[Reply to David Sless. Long Post.]
Dear David,
Thanks for your good post on the critical literature review. For the
most part I agree, and I want to make the nature of my agreement clear.
I was writing about the critical literature review, and not “the
plumbing.”
This thread has concatenated a number of unlike threads. Along the way,
a few points and their authors may have been confused. These issues are
important to me, and I want to keep my views clear.
My response is not a disagreement with your concepts, but a
clarification to reiterate my earlier posts. I am not concerned with
plumbing, but with central issues in the growth of our field.
[David Sless wrote]
—snip—
Having said that, I hope there is a recognised need within the
community of practice that is phd supervisors and phd candidates to have
a rigorous and shared set of procedures and practices for undertaking
literature reviews. This is what forms a large part of what Ken has been
articulating masterfully in the earlier threads. But, without in any way
wishing to denigrate this vital part of doing a literature review, I
would suggest that this is all about plumbing.
—snip—
In writing about literacy, I explained why supervisors must be
literate. We both agree on this. This involved the kind of research
training that allows one to contribute to a field. Nevertheless, it was
not my main point.
The main point involved Victor Margolin’s larger question of
literacy. For me, this involves using the core position texts of the
field and using the ever-developing literature of journal articles on
empirical, conceptual, and theoretical topics.
This is different to the literature review as part of a PhD thesis. My
reply to Derek Miller makes this clear:
[Ken Friedman wrote]
—snip—
The PhD thesis makes an original contribution to the knowledge of a
field by a specific doctoral candidate. Within the PhD thesis, the
literature review chapter has a formative role, defining the topic,
summarizing progress to the moment in the topic, narrowing the field of
interest, and identifying the knowledge gap that the thesis author will
fill. In filling this gap, the doctoral candidate makes an original
contribution to the knowledge of the field.
The genre of journal article known as a literature review has a
related, but slightly different purpose. Literature review articles
published in journals are generally written by scholars after completing
the PhD. In some cases, these are important research statements by
senior scholars.
—snip—
By describing this genre of literature in several posts, I was
describing the critical literature review. I argue for expert-level
literature review contributions and annotated bibliographies that filter
useful from useless, sorting relevant from irrelevant, to locate and
disclose the conceptual and theoretical contributions that will advance
the field.
Now we agree on this, but you’ve described my concerns as plumbing
and in doing so, you placed me on the other side of a conceptual fence.
That tweaks my sense of craftsmanship enough to show that I already
stated the issues you raise in explicit terms.
[David Sless wrote]
—snip—
That is when the real work of doing a CRITICAL literature review
begins. I emphasise the word ‘critical’ because I think it is vital
to distinguish between a literature review that simply summarises what
has been done in the past and possibly classifies it according to
explicit criteria, and a critical literature review that filters what
has been found in new and interesting ways. The former is plumbing, the
latter is filtering.
—snip—
This issue appears in several of my notes. The most succinct statement
appears in my reply to Derek Miller.
[Ken Friedman wrote]
—snip—
The literature review article seeks to summarize the knowledge of the
field at any given moment. Using the Webster-Watson schema, the
literature review article will (1) state why the research topic is
important, (2) explain the contribution that the literature review
article will make to the field, (3) describe the key concepts in the
article, which may include definition statements, (4) delineate
boundaries of research issues the article will address, (5) review
relevant prior literature – for us, this will cover relevant areas of
design – as well as reviewing the literature of relevant related
areas, (6) develop a model to guide future research, (7) justify the
propositions of the model by presenting theoretical explanations, past
empirical findings, and practical examples, (8) present concluding
implications for researchers and relevant professionals, including
designer, design managers, project leaders, and others.
The Webster-Watson list has seven bullet points. This list has eight,
since I see the first two steps as distinct. I’d also argue that
several steps take place in moving from step 5 to step 6. Here, though,
one comes to a range of challenges and problems in theory construction.
My purpose in posting the article was to alert people to the value of
the literature review article as a contribution to the knowledge of the
field.
There are other approaches. I presented this one because it is a good
summary piece, readily available. The IS field – including HCI and MIS
– shares many common challenges with the design field, so it seemed a
good fit.
Again, I invite people to read it for themselves:
Webster, Jane, and Richard T. Watson. 2002. “Analyzing the Past to
Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review.” Management
Information Science Quarterly Vol. 26 No. 2, (June), xiii-xxiii.
Available from URL:
www.misq.org/misq/downloads/download/editorial/176/
—snip—
A literature review summarizes the state of the art, but this is more
than a simple summary or recap.
Several key steps in a literature review state what more is required:
“(5) review relevant prior literature – for us, this will cover
relevant areas of design – as well as reviewing the literature of
relevant related areas, (6) develop a model to guide future research,
(7) justify the propositions of the model by presenting theoretical
explanations, past empirical findings, and practical examples.”
Between 5 and 6, I wrote that there are several substeps. Keeping to the
Webster-Watson schema, I didn’t describe them. These steps require
critical filtering. That’s the whole point of a literature review
article, and this defines its value for the field.
A good literature review does not report out everything that’s been
written. It focuses on relevant contributions, filters out the needless,
and narrows the frame with respect to a contribution. (I don’t want to
confuse this with plumbing, but one must also do this in the literature
review chapter of a thesis to move from the past state of the field to
the knowledge gap that the thesis author will attempt to fill.)
From the tone of your note, it seems to me that you did not read the
Webster and Watson article. They describe the critical literature
review, explaining how to do one, and argue for the vital function it
plays in advancing the future of a field. This is not a summary of the
past, but an analysis. They describe “analyzing the past to prepare
for the future.”
Webster and Watson provide a filtering mechanism, the concept matrix,
and they show the aspiring authors of the critical review how to move
from a series of summary accounts to a focused, filtered and
developmental account of concepts.
There are certainly other ways to filter the literature. Webster and
Watson and the two books by Hart offer several explicit and well
developed approaches to locating literature, filtering it, and preparing
a critical literature review. Again, the two books were:
Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a literature search. A Comprehensive Guide for
the Social Sciences. London: Sage Publications.
Hart, Chris. 1998. Doing a Literature Review. Releasing the Social
Science Imagination. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
—snip—
Your note called for a wider view of the literature. I agree with this,
and I said so.
[David Sless wrote]
—snip—
What I think rightly disturbs Victor is the stagnant pools from which
some people draw on in their investigation of our fields, missing some
of glorious fresh water lakes because they are outside their own
professionally approved territory.
To give you concrete sense of this, I will draw from my own experience.
Back in the mid sixties I started taking an interest in symbol design.
With a background in psychology, my first port of call was psychology
abstracts. I diligently (manually) trawled through the entire series
from the 19th Century through to the (then) present day. I found very
little, and what I did find was not very useful. Had I stuck to that
area I could have concluded that I was the first person on earth to
consider this matter as worthy of research. I made further searches in
the peer reviewed, published research, in many other fields and found
nothing that helped. However, once I looked beyond this narrow
literature, I discovered a great deal of thinking, ideas and practical
investigation in all sorts of matters that had a bearing on my interest.
—snip—
My original reply to Victor made exactly this point.
[Ken Friedman wrote]
—snip—
For each of us, there is also a literature that informs us from outside
the design field. For me, this includes the literatures of: management,
knowledge management, information science, and leadership; philosophy,
philosophy of knowledge, and philosophy of science; history, history of
science, and history of technology; religion, theology, and exegetics;
art and art history. […] Nearly everyone I know in design research has
some kind of different background. Engineering, mathematics, computing,
information science, and informatics are common; psychology,
anthropology, sociology, and cognitive science reasonably widespread;
communication, economics, behavioral science, and related fields not
uncommon; architecture, urban planning, fashion, and cognate design
fields quite widespread.
The other fields we bring to our work form the hermeneutic horizon of
our perception and inquiry. These literatures frame our discourse,
giving us a substantive and methodological vocabulary, as well as giving
us an array of sources on which to draw in our research and teaching.
In each case, as individual as each case is, literacy involves more
than knowing how to read. It involves mastering, understanding, and
knowing a literature. The deep knowledge of a literature enables us
ultimately to embody a perspective. It is only when we draw explicitly
on our perspective and on the literature we represent that we expand the
discourse of the field.
—snip—
While I’ve commented on the plumbing, much as you did in your post,
this was not the point of several carefully crafted notes. I am puzzled
to see these statements described as plumbing when I addressed the very
issues you raise.
My reply to the thread on Endnote established the distinction between
plumbing and content.
[Ken Friedman wrote]
—snip—
Content counts, not the storage system or the software. …
To speak of “years of endnoted interrogation of design canons”
misses the point of literacy. Literacy entails knowing and using the
useful literature. But this is not simply a matter of a canon in the
sense of an historical, philosophical, or literary canon. In any field
of research connected linked with an applied profession such as
medicine, law, or design, literacy also entails understanding and
applying empirical, conceptual, and theoretical research.
The issue is not a matter of interrogating the canon. The issue
involves interrogating the human and physical world, using theoretical,
conceptual, and empirical literature as tools in the process of
interrogation.
—snip—
Over the past week since Victor posted his note on literacy, I’ve
followed the thread carefully. These are important issues in our field,
and I’ve emerged from lurk mode to spend more hours than I should have
on these contributions.
So I’ll agree with you on the content of your post, but I’ll differ
where you suggest that my contributions are “all about plumbing.”
The central point has been the larger range of issues involved in the
literacy of a field. This is the point that Victor raised. Along the
way, I illustrate my comments with examples, and I applied these
comments and examples to doctoral supervision and the work of the PhD.
Nevertheless, this series of notes addressed the points you raise.
My comments on literature review focused on the critical literature
review, and in much the same way: filtered for conceptual value, engaged
with the larger relevant literature, applied to significant issues in
the human and physical world.
Best regards,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
|
