2006 July 5

Summary 2: Research

--

Friends,

These 1,475 words summarize issues on research.

1) Research definitions

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines research in a way that clarifies
the term as living speakers use it: “1: careful or diligent search 2:
studious inquiry or examination; especially: investigation or
experimentation aimed at the discovery and interpretation of facts,
revision of accepted theories or laws in the light of new facts, or
practical application of such new or revised theories or laws 3: the
collecting of information about a particular subject”
(Merriam-Webster’s 1993: 1002; for more, see the Oxford English
Dictionary).

These definitions cover clinical, applied, and basic research;
theoretical and practice-led research; qualitative, quantitative,
descriptive, interpretive, logical, mathematical, empirical, positive,
normative, hermeneutic, phenomenological, and philosophical research, as
well as expressive research.

What distinguishes research from other activities is what Mario Bunge
(1999: 251) describes as the “methodical search for knowledge.
Original research,” he continues, “tackles new problems or checks
previous findings. Rigorous research is the mark of science, technology,
and the ‘living’ branches of the humanities.” Synonyms for
research include exploration, investigation, and inquiry.

2) Clearing up confusions

Discussing practice-led research often generates two confusions, values
confusion and category confusion.

The first confuses value issues. Research is not “better” than
painting, playing football, or feeding the poor. Research is different.

An angry design student once asked me whether research is more
important that feeding the hungry as though I could choose between
solving a particular mathematical problem and ending world hunger. If I
could choose, I would end hunger. I do not get to choose between these
two.

(Ending world hunger involves political and economic choices. See,
f.ex., Fuller 1981 or Sachs 2005. We do not need to choose between two
different social goods, research, and ending hunger. We must persuade
our citizens and governments to end hunger for all humans. This takes
the kind of research Sachs has been doing.)

The second problem is category confusion that involves the frequent
appeal to many ways of knowing. There ARE many ways to know, to learn,
and to transmit information.

While there are many ways to know and many kinds of knowledge, not all
ways to know or learn constitute research. Theology and comparative
religion entail research. Religious prophecy and divine revelation do
not. This is why Dr. Wojtyla and Dr. Ratzinger found no conflict between
church doctrine and evolution theory.

Guilds transmit knowledge as a form of embodied information and
modeling in the master-apprentice relationship. Apprenticeship is not
research.

There are hundreds of similar examples. Research is a range of
systematic approaches to finding, learning, and knowing. There are
others ways to find, know, and learn, and they are valuable. This
workshop focused on research.

Definitions help us to understand what we discuss so that we can deepen
and improve our fields.

3) Other definitions

At different points, participants posted valuable but limited
definitions of research. These are useful. They simply have less
covering power than the large-scale definition I use. I prefer to
postulate a definition with the greatest covering power.

If you prefer another definition, the way forward is not to say that my
postulates are wrong. Present your own articulate definition instead.

Definitions must be reasonable as well as articulate to be useful.
Every workshop of this kind elicits definitions of research that are
neither accurate nor useful. The common denominator among these is a
tendency to label different kinds of non-research activities as
research.

In a private note, a doctoral candidate argued against my definition of
research by referring to a diatribe against “colonizing research”
and “positivism” in a book on “decolonizing methodologies.” The
book argues that colonizing research includes “having your genealogy
and identity (cell-lines) stolen, patented, copied; having the umbilical
cord blood of aborted babies ‘farmed’; having your cultural
institutions and their rituals patented either by a non-indigenous
person or by another indigenous person” and so on (Smith 2002:
100-101). On this basis, the author argues that research is bad.

While these are unethical practices, they are not research. That is
rather like saying: “Dumping raw nuclear waste into the ocean is
research. Therefore, research is bad.” Some of [these unethical]
practices are based on knowledge derived from research, but they are not
research practices. Instead, this resembles the relationship between
metallurgy and killing people with swords. The same research that
produces swords makes better plowshares. We choose how to use them.

Our focus is research rather than other practices, good or bad.

4) Research goals

One participant stated the goals of research as knowledge or
understanding. That fits most definitions, broad or narrow.

5) Research and instrumental knowledge

The goals of knowledge and understanding have many purposes. In
contrast, we read an argument for instrumental knowledge that pointed to
action research as an example of research where the goal of research is
change. This requires a distinction the author did not make.

The notion of instrumental knowledge fails to account for the diversity
of research or change built on expanded knowledge and understanding. The
year 1905 saw several contributions to basic research that had no
practical application at all. The scientist who did the work said that
he could imagine no foreseeable use or practical value in his work. The
research expanded human knowledge by providing a better model of the
physical forces at work in the universe. It had no other purpose. Over
the following century, this supposedly useless research opened the way
to much of the technology we use today, including the computer
technology and Internet technology that you are using to read this
summary in a workshop that enables us to meet in real time around the
world.

If all research were required to serve instrumental ends, we would live
a world where 90% of all human beings worked in farming, fishing, and
forestry, rising with the sun and retiring at dusk. Most of the products
and services we use today began in some form of basic research. Many of
the benefits we enjoy begin in non-instrumental experiments by people
who want to see whether things can work in new and different ways.

The demand for immediate application of instrumental knowledge is often
associated with narrow political goals. Because the value of
instrumental knowledge is always a political decision, history has seen
many cases of instrumental research with destructive results. This is
particularly common in dictatorships where those who fail to achieve
serious research careers become “research politicians” through an
ability to argue for instrumental knowledge without the deeper
understanding that leads to improvements.

Research works best when our goals are knowledge and understanding.
This is even the case when our research has such instrumental goals as
feeding the world or making tools work better.

6) Action research

This clarifies the distinction between action research and action
without research. The goal of research is knowledge and understanding.
The goal of action research is informed action based on knowledge and
understanding.

If all action and all practice were informed by knowledge and
understanding, we would not need action research, practice-led research,
or any other kind of research. Consider, for example, the debate that
occurred when practitioner physicians believed that their social
standing required them to make hospital rounds and perform surgery in
street clothes. The arguments against Pasteur, Lister, and Semmelweiss
often posed action against academic theory. “We’re surgeons,” they
argued, “Let’s get on with our practice! Invisible ‘microbes’
have nothing to do with medicine.”

Kurt Lewin, Chris Argyris, Donald Schon, and the other founders of
action research would have sided with Semmelweiss. Semmelweiss learned
how to save patient lives by practicing the legitimate action research
and sound science that medical practitioners opposed.

Action based on knowledge and understanding is the goal of action
research. Anyone can “change” things. The point of action research
is to know and understand what we change, why we should change it, and
how to change it effectively.

The goal of action research is not “change” but “improvement.”
We must decide what we mean by the term “improvement,” but one thing
is certain: the word means something better and more desirable than what
exists today. Change is something else.

If the difference is not clear, just consider how dramatically George
Bush changed the world.

The goal of our workshop is knowledge and understanding for improvement
rather than instrumental change established by uninformed political
preferences. That is the difference between research and politics.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

References

Bunge, Mario. 1999. The Dictionary of Philosophy. Amherst, New York:
Prometheus Books.

Fuller, Buckminster. 1981. Critical Path. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.

Merriam-Webster, Inc. 1993. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
Tenth edition. Springfield, Massachusetts.

Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2005. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for
Our Time. London: Penguin Press.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2002. Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and
Indigenous Peoples. London and Dunedin: Zed Books and University of
Otago Press.