities (and especially those borderlands, zones, and territories where humanities, social sciences, and sciences create challenging but promising hybrids) remains underappreciated. “Science” that has lost its credibility under the severe attack on the part of cultural studies, social studies of science, feminism, ethnic studies, and the like appears to strike back And, for the reasons that are far beyond the scope of this paper, epistemology per se finds itself promoting the ideas of “hard science” or has been mobilized as a way of its justification providing a normative base from which the conclusions about proper research are drawn. What I mean, and what seems to me truly remarkable about the most recent tendencies in the development of human sciences, is what is called by some researchers a backlash of epistemological conservatism. I want to bring two examples of it. The first is the critical discussion by the community of educational researchers of the publication in 2002 of the National Research Council (NRC) Report, Scientific Research in Education in the magazine Qualitative Inquiry (vol.10, no. 1, 2004). The second is the discussion by the community of Russian scholars of the state of the qualitative studies within the Russian institutionalized sociology published in the magazine Neprikosnovenny Zapas (Emergency Reserve) (no. 3(35), 2004).

My first case is related to a recent creation by the U.S. Department of Education of the “Institute of Education Studies.” In its instructional documents, requests for proposals, and the speeches of its officials, quantitative methods of research are given a pronounced priority while the value of qualitative research and the results it might provide is questioned. This is obvious in the statement that the director of the new IES has made:

A district might have someone come in and do case studies or focus groups to find out what the issues are in the district. But once you get to the issue of whether or not it works, you ultimately want to get to the point where you can use quantitative, experimental designs. (quoted in Viadero, 2003 as quoted in St. Pierre, 2004).

Underlying this confidence that randomized experiments in the end always work better in order to provide needed evidence is the belief explicitly expressed in the NRC report titled Scientific Research in Education that

At its core, scientific inquiry is the same in all fields. Scientific research, whether in education, physics, anthropology, molecular biology, or economics, is a continual process of rigorous reasoning supported by a dynamic interplay among methods, theories, and findings. It builds understanding in the form of models or theories that can be tested. Advances in scientific knowledge are achieved by the self-regulating norms of the scientific community over time, not, as sometimes believed, by the mechanistic application of a particular scientific method to a static set of questions...” (NRC, 2002, p. 2).

This statement raises a number of important points with regard to the use of the idea of unity of science as a way to justify the sheer existence of some disciplines, for instance, of “education” or “anthropology”. While the prevalent tendency in the post-positivist epistemology has been to assert disunity of science, one of the traditional epistemological ideas that have purchase in a wider world seems to be exactly the opposite. The idea of the fundamental unity of science has been brought into play with naturalistic purpose: to show that “education” or “anthropology” can be granted a status of a scientific discipline. In other words, the idea of the unity of science turns out to be closely intertwined with the idea of its utility. The old positivist assumption that the social sciences and their methods should be patterned as the natural sciences is back. Why? The answer that one of the commentators in the discussion provides is that “the major purpose appears to be to make educational researchers and research more acceptable at the federal level.” (Bloch, 2004, 100). Frankly, the stylistic similarities between this statement and many others that lately have been publicly expressed with regard to sociology and linguistics, philosophy, and sociology during the endless meetings of academics in Russia are just striking. One day one hears the director of a research institution exclaiming upon the presentation of theoretically and politically questionable but “presentable” results of a recently conducted poll that finally there appeared the results that makes sense to show to the authorities in order to prove that “sociologists can be useful, too”. Another day one hears the director of a funding agency reproaching a rector of a higher education institution for “having too much linguists and not enough economists”. And even among the academics themselves, in the folk epistemology they seem to follow, it is too often that one discerns a certain inferiority complex on a part of qualitative scholars, derived from their firm belief that only big numbers, statistics, and experiments, all the hard stuff a real science is made from, is what eventually counts as research (I’ll come back to this later).

Back to the American matters, according to the report, quantitative and qualitative research are “epistemologically quite similar, and as we recognize that both can be pursued rigorously, we do not distinguish between them as being different forms of inquiry” (NRC, 2002, p. 19). The authors even use the phrase “the epistemology of education research” (NRC, 2002, p. 15) as if they were forgetful of the fact that the most impressive results of educational inquiry were received precisely by anthropologists, case studies, and life story researches who, in early 1970, started to investigate schooling as a socially constructed process and to look at the educationally significant dimensions of it (Goodson, 1992; Wertsch, 1985).

The rationale underlying such a significant re-assessment of educational research has been a need to make changes in educational policy, particularly, “changes in what kind of evidence matters for determining educational program effectiveness” (Ryan and Hood, 2004, 80). Note that the notion of evidence is put to use here, not in the conventional epistemological context of accessing scientific theories in the light of experimental evidence, but in the utterly complicated practical context. As the commentators rightly say, “Educational evaluation involves making a judgment about program merit or worth. Educational evaluation methodology, which involves both judgment and inquiry methods, is particularly critical for studying education reform

and for determining effective educational programs”. (Ryan and Hood, 2004: 80). Yet, as it has been said already, instead of careful proceeding in the direction of what Aristotle called phronesis by means of reflective judgment, the educative researchers are expected to rely on “randomized experiments.” One is reminded of the dilemmas that took place in the 17th century when the pressure of political, cultural, and cognitive uncertainty was so strong that it has led to the birth of Cartesian epistemology. As Steven Shapin ironically renders it,

If ordinary life involved judgment under uncertainty, then this was proof that ordinary life needed repair by Rational Method. Uncertainty had to be cured and it could be cured by the right philosophy or, later, by 'legislative' social science. From the 19th century, economists sought to become 'the Newtons of the human sciences', elaborating neoclassical equilibrium analysis in supposed imitation of the Principia Mathematica's rationally intelligible and completely predictive model of the solar system (Shapin, 2002).

No wonder then that the report refers to the qualitative/quantitative divide in a way that, again, explicitly defends quantitative research: “The current trend of schools of education to favor qualitative methods, often at the expense of quantitative methods, has invited criticism. Real problems stem from these ‘either/or’ kinds of preferences” (NRC, 2002, p. 19). E. St. Pierre in her contribution comments on this that one of the “real problems” “might be that power relations have shifted since qualitative inquiry won the paradigm wars in education. I believe we are witnessing a backlash as those who lost control of the production of a certain kind of knowledge using a certain methodology work to get it back (2004: 135).

The qualitative/quantitative debate is in the center of my second case – the discussion by the community of Russian scholars of the situation of the qualitative studies within the Russian institutionalized sociology published in the magazine Neprikosnovenny Zapas (Emergency Reserve) (no. 3(35), 2004). Initiated by the one of the most ardent proponents of qualitative inquiry in Russia, Victor Voronkov, the Director of St. Petersburg Center for Independent Social Research, the discussion has brought to the fore the tensions underlying the existence of the professional community of sociologists.

The qualitative studies in Russia emerged largely from the breaking up of various theoretical fields of analysis and traditional methods of research. The positivist paradigm of social knowledge was problematized by the post-structuralist critique of presenting people in aggregate through imprecise statistics and large scale surveys. The different textual politics employed by a rapidly growing community of scholars did allow them to make the everyday life of the individual the center of attention (Utechin, 2001), to provide the “thick descriptions” of the ways in which people experienced the processes of social and political transition (Kozlova and Sandomirskaya, 1996; Mescherkina and Semyonova,. 1994; Zdravomyslova and Voronkov, 1997), to explore how culture’s narratives work their way inward to people’s biographical anticipations and what happens to story telling when state ideology, rather than the culture, or, largely ideologized culture, for a long time determines the content of the stories people tell (Trubina, 2002), and to touch upon the issues previously unthought-of of within the traditional Russian academic discourse like sexuality (Tyomkina and Zdravomyslova, 2002) or masculinity (Oushakine, 2002). The courses on qualitative studies have been now taught in the sociology departments, and the magazine devoted to it enjoys considerable popularity (Inter, 2004).

In spite of all these positive tendencies, qualitative studies remain in Russia at the margin of the field of sociology in particular, and social sciences in general, and, where it becomes a largely interdisciplinary undertaking, prompts a rather mixed reaction. In the effort to sort out the reasons for this problematic plight, one group of the experts who took part in the magazine’s discussion repudiated the unified and usually omniscient viewpoint of traditional sociology in favor of representing the others by means of field work, participant observation, narrative interviews, and the like and reproached it for insensitivity to cultural variables and individual voices. Most important, in their reflections, often indirectly, they posed the problem of the coinciding of epistemological, political, and methodological dimensions of qualitative studies that invites a comprehensive and open view of this type of inquiry. “Why an authorial interpretation of the first-hand material remains, as a rule, at the periphery of scientific methods?” asks one of the experts and provides two reasons for this. The first has to do with the researchers’ reflection of their “academic and methodological situatedness,” and the second concerns the difficulties of communicating the obtained results, namely, “the peculiarities of reception of [this] epistemological product on a level of its final or/end intermediate consumer” (Oushakine, 2004). Oushakine goes on to say that the “quantitative realism” of Russian sociology provides it with a sense of stability, while one of the demands the proliferation of the case studies poses is a persistent need to redefine one’s research coordinates, to see a connection between this or that particular case in question and some general theoretical framework. When it comes to the theories underlying empirical studies, this group of experts differentiate between the institutions of the Academy of Science where still essentialist sociological holism reigns and the independent research centers, which during the last two decades have adopted quite a variety of theoretical perspectives, ranging from poststructuralism and discourse analysis to phenomenology and new anthropology (Voronkov, 2004, Oushakine, 2004). The traditional epistemological rules, it turns out, still privilege the strict division of labor among the disciplines, and it is too slowly that the approaches that developed in the context of cultural studies make their way into social sciences. The proponents of qualitative studies argue that the common interests of the research community are somewhat blurred and vague. A lot more can be done in order to strengthen the horizontal professional bonds and networks. One wonders sometimes why so few reviews of the new books appear in Russia. In the absence of the open discussions and given the low level of peer review, it is no wonder that the validation of qualitative studies remains an ambiguous and difficult task. Four sources of difficulty can be differentiated. First, only in a climate of mutual support and interest can high standards of professional work be sustained, and this climate is obviously lacking. Second, disciplines combined in the course of qualitative studies (say, sociology and psychoanalysis ) presuppose a range of different standards of validation. When brought to the meeting ground of qualitative studies, they seem sometimes hopelessly partial by contemporary standards. Third, a conceptual clarity about the nature of qualitative inquiry and its assessment is lacking, which prompts the necessity of a more systematic reflection in this regard. Fourth, when previously unknown social practices receive innovative interpretations, few precedents are available and coming up with validation procedures becomes part of the inquiry process itself.

The stance that the other group of experts took in the discussion can be described as follows. The premises of “qualitative” and “quantitative” paradigms by no means challenge each other’s validity because, after all, all scientific research, if conducted properly, should meet well established criteria. According to one of the participants,

Scientific culture, in a fundamental sense, retains its unity in spite of all the sentimental narratives about paradigms, programs, discourses, epistemes, and other nice things the importance of which becomes only stronger when the above-mentioned unity of scientific culture has a lively and dynamic character. There is no other way for social sciences except deciding between the poles of a following alternative: either they establish themselves within this unity or they position themselves outside of scientific culture”. (Filippov, A. 2004)

From this viewpoint, then, to conduct a critique of modernist science is an excess of postmodern rhetoric and to question the logic of a system of scientific knowledge production doesn’t make a lot of sense either. What makes sense, though, is simply to decide for oneself – to belong or not to belong to “scientific culture”.

Another expert, in similar vein, states that:

If one wants to remain a scholar, one mustn’t claim that “quantitative” objectivism is epistemologically superior to “qualitative” subjectivism. Each of them has its own sphere of application, yet they differently in different times resonate with various external factors…Thus “qualitative” subjectivism, rather, can be understood as an expression of the devaluation of the scholarly values in the Russian culture, of the situation, in which a status of scholar is very problematic, and classic scientific rationality has ceased to be a part of a meaning of life for the majority of scholars (Kachanov, 2004).

If the authors of two last statements worked hard to come up with the arguments in favor of objectivism, another participant was rather straightforward and attributed to the qualitative studies researchers an attempt to “provoke the discussion about depriving the polls conducting institutes of their privileged epistemological and academic status” (Devyatko, 2004). As, I believe, it is pronounced in the quoted passages, it is at the connections among intellectuals, discourses, politics, and societal configurations that we must look in order to find out why, at the beginning of 21st century, the sociologists and other social scientists adhere to traditional epistemological beliefs and the ideals of objectivity and unity of science.

The different narratives of scientific legitimation, briefly presented in this contribution, allow us to see what kind of work epistemological premises perform in and out of scientific communities. For example, the ideal of “scientific culture,” as the Russian expert has put it, and the core idea of the NRC report that “scientific inquiry is the same in all fields” supposedly warrant the legitimacy of the profession of the scholar in human sciences in the face of threads coming from both postmodern academic practices and new strategies of supporting science that have been developed by the federal agencies on both sides of Atlantic. Yet it would be too easy to join the chorus of “scientists' continuing lamentations about the passing of the supposed golden age in which research grants hung low on trees and the social value of every kind of scientific research was suitably acknowledged by Administrations of all political complexions” (Shapin, 2001). What we also have to cope with is the confrontation of the culture of administrators (or of managers) and the culture of the academic community. If there is a genuinely common challenge that the American and the Russian intellectuals currently face, it is that the technocratic principles and a pure administrative logic subdue the dialectic of teaching and research – the two most important components of professional life. American colleagues, with all the differences in our situations, also seem to be in search of successful strategies of resistance to functionalist ideology of administrators working on all levels, from the local to the federal–those who would like to erase all the disciplines that don’t bring immediate profit. It is, I believe, the problem of the utility of qualitative studies, the difficulties with its marketing, if one will, to which the limited interest they have for power at any level should be added, that makes its reception by the professional so mixed and controversial.

Apart from reflecting on the peculiarities of the redistribution of institutional capital or accessing the consequences of the not always successful export of cultural categories into disciplines that had previously resisted them, epistemology is able to provide stimulus for continuing the cognitive quest by further developing views about theorizing and interpreting that have been conducted in new forms of scholarly discourse. To meet reflective goals, it is necessary to look at the philosophical footing of different qualitative approaches in order to reach a novel epistemological stance that can not only challenge positivist conventions but lay a coherent foundation for their methods and findings.


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