Dear all,
At last we appear to have a debate going. Here's my two penneth.
Isn't it rather too convenient to identify flaws in research? This is often
a stage in resisting having to do anything about a problem.
Anyone who is involved in organisational research understands the problems
and the realities of data gathering and interpretation.
At a stroke we have highlighted all those methodological issues of human
research such as fittingness, etc.. When we evaluate research, while rigour
must be demonstrated and care must be taken to make only realistic claims,
we will always be left with questions since causal links can never be
identified in the same way as in a controlled experiment (and I'm sure that
our researchers are not suggesting that we carry out experiments).
It is always a bone of contention among organisational researchers about the
organisation itself. They might be viewed in Durkheimian terms as having a
set of influences which are apart from the individuals within it or, at the
other extreme, we may have the view that (like Thatcher's 'there is no such
thing as society') there are just collections of individuals.
No matter how you view it, it is in the concrete world that we witness the
outcomes, i.e. sick people. While I would not hide behind the easy term of
claiming that anything which might help is worth trying, I would argue
(perhaps appealing partly to Popper) that the best and most rigorously
developed ideas which might help are worth listening to. We will go on
improving and replacing them as knowledge and understanding increases. If,
however, we wait for the perfect research (perfect by whose standards?
physical scientists?) we will wait for ever.
While the social studies approaches were evolving, they were at one time
referred to as the 'moral sciences'. Stress and how we try to address it is
a moral issue.
Kevin MAGUIRE
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