Search results

Within this chapter, I use my early experiences as a special education teacher to story and restory how Othering shapes the lives of special education teachers and their students. The disability-as-deficit model labels those students who receive special education services as less than, as outside the norm, as Other. The stories of my early teaching career offer insight into this Othering and link special education subject matter knowledge with my identity as a sibling of an individual with Down syndrome that fuels my teacher knowledge. Clandinin and Connelly’s three-dimensional narrative inquiry space provides a framework to examine the back-and-forth intersections of sibling and special educator knowledge. An autoethnographic exploration results in a critically reflexive narrative that exposes overlapping pieces of Othered identities, and explains how my teacher knowledge situates me differently than my special educator colleagues. The three-dimensional narrative inquiry space also provides the necessary tension between subject matter knowledge and teacher knowledge to create a dialogue of Othering between special education teacher and student. This dialogue pushes the idea of Least Restrictive Environments within social-personal space, and can lead to multiple Othered voices speaking as powerful bridges to span the divide between general and special education, the norm and the Other.

Matrix structures are complex and conflict prone, so multinational enterprises (MNEs) would utilize them only if they conferred some advantage over less complex organizational structures. Based upon the information-processing view, a theory of matrix advantage is proposed. It is supported by a secondary analysis of data from a major study of German MNEs. Matrix structures are shown to have an advantage over the elementary structural types. Specifically, the matrix structures fit higher levels of transnational strategy than elementary structures. Transnational strategy is assessed by two concepts: firm internationalization (involvement in foreign sales, manufacturing, and research and development (R&D)) and corporate integration (intracompany transfers). Moreover, three-dimensional matrices are associated with higher levels of transnational strategy than are two-dimensional matrices, confirming the gains from having additional structural dimensions. Matrix structures arise because of the need to simultaneously fit high levels of both firm internationalization and corporate integration. Matrices fit the transnational strategy type of Bartlett and Ghoshal. Implications are drawn for the relationship between the head office and the subsidiary. The matrix often subjects the subsidiary to conflicting expectations from the head office, which it can attempt to manage. Similarly, the head office is challenged by the task of integrating the information that comes from different dimensions of the matrix.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate “walking alongside” in the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, as explored through the field texts of two teacher educators, one mentoring the other through layered stories of “place.”

Approach – The authors use several interpretive tools to explore the question, “What sustains us as teacher educators?” The dialogue deepens as the authors make their professional knowledge landscapes more visible, bringing sacred stories, stories of gender, stories of hierarchy, stories of power, and stories of race forward, exploring how these stories are held in tension with one another. The authors ponder the questions: what happens when the small stories’ educators living in “place” become so far removed from authorized meta-narratives also underway in “place”? And, how can we remain wakeful to the numerous story constellations of others that revolve around us?

Findings – The analytical spaces described by the researchers helped them to realize and share with others that researchers may more fully respect the vulnerability our research participants feel that comes along with their own restorying. Vulnerability brought forward a common bond found in the experiences of “place” in the field texts. Narrative inquirers who write field texts, then restory their own narratives of place, add to the empirical dimensions of narrative inquiry and its attentiveness to lived experience.

Research implications – This demonstration, through its examples of the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, shows how interpretation emanates from the various cracks, corners, and even the air within this important analytical space. Narrative researchers may continue to unpack this space in their work. Narrative inquirers are also reminded that place is storied and that human beings are narratively anchored in place, an important consideration for relational research ethics.

Value – Readers can interact with the tools used by narrative inquirers, in this case, “tracing” and “burrowing and broadening.” Narrative inquirers may also recognize vulnerability as an effect of interpreting within the three-dimensional inquiry space, and understand the necessity of vulnerability as a part of thinking narratively.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore and make visible narrative thinking as an interpretive act in moving from field texts to research texts.

Approach – The chapter shows a collaborative meaning-making process of three teacher educators/researchers as they inquire into their identities as teacher educators. The chapter is framed around a focus on temporality, one commonplace within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space and also shows connections with the two other commonplaces of sociality and place.

Findings – The researchers deepen the understanding of identity as situated in a continuity of experience in relation with others. They highlight how stories beget a storied response. They demonstrate that the experiential dimensions of sociality, temporality, and spatiality are interconnected. They find, through thinking narratively, that the relational is critical – both historically and in the present. Relationships shape a sense of self. This relational aspect of their research introduces ethical considerations. It is in honoring the stories they carry and the stories that are given to or shared with them that the possibility exists for shaping a responsive and attentive life.

Research implications – Numerous authors have written about the relational aspects of narrative inquiry as a research methodology. This chapter shows ways in which the relational aspects of narrative inquiry shaped both our inquiry into and our understandings of our identities as teacher educators. These foundational aspects of the relational both in terms of narrative inquiry as a research methodology and in identity inquiry open up many future research possibilities which extend far beyond narrative inquiry into teacher educator identity.

Value – Researchers utilizing a narrative inquiry approach will find a helpful explanation and demonstration of the process of making meaning of field texts by situating them within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space.

Climate change is a vortical situation of increasing turbulent conditions called the “sixth extinction.” In this chapter I begin with the two-dimensional Archimedean spiral (the coiling rope), move on to the three-dimensional corkscrew spiral (or threaded screw), and on to the three-dimensional double spiral of upward and descending movement with many nested vortices. The latter is more necessary to understand climate change, and our possible future in it, than the flat spirals. Ironically, Plato wrote about the double-twisted spiral with its nested vortices long ago. We are in a double-spiralic helice, a vortical phenomenon with centripetal and centrifugal, upward-ascending and downward-descending waves, and left and right turning whorls. It is worse than this. We need to challenge spiral symmetry thinking. There is no reality axis around which the spiralic helice is spinning, and there is no symmetry. There is no uniformity to the spiralic vortices of turbulence of the sixth extinction.

Chapter 2 describes how behavioral science research methods that management and marketing scholars apply in studying processes involving decisions and organizational outcomes relate to three principal research objectives: fulfilling generality of findings, achieving accuracy of process actions and outcomes, and capturing complexity of nuances and conditions. The chapter's unique contribution is in advocating and describing the possibilities of researchers replacing Thorngate's (1976) “postulate of commensurate complexity” — it is impossible for a theory of social behavior to be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple and as a result organizational theorists inevitably have to make tradeoffs in their theory development — with a new postulate of disproportionate achievement. This new postulate proposes the possibilities and advocates the building and testing of useful process models that achieve all three principal research objectives. Rather than assuming the stance that a researcher must make tradeoffs that permit achieving any two, but not all three, principal research objectives as, Weick (1979) clock analogy shows, this chapter advocates embracing a property space (a three-dimensional box rather than a clock) view of research objectives and research methods. Tradeoffs need not be made; having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too is possible. The chapter includes a brief review of principal criticisms that case study researchers often express of surveys of respondents using fixed-point surveys. Likewise, the chapter reviews principal criticisms of case study research studies that researchers who favor the use of fixed-point surveys express.