Research and the Theoretical Field - Pauldowling.me

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Core texts for this chapter
Crotty, M. (1998). The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and
perspective in the research process. London, Sage.
Dowling, P.C. (2004c). Mythologising and Organising.
http://homepage.mac.com/paulcdowling/ioe/publications/mo/index.htm
Introduction: Metatheoretical Issues
Now, I am not doing philosophy and, I would imagine, nor are most people
who are reading this as a part of their MRes studies. What does this mean
Well, as I argued in the introduction to Chapter 3, a performance has to be
interpreted—by its author and by its audience—in the context of a more
general discourse; the interpreters, in other words, must be competent in
respect of their readings or interpretations. Where I am the author, then I
would like to think that my competence lies generally within the rather loosely
defined and interacting fields of sociology and educational studies—that’s my
language. Here, I am assuming that my audience, though in the position of
acquiring the discourse and maybe emphasising a discipline other than
sociology, is in broadly the same area, but this isn’t necessarily always the
case. Some of you may recall a TV commercial for Barclaycard in which
Rowan Atkinson played a bungling secret agent—Richard Latham—who was
always outdone by his calmly efficient assistant, Bough (Henry Naylor). In one
of the ads, Latham attempted to haggle in the vernacular with an apparently
Tuareg carpet seller, to little avail. ‘You’re very fluent, sir’, remarked Bough
(and I’m drawing on memory for the dialogue). ‘We are both fluent, Bough,’
Latham replied, ‘unfortunately in different languages.’ A lot of this goes on in
the academic field.
Here is an attempt to haggle over the truth.
All accounts have, first, to theoretically construct the world they go on to describe
in various ways and, in principle, be able to demonstrate non-tautologically
(Bernstein, 1996, Chapters 6 and 9) that the world is in fact as such. What voice
discourses suppress is the manner in which they covertly exempt themselves
from the condition they prescribe and hold to be true for everyone else. This
exemption is always a form of the basic contradiction of relativism. The truth that
all truths are relative must exempt itself in order to be true; there is one truth that
is not relative: the truth that all truth is relative. But then, of course, it is not true
that all truth is relative. Positions that deny that anything can be 'in fact' the case
(because what is the case is only ever so from a particular perspective) implicitly
suppress the claim that it is in fact the case that the world is thus and,
furthermore, can be shown to be so. In fact, we know full well that it is not!'
(Moore & Muller, 1999; p. 201)
(What on Earth is the Bernstein citation doing in the middle of the first
sentence of this extract) Let me summarise the argument in this extract as
follows:
1. All accounts of the world have a duty to demonstrate, not just assert,
their conformity with that world.
RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD