Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

organizational life is trying to understand something ever-changing. Reflexive research
is as if catching water with your hand. To catch, an enhanced attention is
demanded. Given the elusiveness of social reality reflexive research has its own demands.
The breach within the reflexive, practice-based, critical and (potentially) complexity
turns with positivistic approaches of science is quite fundamental. Therefore it remains
to be seen if reflexive research is easily to be positioned within a comparison of different
research-methods as done by Verschuren (2009). I will come back to that when
discussing the subjects of relevance and internal/external validity of research (see 2.3).
In the next paragraph I will indicate what it implies to be a reflexive researcher and to
do reflexive research, taking the breach with modernistic or positivistic approaches of
science as point of departure. Given the “personal” line of approach within my research
I will return to why a complex responsive process-approach is to be interpreted as a
radically reflexive approach of research. After that I will pay attention to auto-ethnographic
research, trying to learn something from this research tradition.
2.2 Reflexive research(er) and a complex responsive
process-approach
Reflexivity is an umbrella concept. Reflexivity embraces a wide range of approaches
for research. Already mentioned are the influence of the philosophy of Aristotle, Marx,
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism.
These philosophies are, together with for instance the work of Foucault and of the
philosophers within the tradition of the Frankfurter Schule, to be found in reflexive
research from the perspective of social constructionism, critical realism, grounded
theory, hermeneutics, critical theory, post structuralism, postmodernism, discourse
analysis, feminism and genealogy. These are approaches in which the position of the
research and of the researcher are held up to the light, in which specific interests
connected to power differences are paid attention to, and in which the very substance
of scientific research is debated.
The renaissance of the particular and local (Brinkmann, 2012; Toulmin, 1990) has
far-reaching consequences for the self-image of researchers. There should be a growing
awareness that there exists an intimate relation between power and scientific
truths (Foucault, 1980). It is contended that a researcher’s values and beliefs lay behind
every interpretation, that research as everything is a construction in time (Denzin and
Lincoln, 1994; Etherington, 2004; O'Reilly, 2005) permeated by amongst others politics,
conventions, selective perception and language (Alvesson et al., 2008; Alvesson
and Sköldberg, 2009). Even in the apparently value-free realm of computer-languages
(Baron, 1986). In contemporary ethnographic fieldwork reflexivity is required to think
critically about the context of research and writing, thinking about what is read and
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