infonet-economy

The Bologna Process (Reichert & Tauch, 2004) represents one of the most recent transformations of the higher education landscape. Though there are as yet few critical investigations (Nóvoa, 2002), it can be reasonably objected that the Bologna Reform propels managerial rationalities such a quality, standardization or transparency (e.g. ENQA, 2005) and thus delineates the limits of science propre (Meier Sørensen, 2003). While establishing a configuration of thought that pinpoints a rational way of conducting higher education in the European context, it is anything but surprising that the Bologna Reform has (and will increasingly have) a significant impetus on the justification of (psychological) qualitative research. The present paper thus addresses the Bologna Reform as a process of educational restructuring (Lindblad & Popkewitz, 2004) in order to speculate on the relationship between the mentalities/logics proclaimed by educational policy documents and the space qualitative research does or can inhabit therein. The paper will culminate in the proclamation of the potential (though as yet not merited) tenets of qualitative research in prospective BA, MA and PhD programs.
The argument of our writing will proceed as follows. Starting from the middle of things, so to speak, we will first provide anecdotal evidence accumulated during the course of our own doctorates in order to pinpoint the obstacles and hardship related with qualitative research. We will then construe these Odyssey-like journeys as a somewhat logic consequence of the contemporary scientific dogma of performativity (Lyotard, 1984). While referring to the current critique of higher education (e.g. Aronowitz, 2005) to contextualize our experiences, we will show that the marginal(ized) position of qualitative research becomes intelligible if one takes into account that the McUniversity (Parker, 2002) is increasingly occupied with the production and dissemination of ostensibly practical knowledge, that is, knowledge which can be translated into a code of dos and don'ts. Our inquiry is hence based on both political and economic arguments since we seek to show that higher education is on the one hand envisioned (through Bologna-related and other educational strategy documents) as a means to increase the employability and flexibility of national citizens (Fejes, 2005), and on the other hand construed as a "support device' for the business sector (Etzkowitz, 2003) and as a mechanism for leveraging the competitiveness of national economies (Lyotard, 1984). Positing that it has become mandatory for scholars to treat knowledge as a commodity (Jacobs, 2003) that can be sold either on the tertiary education market or through consultancy services, we will get to use these insights to exemplify how the performativity imperative in turn make it increasingly difficult for qualitative researchers to render visible the value of their work and, by implication, to legitimate their existence.
In the last part of the paper we will probe the unique "promise' of qualitative research in the context of prospective BA, MA and PhD education. Though we refrain from promoting qualitative research as an antidote to mainstream research, we will nevertheless suggest that the heritage of qualitative research has much on offer when it comes to the non-economic justification of research. In particular, we conclude that qualitative research defies a consumerist attitude towards knowledge since it notably stresses that social life is more complex, paradoxical and undeterminable than assumed by normal science (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1992). We will further muse on the political implications of quality research so as to proclaim that qualitative research can be useful for unsettling the methodological conservatism of prevailing research (Lincoln, 2005). In full awareness of the utopian connotation of our plea, we will establish qualitative research as an ethical practice which nurtures a sensitivity for difference and alterity.

References
Aronowitz, S. (2005). Higher Education and Everyday Life. In P. P. Trifonas & M. A. Peters (eds.), Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the New Humanities. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
ENQA (2005). Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area. Helsinki: European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.
Etzkowitz, H. (2003). Research Groups as "Quasi-Firms': The Invention of the Entrepreneurial University. Research Policy, 32, 109 - 121.
Fejes, A. (2005). The Bologna Process - Governing Higher Education in Europe through Standardisation. Paper presented at The Third Conference on Knowledge and Politics - The Bologna Process and the Shaping of the Future Knowledge Society, University of Bergen, Norway, 18 - 20 May, 2005.
Funtowicz, S. O. & Ravetz, J. R. (1992). Three Types of Risk Assessment and the Emergence of Post-Normal Science. In S. Krimsky & D. Golding (eds.), Social Theories of Risk. Westport, CT: Prager.
Jacob, M. (2003). Rethinking Science and Commodifying Knowledge. Policy Futures in Education,1, 125 - 142.
Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Institutional Review Boards and Methodological Conservatism: The Challenge to and from Phenomenological Paradigms. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3 ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Lindblad, S. & Popkewitz, T. S. (2004). Education Restructuring: (Re)Thinking the Problematic of Reform. In S. Lindblad & T. S. Popkewitz (eds.), Educational Restructuring: International Perspectives on Traveling Policies. Greenwhich: Information Age Publishing.
Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Meier Sørensen, B. (2003). Gilles Deleuze and the Intensification of Social Theory. Ephemera: Critical Dialogues on Organization, 3, 50 - 58.
Nóvoa, A. (2002). Way of Thinking about Education in Europe. In A. Nóvoa & M. Lawn (eds.), Fabricating Europe: The Formation of an Education Space. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Parker, M. (2002). The Romance of Lonely Dissent: Intellectuals, Professionals and the McUniversity. In M. Dent & S. Whitehead (eds.), Managing Professional Identities. London: Routledge.
Reichert, S. & Tauch, C. (2004). Bologna Four Years Later: Steps Towards Sustainable Reform of Higher Education in Europe. European Education, 36, 36 - 50.

In lieu of an abstract, here a brief extract from the introduction:

In recent years, researchers in management and organization studies have devoted considerable attention to discursive research, so it is hardly controversial to claim that discourse analysis is one of the field’s most popular research methodologies. At the risk of simplifying, a key assumption underlying much of the available literature is that discourse analysis is primarily an excellent tool for producing knowledge (Heracleous, 2006) and more generally an analytic mentality (Phillips and Hardy, 2002). This interpretation is noteworthy as it consigns discourse analysis to its epistemological function.
Although we agree that discourse analysis is inextricably connected to questions of epistemology (knowledge), in this chapter we seek to transcend this position by demonstrating that it can also be used productively as a means of intervention. Conflating the epistemological and interventionist trajectories of discourse analysis, we build on prior work that conceives of ‘method’ and ‘research’ quite generally as a means for enacting and changing reality instead of ‘only’ representing or interpreting it (Law, 2004; Steyaert, 2011). Following this vein of thinking, we tenta- tively outline the interventionist potential of discourse analysis against the backdrop of organizational changing. Thereby, drawing on Tsoukas (2005), we define organizational changing as the process through which multiple discursive practices unfold, allowing members of organizations to give meaning to the organizational reality of which they are part. Using this approach, and analysing a consultancy project in a large German voluntary organization, we reveal how discourse analysis can be used to intervene in discursive practices that are characterized by tensions and struggle. To this end, we pinpoint how the results from one such analysis were used to break up a contracted conflict via two interrelated steps. First, discursive spaces were created that offered members of the organization an opportunity to vent their frustration and to create awareness of the antagonistic discursive practices that triggered the tensions and conflict. Second, generative dialogue allowed them to foster more affirmative re-interpretations of organizational changing.

The growing discomfort about contemporary capitalism has rekindled interest in alternative forms of entrepreneurship. Broadly conceived as pre-eminent social change agents, alternative enterprises – variously referred to as public, social, sustainable, eco- or transformative enterprises – are increasingly seen as holding the promise of a type of commercial endeavor capable of transcending the blatant excesses of capitalism. This debate, albeit important, lacks theoretical depth and critical grounding. To address this situation, we draw on Henri Lefebvre’s work on capitalism, rhythms and everyday life to develop a conceptual vocabulary attentive to the controversial and shifting relationship between alternative enterprises and capitalism. Specifically, based on Lefebvre’s tripartite framework of rhythms (isorhythmia, eurhythmia and arrhythmia), we offer a conceptual reading that aspires to map how three alternative enterprises (work integration social enterprises, urban recovery enterprises and entrepreneurial squats) variously reproduce, escape or intervene in the regular unfolding of the rhythms of capitalism. Pinpointing that the relationship between alternative enterprises and capitalism is more controversial than both celebratory and alarmist studies would suggest, the main contribution this article makes is to raise awareness that alternative enterprises intermingle reactionary and disruptive tendencies in often-unexpected ways. We conclude by calling for prospective research using rhythmanalysis as a corporeal mode of analysis that sets out to sense moments of reproduction and breakthrough which alternative enterprises’ enactment of different rhythms entail.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Crowdfunding is a fairly novel phenomenon, both in taxonomic as well as in technological terms. Whilst at first mainly used to finance projects in the arts and the broader field of the creative industries (Bradford, 2012), political campaigns (Belleflamme, Lambert, & Schwienbacher, 2010) as well as entrepreneurial start-ups and SMEs (de Buysere, Gajda, Kleverlaan, & Marom, 2012), crowdfunding has meanwhile increasingly been employed as a vehicle for financing social and sustainable ventures or projects (Lehner, 2013; Thorpe, 2012)—which forms the focal attention of this chapter.

In general, so-called social purpose crowdfunding forms an alternative means of financing the overall operation of social ventures, or isolated projects or programs (Lehner, 2013, 2014; Lehner & Nicholls, 2014; Lehner, Grabmann, & Ennsgraber, 2014). The main assumption is thereby that social purpose crowdfunding offers project initiators or Social Entrepreneurs a financial remedy under conditions of increasing restrictions on traditional means of funding (Meyskens & Bird, 2015). Simultaneously, social purpose crowdfunding offers attractive invest- ment opportunities to those investors who are more interested in promoting social value than in earning a profit (Meyskens & Bird, 2015).

The basic contention the present chapter makes is that despite the almost univocally accepted promise of crowdfunding as an innovative tool for social value creation, relatively little is know about how this emergent technology works, and what kind of contingent effects it produces. This chapter argues that substantially new insights about crowdfunding in general and its rela- tionship to social value creation more specifically can be derived from the investigation of queer cases—a particular type of extreme cases which do not simply deviate from but largely upset and potentially change the very essence of the phenomena under consideration. To attain this goal, we will follow a potato salad crowdfunding campaign, which started as a fairly modest initiative before turning into one of the most prominent crowdfunding projects in the US. The project in question, which was perceived by many as a blatant hoax, challenges the linear “cause and effect” model underlying many conceptualizations of crowdfunding. It also makes us aware that social value creation is not necessarily attributable to the ingenuity of the project initiator or located in the proclaimed goal of a campaign; instead, social value in the case of the analyzed project forms a contingent effect emerging from the specific relations between an initial idea, the distinct agency of the crowdfunding platform, and the backers’ staging of an event.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we offer an overview of crowdfunding research, with an emphasis on how the crowdfunding process is framed in normative terms. Second, we introduce the concept of queer cases and draw on speech act theory to develop a provisional framework to analyze the infelicitous usages of crowdfunding. Third, we empirically analyze a Kickstarter project by Zack Brown aimed at raising $10 to produce a potato salad. Fourth, Brown’s potato salad project is analyzed in terms of how it breaches existing conditions of felicity. Fifth, we reflect on a more general level on how attentiveness to ostensible misfires and abuses of crowdfunding through queer cases creates an opportunity to experiment with new perspectives on the subject matter. The chapter concludes by calling for prospective research on queer crowdfunding projects which uproots convictions about how and where social value is created.

Available conceptualizations of ‘civil society' tend to depict the subject matter as a ‘thing', often either credited with the potential to solve today's most pressing social problems (the progressive view) or, conversely, seen as perpetuating prevailing orders of power (the conservative view). To venture beyond these essentialist imageries which envision ‘civil society' as a static configuration which is always already there, we employ the metaphor of zooming in to argue that the social is radically open, that is, neither progressive or conservative a priori but becoming progressive or conservative in the way it is enacted through heterogeneous elements. With this as a backdrop, we introduce Actor-Network Theory and After to flesh out a post-foundational understanding of the social, and use the case of crowdfunding to reflect on how technology-mediated ordering practices might bring about alternative forms of sociality. The paper concludes that Actor-Network Theory and After - despite claims to the contrary - bears critical potential in the way it pinpoints, based on empirical insights, favorable ordering practices.

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