Search results

This paper accounts for, and reflects upon, the research design and the methodological approach adopted in ethnographic research with young people. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to reinforce the significance of conducting qualitative participatory and innovative methods with young people, alongside the value of rapport building.

Qualitative participatory methods are understood as the most appropriate way to empower and respect young people in the research process. Alongside such methods the ethnographic nature of the research is discussed in conveying the importance of rapport building with young people in the field. In doing so the paper examines a number of important considerations when conducting youth research.

The triangulation of qualitative methods was fundamental in exploring and understanding young people’s lives in each locality and allowed for deep and meaningful explorations of specific themes. The additional and complementary methods employed alongside traditional methods were particularly suited to understanding young people’s everyday lives, as complex experiences are not always conveyed through traditional methods alone. Conducting participatory methods produced narratives around safety, security and governance in public places.

Being reflexive and adapting to a research setting in order to enhance the process of building and maintaining trust with young people is the most important facet when conducting youth research. Giving careful consideration to the impact of a researcher’s presence in the field needs to be carefully navigated.

The purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives.

This paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic.

Even when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing.

Our contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.

Assumptions about race in the discipline of organization studies are explored by introducing the notion of “interrogating whiteness”. Standpoint epistemology, which assumes people’s experiences are relevant to the ways they know, allows the apparently unmarked, neutral category of whiteness to be seen as one standpoint among many. To encourage a useful discussion of race, key terms are situated linguistically and historically, background is given on paradigms for thinking about race, and there is a consideration of the consequences of whiteness and blackness. I examine what writers say about race when it is not the topic about which they claim to write. The organizational life of the discipline and authorship is explored. I then turn to the organizational literature for further illustration of whiteness as unmarked, stereotypical examples, and distancing language.

This article presents a theoretical investigation of the concept of ‘subject’ or ‘subject matter’ in library and information science. Most conceptions of ‘subject’ in the literature are not explicit but implicit. Various indexing and classification theories, including automatic indexing and citation indexing, have their own more or less implicit concepts of subject. This fact puts the emphasis on making the implicit theories of ‘subject matter’ explicit as the first step. A very close connection exists between what subjects are, and how we are to know them. Those researchers who place the subjects in the minds of the users have a conception of ‘subject’ different to that possessed by those who regard the subject as a fixed property of the documents. The key to the definition of the concept of ‘subject’ lies in the epistemological investigation of how we are going to know what we need to know about documents in order to describe them in a way which facilitates information retrieval. The second step therefore is an analysis of the implicit epistemological conceptions in the major existing conceptions of ‘subject’. The different conceptions of ‘subject’ can therefore be classified into epistemological positions, e.g. ‘subjective idealism’ (or the empiric/positivistic viewpoint), ‘objective idealism’ (the rationalistic viewpoint), ‘pragmatism’ and ‘materialism/ realism’. The third and final step is to propose a new theory of subject matter based on an explicit theory of knowledge. In this article this is done from the point of view of a realistic/materialistic epistemology. From this standpoint the subject of a document is defined as the epistemological potentials of that document.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of whether more representation of gendered scholarship could enrich the traditional framework of consumer behaviour – a discipline that lacks consensus on epistemology and is also starved of theory building – by means of critical introspection leading to new managerial solutions, new methods and theory building.

The quantitative approach involved a content analysis of three leading journals in the consumer behaviour discipline from 2006 to 2010: the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Affairs, in order to ascertain how much research represents a gendered perspective. The qualitative approach involved analyzing the papers from a gendered perspective, to see if the papers were more conceptual or based on applied research, and to gauge the type of methodologies used.

From 2006 to 2010 it was found that only an average of 2.4 per cent of 369 abstracts in JCR, 4 per cent of 224 abstracts in JCP and 5.8 per cent of 138 abstracts in JCA are from a gendered perspective. Approximately 25 per cent of the papers are steeped in applied research, while 75 per cent verify existing theories or expand to them.

The authors’ qualitative analysis brings forward new results, namely that the very feministic perspective that has the potential to bring forth greater introspection in the consumer behavior research, namely feminist postmodernism, is in fact the least represented, with only one such paper out of 731, which is a possible wake‐up call for feminist scholars. The authors conclude that the scope of the traditional paradigm can be enlarged by gendered scholarship.

The paper represents a major effort to present the importance of including gendered perspective articles in marketing journals, to provide an analysis of the lack of a gendered perspective in papers published by three leading consumer‐based journals, and to determine whether a gendered perspective can enrich the traditional framework.

To show that the neo‐pragmatist position of Richard Rorty, when combined with a sociocultural perspective, provides library and information science (LIS) with a forceful epistemological tool.

Literature‐based conceptual analysis of: historical development of pragmatism in relation to other epistemological positions; neo‐pragmatism as a non‐dualist, both purpose and communication oriented, epistemology; and a sociocultural perspective within pedagogy, originated from the Russian researcher Lev Vygotsky.

Brought together, a neo‐pragmatist, sociocultural perspective contributes to a focus on people's actions through the use of linguistic and physical tools. As a tangible example of how neo‐pragmatism can be applied as an epistemological tool within LIS, information seeking seen as communicative participation is discussed. This article unites a perspective on information seeking as communicative participation with the neo‐pragmatist concepts of “tools” and “communities of justification”. The article is concluded by an assessment of neo‐pragmatism as an epistemological position within LIS, including those research issues that arise from this position and that are introduced along the way.

In its focus on usability, the neo‐pragmatist position provides a possible bridge between academic and other professional practices in the field of LIS.

Provides, through the means of neo‐pragmatism, an argument for the necessity of epistemological argumentation within LIS.

This paper aims to outline some of the social, cultural, political and economic conditions in which four of only seven women who have become rectors of public universities in Vietnam. Their experiences are described with a focus on the context of Vietnam in order to focus more clearly on non‐western starting points for theory about career development in higher education in Vietnam and other non‐western settings.

A combination of historical and personal accounts is used to situate the points of view of Vietnamese women and to argue for the processes of becoming a rector as an important and significant point for understanding how women gain entry to high‐status and previously all‐male domains.

Findings demonstrate that while family/career relationships are crucial in reporting these women's experiences, too much emphasis on these aspects can divert attention away from the conditions historically blocking the initial journey into high‐status parts of an organisation. These processes in which this is initiated cannot be fully contained within western theory and literature.

The sample size of four is a limitation and the interviews do not extend to colleagues and family members, but the four women represent over half of the total population of Vietnamese women rectors. On balance though, the research contains implicit material that would be of interest to others in the area to build on with further case studies either in Vietnam or other Asian countries.

The experiences of the women rectors could provide examples lacking in Vietnamese society and in literature there. The experiences could be a role model for other women's pursuits of careers in Vietnam.

The paper contributes in identifying processes of becoming and their reliance on social conditions from the personal powers can be generated. For this framework to be effective, factors such as management style adopted when women are “at the top” must be separated from conditions that have made the “journeys to the top” possible in the first place.

The paper is the first of its type on women's careers in Vietnam and contributes to the development of further studies into individual women, for women's groups and academic debate in Vietnamese society. The paper could provide some discussion on where strategies might be most appropriately devised and implemented to counter loss of small gains made in women's careers and within the values in Vietnamese society.

The purpose of this paper is to explain, in the context of the massification and internationalisation of higher education, how Web 2.0 and its socially oriented knowledge system (episteme) has the potential to counter the current neo‐colonial disprivileging of non‐mainstream knowledge systems and discourses.

The paper, drawing on postcolonial, epistemological, and Web 2.0 learning literatures, first deconstructs the continued dominance of the traditional academic discourse in transcultural settings. It then illustrates how Web 2.0's non‐foundational approach to the nature of knowledge gives it the capacity to construct postcolonial transcultural learning zones that are inherently open to other knowledge systems and discourses.

The paper concludes that the socially oriented knowledge system or episteme of Web 2.0 enables educators to create postcolonial, meaning more epistemically inclusive, transcultural learning zones in which no one knowledge system or discourse is automatically privileged.

The paper highlights the role Web 2.0 can play in negating the colonialising impact of dominant educational practices that disprivilege non mainstream knowledge systems and discourses that have entered university learning environments through massification and internationalisation.

The paper addresses a significant gap in the literature by highlighting the pivotal but much neglected role of epistemology in Web 2.0 as well as in the internationalisation and massification of higher education. More specifically, it indicates how the respectful acceptance of different knowledge systems and discourses can create postcolonial architectures of learning and promote a more egalitarian form of cosmopolitanism.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of the author's negotiation of a methodological and personal crisis that emerged in the course of his PhD research. It provides a description of the research project and how, in its implementation, questions emerged for the author regarding the likely “indigenous credibility” of the work, and the repercussions of this for him as an indigenous researcher.

The author provides a narrative account of the events and responses, identifying critical issues, courses of action and subsequent outcomes. Opportunity is also provided for the reader to consider their own response to the issues identified.

The author discovered that the initial misgivings regarding the research project were misguided following a broader reading of the literature regarding Indigenous Standpoint Theory and Causal Layered Analysis. Indeed, as well as allaying the initial anxieties, a number of aspirational congruities between the approaches became evident which, in the opinion of the author, will lead to a differently rendered layering of the arena of indigenous mental health. The author also discovered that a source of his initial misgivings were related to his own essentialised constructions of what constitutes credible indigenous research.

The paper has implications for those indigenous researchers who may be grappling with methodological issues related to their research, particularly those considerations regarding Indigenous Standpoint and other nominally indigenous theories/methodologies.

The paper presents a novel attempt to compare and contrast methodologies specifically identified as indigenous, with those that could be utilised as complementary to them. Such attempts at collaboration serve to challenge essentialised expectations about what can constitute meaningful research by, and for indigenous Australian people.

Using an alternative lens to challenge assumptions of solidarity behaviour and the queen bee label, the paper aims to analyse empirical data to explore negative relations between women in management and surface processes of female misogyny.

Feminist standpoint epistemology; qualitative semi‐structured interviews; subjective narrative data from senior women and women academics of management in two UK organisations.

Assumptions of solidarity behaviour are largely absent in the research and the queen bee label impacts pejoratively on women in management, perpetuating a “blame the woman” perspective. Senior women do recognise barriers facing women in management but they do not want to lead on the “women in management mantle.” This does not make them queen bees; the women recognise becoming “male” in order to “fit” senior management and acknowledge the impact of their gendered context. From this context, processes of female misogyny between women in management fragment notions of solidarity; highlight contradictory places women take in relation to other women and challenge women as “natural allies.”

Future research should engage women at all levels in management in consciousness‐raising to the impact women have on other women. Organizational interventions are required to explicitly surface how the gender order exacerbates differences between them to maintain the gendered status quo.

Empirical paper using an alternative lens to problematize solidarity behaviour and queen bee, surfaces female misogyny between women in management and highlights how the gendered social order encourages and exacerbate differences between women.