Sunday 5 January 2014

Re-examining my worldview

Image: ariss via freeimages

Research Philosophy

 How do I identify with four of the main worldview areas, as discussed by Newby?

Scientism and Positivism

 This school of thought demands predictable cause and effect - not easy to establish where people are concerned. Once people realise that others are able to predict their behaviour in any way, they tend to change their behaviour to avoid manipulation! It may be beneficial to look for patterns if you have a critical interest, such as a business issue, although this may actually overlap with more humanistic traditions (see below) because you will be seeking a model that is 'fit for purpose' rather than trying to establish an objective truth.

This is the case for the research carried out by Meadows (2004) and Tremain (2011, 2012), where the critical factors affecting examiner retention and job satisfaction needed to be identified. Establishing an all-encompassing theory or truth (positivism) may be too ambitious - and would be clouded by personal interests - identifying and monitoring the relevant factors was achieved through careful selection of questions and interpretation of data.

 Future reading: Discussion of the work of Karl Popper (Newby, Ch.3)

Humanism, Phenomenology and Existentialism

 Whist positivism demands an objective external truth independent of human influence, humanism treats 'truth' as a social construction, where one culture's truth may not be another's. This ties well with my understanding of social evolution (Hobson, 2012; Ronfeldt, 1996, 2012a,b) whereby societies develop distinct cultures of varying complexity through the addition of different forms of organisation. Conflicts arise between or even within societies due to disagreements about how society should be ordered (or not) by hierarchical institutions and free market policies. Ronfeldt (2013) acknowledges that even the term 'tribe' in his T-I-M-N framework is frequently contested by others, and progresses the model by engaging with and incorporating these disagreements into his model.

Phenomenology focuses on individual and collective experiences to form a rational basis for future action, by probing the differences between 'perceived' and 'experienced' world. Methods include description observation, reporting and reflection.

Existentialism centres around seeking to understand the world from a personal perspective, driven by conviction and desire. Methods could extend to asking participants for other forms of 'data' such as pictures, videos and stories of their lives - anything that conveys their viewpoint in richer detail than a questionnaire could. Existentialism has been applied to curriculum design, by designing a curriculum that centres around self-discovery.

 Critical theory

This theory is concerned with political beliefs, particularly those that are left-of-centre and seeking to change society by making people aware of their circumstances in order to liberate them. Research carried out within a critical theory framework seeks to observe and expose individual facts which can then be combined to form an argument for change.

Aside: I am particularly interested in the references to Karl Marx, as this led to a model for social evolution around the struggle for control of wealth - somewhat akin to Ronfeldt's description of the transition between biform (T+I) and triform (T+I+M) societies.

 Applying critical theory to education has been used by academics to attack the present model for education as being primarily based around servicing the needs of the capitalist economy, and thus serves only to reinforce the inequalities that it inevitably generates. However positivists would undoubtedly attack this approach because it proposes a hypothesis and seeks to prove it.

 Postmodernism

This approach distinguishes itself from the 'modernist' approaches by rejecting the 'modernist' assumption that there is a single explanation for things, which leads to a natural order. For education, this almost rejects the need for theories of education, since such theories are rooted in modernist approaches! This approach does overlap with my TIMN world-view, because it is by nature multi-layered, and acknowledges that 'people and organisations can play several and sometimes conflicting roles', in keeping with the different types of organisations and the interfaces between them.

Postmodernism bears a great deal of similarity to the network (+N) principles described by Ronfeldt, with researchers seeking to act more as nodes in a network, unpicking their assumptions and sharing data that reflects their local situation, with the ideal that the value of the network increases not simply with the number of nodes but the number of connections between them.

 Future reading: Steven Johnson: Future Perfect 

Summary

 My adoption to the T-I-M-N framework in my outlook leads me to cross several of the boundaries of research philosophy, but perhaps I identify more strongly than I realised with the post-modernist approach for rejecting the established order with its demanded polarisation of political outlooks.

References:
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