One question I've been asking myself over the past few years is what an
analysis is intended to produce. Theory? And what is theory-a set of
assertions? An abstraction from the concrete? Academic capital? Or, as
Alan Blum has suggested, is it the theorist reinventing him/herself?
(Blum, A. (1970). Theorizing. In J. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding everyday
life, Chicago: Aldine.)
The work I've described was intended as participatory research; that's to
say, one outcome that I was seeking from analysis was a change in practice,
rather than (just) a theory. I can't claim to have achieved that, but the
aim has guided the way I'm writing about the research. It's said that the
two major modes of discourse are assertion/argument and narrative: I've
chosen the second. I'm writing a *story* about the community schools.
Here's one attempt I've made to explain and justify this:
"Any narrative is shaped by the benefits of hindsight, but it also captures
the unfolding of events in time. It is informed by a sense of the whole,
by an understanding, achieved in retrospect, of the larger social and
historical contexts in which people acted, when they themselves necessarily
lacked this awareness. But at the same time it can reconstruct the
unfolding, the twists and turns of events, the surprises and
disappointments, that agents experienced. This juxtaposition of the
limited viewpoint of the agent and the larger forces that cannot be seen
clearly at the time is the power of narrative, and it is precisely this
two-sided approach-partial understanding of agent; larger social/historical
system-that a critical socio-cultural analysis of human development seeks."
I might add that in a narrative I can locate myself, as something other
than the omniscient but hidden-by-the-third-person academic.
As I write this story I make endless decisions about what to higlight and
what to background, and I've come to see this *as* analysis, of a kind that
doesn't reduce the complexity of events to theoretical abstraction. And
I'd like the people I worked with to read what I've written and say, 'yes,
that's right, and we now understand a little better what we were trying to
do, what went wrong, and what we can do next.' A narrative (I hope) can
do this in the way that a quantitative analysis, for example, can't.
I'd welcome reactions to this approach, negative as well as positive.
Perhaps there's something crucial I'm losing or missing by taking this tack.
Martin
================
Martin Packer
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh PA 15282
(412) 396-4852
fax: (412) 396-5197
packer who-is-at duq3.cc.duq.edu
http://www.duq.edu/liberalarts/gradpsych/packer/packer.html