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How to write academic texts A practical guide How to write academic texts: A practical guide is intended to serve as a rather brief and somewhat personal, yet instructive, treatise on how to think about academic writing.The first part of the book conceives of academic writing as based on a generic model that applies to virtually all kinds of publications including journal articles, doctoral theses, and research monographs. Understanding this “elementary morphology” of such texts—their outline, emplotment, and standard lines of reasoning—is of great help when it comes to reducing the time spent on the format of the text. The second part of the book addresses a few practical issues pertaining to the practice of writing and publishing and discusses the role of disciplined, yet open-minded reading, the importance of establishing writing routines that suit your personality and work life situation, and what to bear in mind when eventually disclosing written texts to external evaluators, be they supervisors, journal editors, or publishing house editors. ”Writing has a mysterious quality to it in academic work. Too many PhD students and scholars fear writing, and usually for the wrong reasons. Alexander Styhre reminds us that writing is based on reading, that the writing process can be managed, and that there is nothing mysterious about it. In this book, he has succeeded in capturing the problematics of crafting academic texts in a clear, informative, and vivid way. He is accessible without being naïve; theoretically elegant without being patronizing; and personal without being self-congratulatory. Although his main audience is PhD students and early career post-docs, Styhre’s book offers an extremely useful resource for everyone engaged in academic writing.”

Alexander Styhre | How to write academic texts

Alexander Styhre is Chair of Organization Theory and Management, School of Business, Economics, and Law, University of Gothenburg. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Management.

How to write academic texts A practical guide

Janne Tienari, Aalto University, Helsinki

Art.nr 37804

Alexander Styhre

www.studentlitteratur.se

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Art. No 37804 ISBN 978-91-44-09348-2 Edition 1:1 ÂŠâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;The author and Studentlitteratur 2013 www.studentlitteratur.se Studentlitteratur AB, Lund Cover design: Francisco Ortega Printed by Exakta AB, Sweden 2013

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“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” Stephen King (2000: 139)

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Contents

Preface 9 Introduction: The role of writing 13 Introduction 13 Writing as a professional skill and prerogative 16 Outline of the book 20 Part I Elements of the text Chapter 1

What constitutes a proper research problem? 23

Introduction 23 Private concerns and social problems 24 The practice of problematization 25 Research problems and integrity 30 Doable problems 32 Research problems as moving targets 33 Summary and conclusion 35 Chapter 2

Constructing the theoretical framework 37

Introduction 37 What is a theory? 38 Two elements of the theoretical framework 41 Literature review 41 Theorizing 44 Constructing theory models 46 Summary and conclusion 48 © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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Contents Chapter 3

Presenting the methodology and the data collection process 49

Introduction 49 Methodology as a scholarly virtue and accomplishment 50 Method as enactment 52 Methodology 53 Data collection 56 Data analysis 58 Summary and conclusion 61 Chapter 4

Reporting the empirical material 63

Introduction 63 Genres of reporting 64 Emplotment 67 Working with emplotment 70 A note on PhD theses 72 Summary and conclusion 74 Chapter 5

Analysis and contributions to the field 75

Introduction 75 Theory production as theorizing 77 The theorizing process, Part I: What does the empirical data mean? 80 The theorizing process, Part II: How do we translate such meanings into theoretical statements and contributions? 82 The moral economy of theory-claims 85 Summary and conclusion 87 Part II The practice of writing Chapter 6

The imperative of reading 91

Introduction 91 The function of reading 92 Finding what to read 95 How to find what to read 98

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Contents

Reading routines 102 Summary and conclusion 103 Chapter 7

A room of one’s own: How to develop the routine 105

Introduction 105 A routine for writing 106 Crafting the first draft 108 Writing is re-writing 110 Writing with others 112 On style 114 Pay attention to the details and the rest will follow 117 Summary and conclusion 118 Chapter 8

Getting things out the door and into print: Submitting to journals and publishers 121

Introduction 121 Genres of academic writing 122 Submitting the text and obtaining a review 127 Summary and conclusion 131 Chapter 9

Writing as the scholar’s way of life: Concluding remarks 133

Introduction 133 Write in order to communicate the messy everyday life of research practices and their outcomes 134 Writing as exploration and communication 136 Practical recommendations summarized 137 Summary and conclusion 138

Bibliography 141 Index 151

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Preface

Writing academic texts is arguably the most frustrating and time-consuming task in the academic research work process simply because it is the very moment when, perhaps, months or even years of work is to be drawn together and given the final shape that eventually reaches the reader. What the writer may see on a screen or on a blank sheet of paper doesn’t always look just like the elegant, eloquent, and free-floating prose that the writer had hoped to produce prior to embarking on the writing process. In that way, both the text and the academic writing practice are truthful to the writer; they are, to cite the disgruntled Harvey Pekar (a part congenially played by the talented Paul Giamatto), in the movie American Splendor, a “reliable disappointment”. The text doesn’t lie: it demonstrates in broad daylight exactly how good or bad a writer you are, how prone you are to hiding behind stock phrases, obscure and pretentious jargon, and ready-made metaphors or “business buzzwords”. In addition to such concerns, for those of us who weren’t born speaking English, texts are commonly peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes that would embarrass a ten-year-old schoolboy in the Englishspeaking world. There is no choice but to face the fact that this is what you can expect from the activity of writing, at least in the early part of your career; a sense of being totally worthless and unable to express any kind intelligible thought in a systematic manner. This does not justify resignation in any way, or the accompanying abandonment of such ambitions; rather, this grinding sense of failure and loss of scholarly qualities is the starting point in the venture of acquiring at least some of the skills needed to survive in the harsh and increasingly publication-crazed world of academic work. Remember, no one is born a writer; you become one through hard work and sometimes painful encounters with the written word. Only by grappling with these © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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Preface

problems can they be overcome. Being a writer is, after all, the scholar’s way of life; it is both a prerogative and a predicament and needs to be understood in such dual terms—as both a blessing and a curse. For some years now, I have been responsible for the course The Research Process, which is an introductory and compulsory course on the business administration PhD program held at the School of Business, Economics, and Law at the University of Gothenburg. In other words, the rather delicate task of guiding our neophytes into the buzzing, blooming and confusing world of the academy has been placed in my hands. It is quite a balancing act to point to the difficulties and challenges while maintaining the right to claim the authority to freely express scientific thinking during such a course. During seminars, I have found myself telling stories about “how to do this” and “how to do that” hoping to be able to make some kind of impression on PhD students in terms of thinking how to accomplish the task of producing a doctoral thesis within a stipulated time. This book is more or less an attempt to commit these ideas to paper and to provide a short and hopefully useful (“inspiring” would be even better) introduction to the practice of writing academic texts. When I say “academic texts”, this doesn’t really specify the format or the genre. It implies that there are certain shared elements in all academic texts (research problem, research question, theoretical framework, etc.) that are present in all forms of academic texts and publications. Even though doctoral theses written in the Scandinavian tradition represent a certain genre of writing, overrating (in my mind) some aspects of research work while ignoring others, that tradition is still modeled on some generic research formats present in many types of publications. The intention of this book is therefore to present a general model of academic writing that applies to doctoral theses, research monographs, and journal papers. The title of the book includes the classic “How to …” opening, rather effectively signaling that it is intended to serve as a practical guide. Despite such a bold declaration of practical utility, there is always, of necessity, a certain amount of anxiety in instructing others, especially in practices that are quite personal inasmuch as what may work for me may not work for you, or your next-door neighbour. Therefore, I hope that the book will be regarded as quite practical without being too narrow in prescribing “One Best Way” approaches to writing. The text does not explain in detail how sentences, 10

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Preface

passages, and sections are to be constructed; rather, it sets out a generic morphology of the text. Since there are many texts available offering rather detailed instructions on “how to write”, I thus recommend the reader who feels that he or she would be helped by more detailed instructions to take a look at that literature. Two books that I think do this job quite well are Howard S. Becker’s Writing for social scientists: How to start to write and finish your thesis, book, or article (1986) and Karen Golden-Biddle and Karen Locke’s Composing qualitative research (1997). Becker’s book is a rather personal account of writing by a major scholar, while Golden-Biddle and Locke rely extensively on the case of A-journal publications and the learning achieved by the authors of these articles. My account is more personal, without being backed by Beckerian-sized credentials. In academic writing, disinterested objectivity and “neutrality” are the norm. When it comes to “writing about writing”, however, there is no room for such a disinterested position. When addressing writing, one must, of necessity, be personal and subjective, for better or worse. For more inspiration and less instruction, Stephen King’s On writing (2000), cited throughout this volume, is warmly recommended. Also, one of my of favourite authors, master travel writer and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipual, has a volume entitled Reading & Writing: A personal account (2000), but this text is actually less to the point than King’s book. I would like to thank commissioning editor Ola Håkansson at Studentlitteratur for commissioning this book. In addition, I would also like to thank the PhD students who participated in the The Research Process course and asked questions, commented on my ideas, submitted written reflections and notes on the course literature, and thus helped me to make myself clear in cases where my thoughts were muddled and inert. During the 2012-2013 academic year, the following PhD students participated in the course and thus contributed, directly or indirectly, to the writing of this little book: Ulises Navarro Aguiar, Fawad Awais, Marcus Brogeby, Sandhiya Goolaup, Eva Maria Jernsand, Henrik Jutbring, Samuel Rombach, and Gabriella Wulff. I would also like to warmly thank Professor Janne Tienari of Aalto University, Helsinki, for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Alexander Styhre, Sävedalen, June 2013

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Introduc tion: The role of writing

Introduction Writing academic texts is a highly specialized professional skill and it is no wonder that it takes a long time and lots of practice to become an accomplished writer. In scholarly circles, in university departments, and in academic communities, there is arguably no issue that concerns researchers more than the ability to write, as well as how to secure the time and space for the practice of writing. At the same time, writing is also basically a “closet activity” whose everyday practice is frequently hidden from the public gaze; a private activity that takes place in faculty offices, at home, and in other favoured spaces, be they second homes or summer cottages located in the wilds far away from everyday distractions. This unwillingness to discuss writing practices in public, and to share experiences and exchange tricks of the trade, is a most confusing trait of the scholarly community. What is arguably one of the principal skills of the academic researcher, especially in the social sciences and humanities, not just being satisfied with the reporting of data, but actively enacting and inscribing the social world as we perceive and understand it, is strangely overlooked by the community. Perhaps this unwillingness to discuss writing practices derives from some eighteenth century myth that scholarly proficiency is a gift, or an innate quality, rather than a skill only ingrained as a result of hard work and systematic efforts, and thus there is little one can do in order to become a good academic writer. On the contrary, I strongly believe that anyone who is committed to becoming a reasonably qualified writer can be successful in this endeavour; however, what it does take is training and good advice, and not least the ability to critically reflect on one’s own writing practices. © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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Introduction: The role of writing

In his On Writing (2000), Stephen King, a remarkably prolific writer, writing every day of the year—including Christmas Day and his birthday, he assures us—suggests that any “mediocre writer” can become a “good writer”. King is not too sure, though, whether a good writer can actually become an excellent one of the same calibre as the great nineteenth and twentieth century authors he admires: perhaps some element of talent or even genius is in play? However, in this book, we are not primarily concerned with writing at the highest level of human accomplishment, but with the capacity to pen papers that are reasonably well structured and capable of telling a story, preferably on the basis of the empirical materials collected. My own experience of writing is mixed. I have written journal papers, research monographs, textbooks, book reviews, i.e. all the basic genres applicable to scholarly writing. I have never written any so-called popular management books but I imagine that to be quite a challenge, not entirely different to writing a textbook for some generalized student community, i.e. how to present an idea or a model without either trivializing the field or making it unnecessarily complicated. Over the years (I started the PhD. program in August 1995), I have published a number of texts in these different genres. More importantly, a good number of the texts that I have written have failed to make it into journals and onto book-shelves; that is, many of my texts have been rejected, criticized, and dropped en route, or otherwise left behind during the course of ongoing academic work. While these texts may be regarded as failures or incomplete projects, they are still the real source of learning when working academically. Academic work is a curious activity inasmuch as it demands novelty and innovativeness while forcing one to pay heed to the tradition, to past works, and to predominant frameworks. Academic work is thus, in its ideal case, something that is Janus-faced in its ability to simultaneously look both backward and forward, to anticipate both the new and what is in the making, yet still recognizing previous contributions to the field. As a younger, less experienced scholar, one may regard this recognition of the past as a stodgy conservatism and something that effectively represses any attempts to develop new ideas; however, you eventually learn that even older scholars are anxious to see some development in the field of research (even though the willingness to recognize such contributions arguably tends to decline with the individual’s ability to serve this role). Research, just like art, ossifies 14

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Introduction: The role of writing

and crumbles under its own tradition, unless it continues to develop. It is, as Woody Allen once said of a relationship, “like a shark”—“It has to constantly move forward or it dies”. That leaves the younger scholar in the position where he or she must learn where the boundaries are regarding what is tolerable and what is not. Needless to say, such boundaries are not fixed and immutable lines of demarcation, but differ from scholar to scholar and from journal to journal. Some journals specialize in developing new theories and hypotheses and propositions, while others—especially top-ranked ones—are more eager to preserve the tradition, only reluctantly accepting and publishing more unconventional papers. When papers are rejected during the review process by a journal, this could be indicative of a number of things, including unqualified scholarly writing, incomplete theoretical frameworks being presented, underdeveloped data, or simply research findings that do not really make a substantial contribution to the field. When one ends up in this situation of a paper being rejected, it is certainly a disappointing moment; however, the good news is that such events offer ample opportunities for learning the rules of the game. Once the initial resentment has faded, reading the reviewers’ and editors’ comment on the text provides insights into the functioning of the academic community; it provides a gateway into the minds of the individuals who oversee and police the targeted academic field. Additionally, an understanding of these rules or norms helps the researcher to become a better writer. Therefore, without overstating this, a rejected paper is, in a way, a blessing as it provides the researcher with rather explicit and direct advice about how to improve his/ her text. My own track-record of rejections, which I still think is reasonable, has thus been a valuable experience when trying to instruct others on how to write their texts. I am all too familiar with the initial disappointment as well as a gradual understanding of the rationale for not fully recognizing my work; having this lived experience is arguably helpful in this respect. In addition to individual publishing experience, I have also been involved in supervising a number of PhD students over the years, and these have all given me the opportunity to read my fair share of manuscripts and paper drafts. Moreover, I have also played the part of reviewer for various organization theory and management studies journals at numerous times; more recently, I have been given editorial responsibilities that have further increased my reading of academic texts. I am the first to recognize that sheer © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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experience does not inevitably and necessarily lead to wisdom or insight— some people seem to do the same things and make the same mistakes for an entire lifetime without fully understanding what they are doing wrong— but I hope that my almost two decades of experience of writing, reading, commenting on, and editing academic texts may have generated some kind of capacity to instruct others on how to do this work. At any rate, this book is written on the basis of such hopes. The basic message of this book is that the capacity to write academic texts is a matter of training, self-reflexivity, and discipline; that is to say, becoming a good writer—and this is what we can hope for—is based on skill rather than on innate talent. After practicing for some time, the diligent writer may hopefully see the fruits of his/her labours. At the same time, being given good advice by experienced writers is not a bad thing, not least because it may help the aspiring writer to defenestrate some of the most frequently occurring myths and folk beliefs that concern writing, which in turn may create some peace of mind when trying to become a good writer. Having said that, this book is something of a hybrid between a “how to book” (disregard the title for a brief moment) and a more conventional treatise on writing. This book wants to point to some of the conventions of the practice but does not really offer assignments or very detailed instructions on how to formulate sentences and passages. On the other hand, it is not a book filled with references to authorities (Greek thinkers, French encyclopedists, Nobel Prize Laureates, and so forth), justifying the claims being made (even though, admittedly, I couldn’t entirely refrain from using such references). In a way, this is a personal account of how writing can be developed on the basis of perceived learning and insights generated in the field of academic research.

Writing as a professional skill and prerogative Writing is both a scholarly prerogative and a predicament. In the age of new digital media and an increased emphasis on the circulation or images and film clips, of much faster but also more ambiguous ways to communicate, centered on the perceptual-cognitive apparatus of the human biological system, writing may easily appear antiquated and even mediaeval in its insistence on adding one letter to the next, syllabus after syllabus, sentence to sentence. Looking at an image gives one an immediate sense impression, 16

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while reading a text is a time-consuming, and in a way disciplined, way of moving through it to eventually create an understanding of what it is trying to tell us. Media theorists have spent a considerable amount of time discussing how the shift from reading to image-based learning will affect the human brain and its capacity to think critically. Theorist Vilém Flusser (2011) has argued that the faculty of analytical and critical thinking is bound up with writing and, more specifically, with the Gutenberg innovation—the printed book—and that a shift from written texts to images will entail significant implications for human societies, largely yet to come. Even today, there is evidence of a decline in the reading ability of school children and adolescents, and we may expect that decline to continue. Media historians have demonstrated that the printed book led to a greater supply of published texts, reducing the scholar’s need to move between the few libraries available in the mediaeval period. Thus, the scholar’s work was no longer a matter of simply memorizing and commenting on a few canonical works but of making an active individual contribution to the field (Eisenstein, 1983). That is, the printed book paved the way for the modern concept of the author and authorship. All the concern regarding plagiarism and the demand for integrity in scholarly fields derived from this idea of autonomous authorship. Over the centuries, academic work has been a domain closely associated with the prerogative to write. While the printed book and written text appearing in other formats, e.g., in digital media, requires time to produce and then to read and digest, it has the advantage over the image that, once it is finished, it is in place and available for, perhaps, centuries. The book is (to use Bruno Latour’s phrase) an immutable mobile that can circulate freely, yet is indisputably “in place”. That is why authoritarian regimes and iconoclastic social movements have burned books throughout history—once a book is published and it put into circulation, it is hard to get rid of. This means that the capacity to write and publish books is closely associated with authority, the right and privilege of enacting and inscribing the world onto a sheet of paper. As a consequence, these liberties must be handled with care by those who have become entrenched in a position where they have the right to conduct such work. There are few Giordano Brunos in the modern age, but there are still certain dangers involved in publishing written texts; these texts may easily take on a life of their own once they have been published. © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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During the contemporary period, obsessed with both the effective use of economic resources, especially in the public sector and state administration apparatus wherein the Swedish university system is located, and the ability to control and monitor activities funded by taxation, there is great normative and political pressure to increase the number of publications in the university systems on all levels. In the field of technical research and life science research, authorities have also imposed demands for more registered patents, by and large a policy formulated in isolation from the criticism of antiquated patent laws and practices failing to be aligned with new advances in, for example, the life sciences; however, to date, the social sciences and humanities have primarily been examined on the basis of the texts published. These reported texts are further classified into a number of categories in order to enable the valuation and commensuration of the various contributions; for the time being, extensive discussions are taking place regarding, for instance, which classificatory scheme should apply when making these performancereward evaluations. Unfortunately, this new regime of governance in the university system has largely ignored research on, for instance, citation patterns, suggesting that most papers are barely cited at all, even papers published in leading A-journals (Baum, 2011). That is, the output of papers for scientific journals may well measure scholarly diligence and the willingness to participate in the publication game rat race, but it says little about the “quality”—in itself a problematic and contested term—of the underlying research. In addition, the dominant performance-reward system says little about how to handle and counteract opportunism and reactivity; that is, the “teach to the test” tactics and strategies that members of the scholarly community engage in. No matter what you think about the governance of the university system and the performance-reward metrics being implemented, there is undoubtedly a new emphasis on writing as a scholarly virtue and skill. The business school is a distinctively North American invention, beginning with the Wharton Business School in 1881 at the University of Pennsylvania, which added to the mediaeval Italian university system a professional school of business training modelled on the French polytechnic schools and the medical schools developed adjacent to the hospitals of major French cities during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even though business school graduates quickly grew in number after 1881, it was not until the end of the 1950s that 18

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Introduction: The role of writing

the business schools were criticized for not developing their curricula on the basis of proper scientific research methods. Business school research started to become increasingly formalized and theoretical in the 1960s. When I embarked on my PhD program in 1995, academics of the ancien régime were still employed within the university system; that is, basically white, middle-aged men who had published only to a very limited degree after defending their doctoral theses during the 1970s or thereabouts. This group had managed to make comfortable academic careers for themselves without demonstrating any specific skills in research and academic writing, but they still took pride in overseeing numerous PhD student projects over the years. It was at times claimed, overly euphemistically, that research was conducted “through and by the doctoral students”. For this category of researcher, international publishing was more of an option than a requirement. Credentials such as academic titles and tenured and chaired positions, even in the most prestigious settings, accrued to this generation with seemingly limited effort. This generation of scholar was certainly able to enjoy what strategic management theorists refer to as first-mover advantages. Since then, the scene has shifted dramatically; to my mind, mostly for the better. Today, scholarly work is inextricably bound up with international publication activities; claims to authority without an accompanying batch of journal publications are mindfully ignored or even frowned upon. Scholarly authority is earned rather than given and there are few spaces where one can hide from the ceaseless calls for new contributions to the field being articulated by university and faculty leaders, who in turn gain from overseeing faculties capable of competing over the limited space on an international market. Needless to say, this shift in focus, having taken less than two decades, is not beneficial to everyone, and many academic researchers are suffering from a sense of endemic insufficiency in terms of failing to live up to international comparisons and demands on individual performance deriving from such studies. However, no matter what you think about this new regime of governance, being able to write is a good and useful skill. Many indicators suggest that, in the future, there will be an even greater emphasis on the capacity to write academic texts, and get them printed.

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Introduction: The role of writing

Outline of the book This is supposed to be a no-frills, hands-on book on how to think about the various parts that are included in all kinds of academic publications. As with all books intending to instruct people on how to do things, a certain degree of idiosyncrasy always pervades the arguments, but I think that my take on this issue is largely shared by many of my colleagues working in this field. “Writing books on writing” is something of a cottage industry and consequently, a great number of books have been published in this genre. In order to avoid making this book a “book about books about writing”, I have purposefully ignored this genre. Instead, I tell my story in the hope that this could bring some small value to the less experienced, but aspiring, writer. However, I have come across a few good articles that may be helpful to read and these will be discussed in the forthcoming chapters. The book is split into two parts: Part I includes chapters addressing research problems (Chapter One), theoretical frameworks (Chapter Two), writing about methodology (Chapter Three), data reporting (Chapter Four), and analysis (Chapter Five), all forming a part of all academic writing that reports on empirical studies. Part II contains slightly more miscellaneous topics as well as concerns which are, for various reasons, regarded as relevant to a book about writing. In Chapter Six, I stress the importance of spending much time reading research literature (as well as other texts you enjoy reading or think useful) in order to be able to become a skilled academic writer. Chapter Seven addresses the importance of developing a certain routine vis-à-vis when and where to write. Chapter Eight addresses how to get the texts you produce “out the door”, i.e., get them submitted to journals, commissioning book editors, or conferences in order to be able to see the text in print eventually. The final chapter gathers up some of the loose threads left behind in the previous chapters. The book is purposefully rather short to make it accessible and not too tiring to read, and I have avoided bringing in too many references in support of my arguments and claims (even though these do appear all through the book).

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C HA P TER 3

Presenting the methodology and the data collection process

Introduction It is, of course, complicated to speak of academic research work as a process that neatly divides itself up into discrete activities in a linear sequence, like beads on a string, where one activity leads on to the next. In real life settings and in actual research work, things tend to happen at the same time and only in due course, safely back at his/her desk, the researcher can at best reconstruct such a linear and ordered sequence of events. However, even though such linearity is a fabrication, it is still expected that the researcher is capable of telling the story as if it had occurred via such prescribed linearity. In real life, problematization and research question formulation, the work of constructing a theoretical framework and the methodology work are both operated on simultaneously. Pierre Bourdieu often spoke of Le métier de sociologue, “the craft of the sociologist”, and you could say that one of the most important virtues of this craft is the capacity to endure periods of messiness when problems, data, theories, texts, and so forth are freely floating around, both in the researcher’s mind and in the various documents, sound files, scribbling and notes etc., to be collected and produced during the research. Methodology as a term is derived from the Greek words meta, (μετά) “after”, “beyond”, “along with”, or “adjacent” and hodos (ὁδός), “road”, rendering methodology as the overarching structure (“road”) of the actual research work being conducted. The central role of methodology in academic research is undisputed and, in certain domains where, for example, quantitative methodologies dominate, e.g. econometrics and psychometrics, it tends to be the case that the methods used are given an even more prominent role than theory. For most scholars of organization studies, however, even © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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Part I Elements of the text

though the methodology is of central importance it does not command what theories can be employed in research. While the methodology section is something that musicologists call an obbligato, i.e. what “cannot be omitted … a part essential to the completeness of the composition” (Oxford Dictionary, cited by Bruner, 1990: 94), it is also something that tends not to elicit the highest degree of interest from the readers (the fields of econometrics and psychometrics again being evident exceptions). One could say that a competently written methodology section in an academic text works as intended, but academic prestige rarely accrues from brilliantly penned methodology sections; it is a section that needs to be presented, but it is usually the theory and the data, and combinations thereof, that readers tend to remember. As something of a passage point between the theory and the data, the methodology section holds a somewhat liminal position in-between theoretical declarations and empirical demonstrations, a barren landscape that needs to be traversed before the reader can move on to the empirical chapters or sections of the academic text. At the same time, a neatly written and effectively communicated methodology section is always a source of admiration in academic circles, and one should not risk the entire text by thinking that lots of corners can be cut when addressing methodological concerns. Methodology needs to be taken seriously and be professionally accounted for.

Methodology as a scholarly virtue and accomplishment The role of the status of method as a constitutive element of academic research is not widely contested. For Max Weber, something of a patron saint of organization studies, science is primarily and irreducibly the practice of systematic methods: “Science can contribute … [with] methods of thinking, the tools and the training for thought”, says Weber (1948: 150). Paul Rabinow (2003) clarifies Weber’s point: Science is not wisdom, science is specialized knowledge. A number of important consequences follow from this situation. First, ‘scientific work is chained to the course of progress.’ All scientists knows that, by definition and in part of their own efforts, their work is destined to be outdated. Every scientific achievement opens up new questions. One might

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3 Presenting the methodology and the data collection process

say that a successful scientist can only hope that his or her work will be productively and fruitfully outmoded rather than merely forgotten. Second, the knowledge worker must live with the realization that not only are the specialized advances the only ones possible but that even small accretions require massive dedication to produce. Dedication or enthusiasm alone, however, are not sufficient to produce good science, nor does hard work guarantee success … The calling for science thus must include a sense of passionate commitment, combined with methodical labor and a kind of almost mystical passivity or openness. The scientific self must be resolutely willful and persistent, yet permeable. Androgynous, if you will. (Rabinow, 2003: 99)

In summary, then, “For Weber, science contributed methods of thinking, the tools and the training for disciplined thought. It contributes to gaining clarity; that is all” (Rabinow, 2003: 99). No method, no science—simple as that! Jürgen Habemas even suggests that the commitment to systematic methodology plays such a strong role in professional research ideology that, even in cases where prescribed methodologies are not effectively adhered to, it still serves to signal a commitment to a certain rationality: Regardless of whether methodology reflects on a research practice that is already in use, as in the case of physics, or whether, as in the case of sociology, its recommendations precede the research practice, methodology sets out a program to guide the advance of science. Thus it is not meaningless to discuss methodological requirements, even if they have not yet been fulfilled by research practice: they influence the way sciences articulate their self-understanding. In part, methodological viewpoints set standards for research, and in part they anticipate its general objectives. Taken together, these two functions establish the system of reference within which reality is systematically explored. (Habermas, 1988: 44)

This enthusiastic acclaiming of methodology as a scholarly virtue is not endorsed by everyone. McClosky (1986: 25), speaking of economics, stresses that methodology is also a source of authority and power, and that “in practice, methodology serves chiefly to demarcate Us from Them, demarcating science from nonscience”:

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The cheerful methodologist divides all possible propositions about the world into objective and subjective, positive and normative, scientific and humanistic, hard and soft … He supposes the world comes neatly divided along the line of demarcation. (McCloskey, 1986: 42)

What McCloskey speaks of here as the “cheerful methodologist” is quite similar to what Nietzsche speaks of as a “philistine rationality”, where the term “philistine” signifies “the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture” (Nietzsche, 1997: 2). “Philistine culture believes in itself and therefore in the means and methods available to it”, says Nietzsche (1997: 37). On the one hand, we have Weber and Habermas, speaking of method as lying at the very heart of Western rationality and its praised accomplishment of scientific practice, while on the other, we have the politicized view of McCloskey whereby method is little more than an apparatus in the hands of a technocratic elite ready to instruct populations and influence policy on the basis of the allegedly disinterested and neutral data being generated. Fortunately for practicing researchers, such debates can oftentimes be advertently ignored as there are more pressing concerns that need to be dealt with. My own take on methodology is very much in line with what Law and Urry (2004) speak of an “enactment” of perceived realities, that is, we can never fully know or get access to what Plato, in Rorty’s (2007) formulation, called the “really real”; however, we can construct, at best, methodological frameworks that help us acquire empirical material that may be subject to theorizing. One could, perhaps, speak of such a methodological enactment as a form of a pragmatic view of methodology. Method as enactment

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”, claimed physicist Werner von Heisenberg (1958, cited in Best and Kellner, 1997: 212). Scientists fabricate engineered specimens of nature in laboratory settings, or inquire into natural or biological systems using advanced technologies and equipment that already embody operational hypotheses (Bachelard, 1934). When science speaks of the nature it examines, it is frequently a nature in a somewhat epistemologically complex relationship with actual, “really real” nature “out there”. In Law and Urry’s (2004: 397) 52

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view, method is “interactively performative” as it “helps to make realities”; consequently, “the differences between research findings produced by different methods or in different research traditions have an alternative significance.” Different methods do, using Thomas S. Kuhn’s term, produce incommensurable theories as they start out from methodologies making different assumptions about the object matter. Therefore, suggest Law and Urry (2004: 397), these various methods no longer offer “different perspectives on a single reality”, instead advancing the “enactment of different realities” (see also Hanson, 1958). In short, the methods used no longer play a simple intermediary role but actively discriminate between what parts of an underlying material stratum or object matter can be examined. Starting out from this kind of more epistemological and meta-theoretical account of what method is and how it can be understood, in academic writing, the methodology section includes at least three basic sections: The methodology, data collection, and data analysis sections. In what follows, these three sections will be discussed in greater detail.

Methodology In the first section, which could be labeled “Methodology”, all kinds of issues concerning the design of the study and the methodological choices are addressed. This section should thus address more abstract and metatheoretical issues of relevance to the practical research work. In this section, it is always tempting for theoretically-interested researchers to bring in all kinds of intellectually stimulating debates and discussions pertaining to epistemology and knowledge production; however, it is advisable to keep such discussions to a minimum. All too frequently, overambitious methodology sections are written, especially in PhD theses, which are not necessarily uninteresting but quite often more or less irrelevant to the actual research project being reported on. In the methodology section, the choice of method for collecting data, as well as the pros and cons of this choice of methodology, should be discussed. Also, it might be preferable to review previous studies employing the method in focus. It is important that the researcher understands that the methodology section is one of the principal parts of the text where he/she can create credibility and acquire “scholarly capital” that can eventually be useful in the analytical sections. If the reader © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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perceives the methodology section to be trustworthy and assuring, then much more analytical leeway can be given in the latter half of the paper or thesis. The overarching objective of the methodology section is, thus, for the researcher to communicate an understanding of the alternative research methods, and to demonstrate a familiarity with previous studies. One issue to consider, addressed by Becker (2009), is how detailed the research methodology should be. On the one hand, there are studies which are highly technical and which use already well-established research instruments and standardized statistical methods in order to test the predictive power of certain theories, while on the other, there is a more open-ended laissezfaire, “let’s go there and see what happens”, research approach with its roots in ethnographic methods. These two end-points on the scale presuppose radically different research skills. The first view demands technical expertise in how to handle both the acquisition of data and its accompanying analytical procedures, while the second view demands greater analytical skills and the capacity to make observations when in the field. The field of organization studies includes both these communities. Becker (2009) still calls for a recognition of the latter approach: [I]nspection of the research classics … shows that researchers don’t fully specify methods, theory, or data when they begin their research. They start out with new ideas, orienting perspectives, or even specific hypotheses, but once they begin, they investigate new leads; apply useful theoretical ideas to the (sometimes unexpected) evidence they gather; and, in other ways, conduct a systematic and rigorous scientific investigation. (Becker, 2009: 548)

Explicating his position, Becker says that it is complicated to just take the existing literature and put it to the test of empirical relevance, or to rely on “what organizational personnel tell us, or on what ‘everybody knows’” (Becker, 2009: 548). That is, neither previous studies, condensed in the form of theory, nor common sense thinking are sufficient sources for justifying studies. Becker instead proposes that researchers should “build theories” on the basis of “unexpected observations made in the field” (Becker, 2009: 548). This is a rather liberal view of scholarly knowledge production as it lends a significant degree of authority and autonomy to the researcher. Becker (2009) continues: 54

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Researchers usually don’t know enough to formulate good hypotheses until they are well into their work, a fact which results from the iterative nature of qualitative social science. It follows that they should deliberately not accept the common understanding on which such theorizing would have to rest. (Becker, 2009: 548)

Fair enough, this make sense to most people, but not everyone is willing to give this much autonomy to the individual researcher, especially not the “mainstream-to-conservative” wing who maintain the notion of social science as cumulative and ultimately capable of making predictions—at least this is an ideal needing to be upheld—and who are fond of using terms such as “evidence-based management” to justify their mimicking of the natural sciences.1 However, in addition to Becker’s hope regarding the possibilities of making “unexpected observations”, Van Maanen (2011) justifies more open-ended methodologies on the basis of other arguments, namely the cognitive limitations of the researcher and the messiness of the field facing the researcher (see also Law, 1994): Fieldwork may appear romantic and adventurous from the outside, but on the inside there is a good deal of child-like if not blind wandering about the field. Cultural oversight, misunderstandings, embarrassment, and ineptitudes are common. Relationships based on a certain kind of rapport form only with time, patience, and luck. Choices of topics, frameworks, and substantive domains emerge only after considerable thought and experimentation. And all writing is of course rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. In short, learning in (and out) of the field is uneven, usually unforeseen, and rests more on a logic of discovery and happenstance than a logic of verification and plan. The unbearable slowness of ethnography— from ‘getting in’ to ‘getting out’ to ‘writing up’—is an enduring feature of the work. (Van Maanen, 2011: 220) 1 “Whereas intellectuals in general are happy to agree that physical science tells you how things work, many contemporary philosophers are still Platonists enough to think that it does more than that. They think it tells you the really real”, says Rorty (2007: 75), apropos the widespread belief in the authority of mathematical representations in scientific research work. In addition, Feyeraband (1999: viii) says, “One of the motives for writing Against Method [Feyerabend’s succèss de scandale treatise on epistemology] was to free people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators such as ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ or ‘objectivity’ which narrow people’s vision and way of being in the world.”

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In order to make a genuinely interesting contribution, claim these champions of open-ended ethnographic research methods, the researcher must enter the field with an open-mind and a great deal of curiosity in order to be able to capture the moment when it all happens. “Chance favours only the prepared mind”, Louis Pasteur is reputed to have claimed, and I suppose that Becker (2009) and Van Maanen (2011) would endorse that proposition. No matter which research methodology the researcher favours and adheres to, there is a need to explain this methodology choice and to present a form of systematic critique regarding its shortcomings and limitations. The reader should preferably finish the methodology section with a sense of confidence in the researcher’s capacity to competently conduct his/her research work.

Data collection Etymologically, data literally means “the things that have been given” (Galloway, 2012: 81). This implies that data is some kind of “raw material” for scientific investigation; however, numerous studies in, for example, science and technology studies demonstrate that what is perceived and advanced as “merely given” has, in fact, always been shaped already by, for instance, the laboratory technologies and equipment used to produce the data (see, for example, Nelson, 2013). In the case of qualitative methods that include, for example, interviews and ethnographic methods, the influence of subjective beliefs is always, of necessity, a factor to consider. That is, only in a very abstract sense is the data that which has “been given”. To make the term data more concrete, Ian Hacking speaks of it as “uninterpreted inscriptions, graphs recording variation over time, photographs, tables, displays” (Hacking, 1992: 48); that is, observations presented in a scripted form as metrics, quanta, images, and so forth, all being standardized scientific methods of sharing observations within professional communities. In the actor-network literature, such data is referred to as inscriptions. The data collection section should include all the relevant information regarding how empirical data has been collected. In qualitative studies, this includes discussions regarding the selection of the organizations or industries to be included in the study, the selection of the interviewees and informants, and how the data was systematically generated or acquired, i.e., how were, for instance, the interviews conducted: Where they based on a standardized 56

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interview guide? Where did the interviews take place? How long were the interviews? Did the interviewees express any specific body-language or other gestures which, in one way or another, were relevant to understanding their beliefs or their practical work, and so forth? In many cases, the data collection section is a fairly straightforward and reasonably honest account of how the work itself has unfolded. One of the difficulties involved is how precise this information should be, and to what extent the reader needs to know about all the minor set-backs and difficulties involved in actually acquiring all the empirical data needed in order to be able to make a contribution to the targeted field of research. For instance, it is not advisable to admit that the researcher was five minutes late for one of the interviews unless this minor event had a significant impact on the empirical data. In most cases, researchers are relatively well aware of what constitutes relevant information, and what constitutes superfluous gossip and excuses that should not burden the text. In quantitative studies, the data collection section is a very important part of the text as a whole since it is here that the theoretical framework is operationalized into parameters and metrics that can lend themselves to statistical analyses. If the research is focused on data that is already available in numerical form, say, the correlation between the dividends paid to the shareholders of a listed company and the size of the board of directors, no major work will be needed in order to justify the use of certain parameters since the metrics will have a rather unproblematic relationship with underlying activities or practices; however, in some cases, there are qualitative parameters in an analytical model that demand significant justification. For instance, Park, Westphal, and Stern (2011) examine the relationship between the degree of flattering of CEOs, their prestige within the business community, and their performance—and find that CEOs who are subject to much flattering by board members performed worse. The need then exists for rather extensive operations to secure the validity and reliability of the parameters and the underlying data. In many cases, such operations are not trivial, but they are contested. Quantitative methods have the major benefit, vis-à-vis qualitative methods, of having standardized and widely agreed upon methods that include certain statistical “rules of thumb” that make quantitative studies easier to assess in term of the degree to which they comply with the standard procedures of established © T he au thor and S t u dentlitterat u r

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Alexander Styhre | How to write academic texts

Alexander Styhre is Chair of Organization Theory and Management, School of Business, Economics, and Law, University of Gothenburg. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Management.

How to write academic texts A practical guide

Janne Tienari, Aalto University, Helsinki

Art.nr 37804

Alexander Styhre

www.studentlitteratur.se

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