CLIL methodology and its benefits

III. 3. Ontological and Epistemological Considerations

Bourdieu dedicated a considerable amount of attention in his opus to explaining his views on ontology. He expressed an equal degree of dissatisfaction with nominalist relativism and the ‘realism of the intelligible’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 232) and argued that the traditional choice between the objectivist and subjectivist position is a false one. He sought to redress that false dichotomy by subordinating “all operations of scientific practice to a theory of practice and of practical knowledge” (Bourdieu, 1977: 4). He saw this pursuit as a search for the conditions of practical knowledge of the social world, i.e.

not an inquiry into the phenomenological ‘lived experience’ but into “the mode of production and functioning of the practical mastery which makes possible both an objectively intelligible practice and also an objectively enchanted experience of that practice” (Bourdieu, 1977: 4). Thus, Bourdieu located the key to achieving the right balance between the objective and the subjective ‘moment’ in practice as that which constitutes the objective social space within the limits of which subjectivity is realised.

“The social world is, to a great extent, something which the agents make at every moment; but they have no chance of unmaking and remaking it except on the basis of a realistic knowledge of what it is and of what they can do to it by virtue of the position they occupy in it.”

(Bourdieu, 1991: 242)

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Bourdieu’s is thus a relational ontology that also informs much of contemporary research in the practice theory tradition (Nicolini, 2009). Practice theory has been exerting a significant influence on organisation studies for over two decades now and has been discussed under terms such as Practice Based Studies (Gherardi, 2009), ‘re-turn to practice’ (Miettinen et al, 2009) or ‘the bandwagon of practice’ (Corradi et al, 2010). Within this research tradition the concept of practice is treated both as an empirical object of study and as an epistemology (Corradi et al. 2010: 268; Geiger, 2009; Cook and Brown, 1999). As an empirical object practice is as a set of

interconnected activities underpinned by a shared way of knowing and understanding, which, by virtue of being interconnected with other practices, exerts far-reaching social effects (Corradi et al., 2010).

Practice as epistemology follows Wittgenstein’s (1953) insight that practice is intrinsically social, not private. It highlights the mutually constitutive, dynamic, relational, and situated nature of knowing and practice (Orlikowski, 2002), where knowing is “the epistemic work that is done as part of action or practice” (Cook and Brown, 1999: 386-387). It reveals the situated, provisional and path-dependent nature of practice, and the dual role of learning in both affecting its reproduction and change. The epistemology of practice (Cook and Brown, 1999) thus represents a “non-cognitive, non-positivist and non-rationalist” approach to organisation studies (Geiger, 2009: 129).

The three-dimensional nature of practice noted by Corradi et al (2010) places sophisticated demands on research design: not only is it necessary to understand the macro-level aspect of practice as a social institution interconnected with multiple other practices but it is also crucial to access the two aspects that together constitute practice at the micro level, i.e. the minutiae of the activity and the knowing-in-practice. Nicolini (2009) proposes a solution: the ‘zooming in/out’ approach to research whereby the researcher shifts between the macro- and the micro- perspective changing theoretical

‘lenses’ in the process so as to sequentially background one aspect of practice and foreground the other. Nicolini argues that this solution addresses the entirety of the problem set above, i.e. covers all three aspects of practice and avoids any form of reductionism so that practice can be revealed as a ‘seamless web’.

The zooming in/out approach certainly goes a long way towards establishing the

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balance between the subjective and the objective moment that Bourdieu (1977) argues for. Nicolini’s advocacy of ethnomethodology in the ‘zooming in’ phase, however, goes against Bourdieu’s (1991) vehement criticism of that approach:

“The structure of class relations is only ever named and grasped through the forms of classification which, even in the case of those conveyed by ordinary language, are never independent of this structure (something forgotten by the ethnomethodologists and all the formalist analyses of these forms).

(Bourdieu, 1991: 147, original emphasis).

The sharp end of Bourdieu’s criticism is the treatment of language as the site of the social and the source of insight into social relations in and of itself, i.e. in separation from the relations of power which imbue discourse with meaning. The criticism extends to symbolic interactionism: Bourdieu (1991: 67) argues against taking interaction between people as a self-contained unit of analysis on the grounds that “the whole social structure is present in each interaction (and thereby in the discourse uttered).”

Thus, in Bourdieu’s view, the immediacy of interaction detracts attention from the underlying structures:

“Interactions which bring immediate gratification to those with empiricist dispositions – they can be observed, recorded, filmed, in sum, they are tangible, one can ‘reach out and touch them’ – mask the structures that are realized in them. This is one of those cases where the visible, that which is immediately given, hides the invisible which determines it. One thus forgets that the truth of the interaction is never entirely to be found within the interaction as it avails itself for observation.”

(Bourdieu, 1987, in: Haugaard, 2002: 233)

Although Bourdieu takes it upon himself to convey similar sentiments in relation to

‘micro-sociology’, ‘interactionsim’ and ‘empricism’ on numerous occasions in his writings, his is not a wholesale dismissal of the empirical evidence to be gained from observing interaction but a sensitizing warning to look beneath the obvious, the

immediately visible, the obtrusively explicit and treat these as manifestations of deeper

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influences exerted by the relations of power structuring the social space. In this sense, his cautionary attitude to drawing conclusions from empirical observation of

interactions is a call for a more holistic and critical analysis: a semiotic as well as semantic reading (Eco, 1990) of the observed situation.