Viva tension

Today our Chinese colleague has her viva. She says she's memorised answers for around a hundred questions. For each question she's learned a one minute answer and a ten minute answer. She knows what her contribution is to methodology, knowledge, and theory and she looks happy, ready and anticipatory.

This is the Chinese post grad who's renewing her visa (see here).

Fitting engagement

I've got a model that fits engagement in with social capital.

I've struggled for three weeks with the theory for this framework, but all came together when I got the diagram working about a week ago. Then the rest slotted into place, requiring only that I connect the ideas by using words to explain and support my argument.

It's thanks to a few comments from supervisor #2, and constant reading of any possibly relevant literature that my ideas begin to pull together. I need to present them to my fellow students to see what they think before I expose myself to big cheese academics because what I've got is either really good, or it's pants.

I'm well chuffed.

Theoretical framework

Choosing a methodology for a research project involves choosing appropriate methods, depending on what access is possible and how the researcher is thinking. The research process is informed by the researcher’s theoretical perspective, which is a philosophical stance. The theoretical perspective is itself informed by the epistemology and ontology. So the research process has four elements that inform one another: epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology and methods (Crotty, 1998).

What the constructionist approach is
Constructionism is the idea that there is no objective truth but that we all construct our own reality, meaning is constructed and different people construct meaning in different ways. People need to have mechanisms for understanding what each of them is doing and need rich forms of conversations that are adequate to dealing with the complexity of social relationships so it’s sense making.

(Guba & Lincoln refer to the constructivist paradigm (Guba and Lincoln, 1989))

Why use the constructionist approach here
Clients and consultants can construct each others roles and clients are actors or agents who shape each others standing of what they do. Schein categorises those roles and so does Bovens.

Disadvantages of the constructionist approach
Czarniawska warns of the difficulties of employing the constructionist stance because the logic of representation is conventionally used between researchers but the medium of everyday organisational life is the logic of practice so there can be difficulties of communication between researchers and managers (Czarniawska, 2001).

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Crotty, M. (1998) 'Introduction: the research process'. The foundations of social research: meaning and perspective in the research process, Sage, London.
Czarniawska, B. (2001) 'Is it Possible to Be a Constructionist Consultant?' Management Learning, 32 (2), pp. 253.
Guba, E. G. and Lincoln, Y. S. (1989) Fourth Generation Evaluation, Sage.