El miedo

Researchers make claims about what knowledge is, how we [can] know it, values that go in it, how we write about it, and the process for studying it (Creswell 1994, 2003). Research paradigms are a set of a researcher’s beliefs about ontology, epistemology, and methodology (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, Guba and Lincoln, 1994). They are, “a loose collection of logically held together assumptions, concepts, and propositions that orientates thinking and research” (Krauss, 2005).

The choice of research paradigm is guided by basic assumptions a researcher holds about reality and how we can understand the things we study (Maxwell, 2012). Guba and Lincoln (1994) suggest that when considering a research design, a researcher needs to address three core questions: what the knowledge claim is, strategies of inquiry, and methods of data collection and analysis.

i. Ontological question

The ontological questions address the nature of reality of what is to be understood. Ontology is the study of the nature of existence and what constitutes reality. Natural life and social life are different and require different approaches to understanding reality about them (Gray, 2013).

Natural reality is understanding reality as a given that is knowable (realism). Social reality takes reality as contextual to an individual’s lived world (normative). Morgan and Smircich (1980) identify three broad categories of each.

Within it the natural reality sphere, reality can be understood as a concrete structure with determinate relationships between components, an evolving process with determinate casual relationships between constituents, or a field of ever-changing form and activity based on transmission of information. Social reality can be understood as projection of individual creative imagination, a continuous process of changing social interaction, or symbolic discourse in which relationships and meanings are sustained through human action and interaction. The choice of what may be perceived as an optimal marketing search strategy which minimises search costs is not deterministic. Rather, it is an outcome of changing social interaction in which interaction to exploit opportunities for asset acquisition, disposal and intermediation services searchers is shaped by perceived information disparities and searcher proximities to information sources.

The ontology that appears most appropriate for the research question is one where reality is understood as a social construction. Guba and Lincoln (1994) provide an elaborate explanation

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of the nature of reality that best captures actor perception. Social reality is a social construct in which the social world is a continuous process created afresh in each encounter. It is a symbolic construction which individuals impose on their world to establish mutual agreement of meaning through labels, actions and routine that may result in shared but multiple realities confined only to those moments in which they are actively constructed and sustained.

ii. Epistemological question

Gray (2013) broadly defines epistemology as, “a branch of philosophy that considers the criteria for determining what constitutes and what does not constitute valid knowledge.” Trochim (2000) describes it as a philosophy of knowledge, that is, how we come to know. Maynard (1994) emphasises that epistemology provides a philosophical foundation for deciding the possible kinds of knowledge and how we can ensure they are both adequate and legitimate. Epistemology is a researcher’s critical attitude of how realty is known. It may at this point be important to talk a bit about ‘philosophy’ to establish the choice freedom on research approaches. Priest (2006) mentions that philosophy does not have a definition as attempting to do so is persuading other researchers to believe in some language game or rules of writing style. Rather, philosophy is creating a system of thought about being sensibly critical and challenging taken-for-granted norms. Criticism is sensible when a researcher can isolate contradictions in a logical theory or paraconsistent logic to points of singularity and possibly develop an alternative view. Priest argues that there is no way one can isolate philosophy as occupying a distinctive place in culture or being concerned with a distinctive subject or proceeding by some distinctive methods. He warns that:

“The philosophers’ own scholastic little definitions of ‘philosophy’ are mere polemical devices—intended to exclude from the field of honour those whose pedigrees are unfamiliar” pp. 198

This statement underscores the importance of basing the choice of epistemology on the nature of reality and not on the researcher’s preferred ontological belief. Since reality is understood to be socially constructed by the perceiver, the fitting epistemology is constructivism. Assumptions are that human beings create realities to make the world intelligible to themselves and to others.

Individuals may work together to create a shared reality which is a subjective construction typically created through interaction, but capable of disappearing as soon as its members cease to sustain it as such (Morgan and Smircich, 1980). They (individuals) can construct meaning of a situation by interacting with others. The researcher interprets the ‘processes’ of interaction among individuals to generate or develop theory (Creswell, 2003, Maxwell, 2012). Hence, the theoretical perspective adopted is interpretivism. Interpretivism argues that the researcher needs to understand the differences between human beings in our roles as social agents which we

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interpret according to the meaning we give to these roles and interpret the roles of others according to our set of meanings (Saunders et al., 2009).

iii. Methodological question

Ontological and epistemological questions are philosophical questions about the researcher’s belief of the nature of reality of what is going on and how it can be known. Methodological question is about how a researcher answers the research question. It is a strategy or plan of action that shapes the choice and use of particular method and link them to outcomes (Creswell, 2003, Crotty, 1998). Methodology provides theory and analysis of the research process (Maynard, 1994) guided by the adopted epistemology and ontology (Gray, 2013).

Morgan and Smircich (1980) identify ethnomethodology (EM) as an appropriate strategy for investigating socially constructed processes. The researcher’s interest is in the methods used by individuals in everyday life to create subjectively an agreed or negotiated social order. de Montigny (2007) citing Lemert (2002) expresses ethnomethodology as a methodology that:

“… imposes the obligation to study the utterly practical methods notorious ordinary people compose the rational grounds of their social order … What matters is what

‘ordinary people’ do as co-ordinated sequence of action for producing sensible and accountable everyday realities” pp. 97

Lynch (2001) simply condenses ethnomethodology as a study of practical action and practical reasoning.

Background of ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology has its roots in phenomenology and ethnography. In phenomenology, the researcher explains social reality based on description by subjects of their lived experiences but does not extend to establish how the description makes sense to the subjects. It is an exploration of prevailing cultural understanding through human experiences uninfluenced by the researcher’s preconceptions. Ethnography focuses on discovering the relationship between culture and behaviour. Ethnomethodology is a research tradition that argues that people continually redefine themselves through their interactions with others. It interrogates how realities in everyday life are accomplished. By carefully observing and analysing processes used in actor’s actions, researchers could uncover the processes by which these actors constantly interpret social reality (Gray, 2013). Order – which ideally refers to ‘meaning’ – of such social activity is largely temporal (Rawls, 2008).

EM was developed by Harold Garfinkel through his publications between 1940 and 1967 (Rawls, 2008, Atkinson, 1988). Garfinkel devised the term ‘ethnomethodology’ while writing up jury material and working on the Yale Human Relations files, an ethnographic database, when he came across terms like ethnobotany, ethnophysiology and ethnophysics. He had been involved

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in analysing tape recordings and interviewing jurors from the American Juror Project. He noted that jurors were making inferences about who did what, when, and to whom, and who was at fault thereby deciding guilt and innocence or rendering other consequential verdicts. That was it!

“Ethnomethodology” was to be the term applied to jury members’ folk [ethno] ways of addressing methodological matters [methodology] for deciding, in a given legal case, between fact and fancy, what actually happened and what appeared to have occurred, lies and truth, credible and not credible statements and stories, and the like (see Silverman, 1993). In his early studies that he referred to as ‘breaching experiments’, Garfinkel reversed sociological preoccupations [which could be phenomenological or ethnographic] with factors that contributed to social stability [sustenance of interaction]. He demonstrated that disruptive events were themselves revelatory of ordinary practices through which social stability was achieved (Maynard, 2012).

Garfinkel extended ethnomethodology beyond breach experiments to studies of workplace. His view was that work was like other social processes. The methods essential to work would be found in details of attention to properties of work, and not in abstract formulation of work (Rawls, 2008). He introduced radical approach to studies of work activities that incorporated content of work practices and not just aspects of work processes (steps, stages, phases) – he called Lebenswelt Pairs (Life world pairs – Google Translate). He used a video recording of a student typing while sustaining a running commentary as she typed. The video showed mistakes, erasures and changes in direction of ongoing passages. Relating the lived world pair to the video, he identified the components of the pair as the formal document (typed script), and the lived work of the unfolding composition actions documented on the video. He argued that the components of the pair were ‘asymmetrical alternatives’

“One could derive from the video how the final text was composed in a continuous unfolding series of actions, but one could not read the final script in isolation and recover the lived world except through the partial and fallible inferential process of reading the signs on the page.” Lynch (2012) pp. 116

Garfinkel felt there was always ‘something more’ to methodological practices than could be provided by highly detailed instructions, formal guidelines or accounts of inquiry. The

‘something more’ would include routine practices in a situated work action (Maynard, 2012).

Ethnomethodology does not claim to be an alternative to formal analysis. It is grounded practice that makes it possible to investigate how members of any grouping achieve, as practical, concerted behaviours, the sense of formal truth and objectivity as in this sense is necessarily embedded in their everyday casual and work lives (Ten Have and Psathas, 1995). Its interest is to penetrate normal situation and uncover how taken-for-granted rules that can be challenged by disruption of a person’s conception of normal, or real (lived or work) life (Denzin, 1969, 2005)

115 Contemporary ethnomethodology

Contemporary ethnomethodology (CEM) is re-orienting the understanding of ‘sequential order’

from ‘meaning of moment-by-moment action or interaction’ to ‘activity’. Atkinson (1988) asserts that findings of ethnomethodology have contributed directly to our understanding of organisations, diagnoses and assessments, social production of ‘facts’ and the construction of written and spoken accounts. Sequential order properties can be studied in their detail as order that workers have to go on and not as generalised routines, or habits. Individuals working together to create a shared reality (outcome) are seen as capable of deploying just the right routine at just the right time and they know when and what is not challenging. CEM preserves the contingencies of the local production of routines by treating these contingencies as essential and not merely the routines and habits an observer might see ‘residuals’ from routines workers go through doing their work.

As noted earlier, the assumption about human nature in social constructivism is that humans create their realities in the most fundamental way in attempting to make the world intelligible to themselves and others through interaction (Morgan and Smircich, 1980). Interaction is sustainable viz-à-viz the concept of mutual intelligibility when action and actors are ‘situated’.

Situated actors constitute a group only when, and for as long as, the sequential character of the interaction they are currently engaged in requires of them a collective mutual commitment to the constitutive properties of the situation (See also Atkinson, 1988). A group is sustained – for the moment – by the commitment of its members to the same constitutive expectation – at the moment. Participants may later join other situations and the sequential order they build together with which to mutually orient objects will be different.

Ethnomethodology has been applied in various fields of research involves interaction within ordered process such as education (Davidson, 2012), management (Plane, 2000), and health studies (Bowers, 1992) to mention some. Maynard and Clayman (1991) sum the diversity of ethnomethodology domain as areas of research ‘where remedies to the troubles of peoples’

experiences may be sought or offered’. These fields, as it may be noted, tend to have bounded processes for achieving tasks. Within these processes, there are actors ‘with’ competences required to accomplish tasks. Researchers use ethnomethodology as a strategy to learn how actors identify their own competences and challenges, deploy resources and sustain action groups to accomplish everyday activities.

Commercial real estate sale transaction is a temporal activity. Transactions are situated in the moment where the composition of buyer-seller-broker team and trading asset is temporal.

Interaction is necessary just to get the work done and achieve a temporal mutual goal of exchanging the traded asset. This is what Plickert et al. (2007) refer to as social interaction for

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economic exchange. It begins with a shared reality that counterparties have capacity to transact in the exchange opportunity. This is followed by coherence of action to agree to negotiate heads of terms, and thereafter fulfil statutory requirements for exchange of the trading asset. Interaction is sustained for as long as the constitutive expectancies used to make it are maintained. Once the moneys are exchanged and assets transferred to the new owner, the team disbands. Sequential order properties of real estate sale transactions are pre-marketing, marketing, due-diligence, exchange, and closing. Marketing, which is the subject of this research, is the phase in which vendors or their brokers, presumably following an optimal search policy, seek to be preferred (identified actors) by potential buyers to negotiate a transaction opportunity on a traded asset (mutual object). Vendor-side actors could have an array of strategies anything from professional membership to closed members’ clubs to be identified with the values that such membership demonstrate trustworthiness.

Duration of marketing (search duration) contributes to the asset’s time on market, and overall perception of market liquidity. However, there are practicalities which influence how vendors secure potential counterparties cannot be captured in the observed search duration except through an inferential process of reading the ‘signs’ of disruptions to the search process.

Ethnomethodology has not been applied in mainstream real estate studies, but it is a plausible methodology to capture the operational nature of real estate markets and so better understand time-based real estate market liquidity. Table 5-2 below is a simplified demonstration of how the concept of social interaction approach to real estate liquidity is integrated with ethnomethodology.

Table 5-2: Integrating social interaction approach to real estate market liquidity with ethnomethodology

Source: Author 2015

To address the research question, which is, how egocentric uncertainty is associated with the search in the commercial investment real estate markets in Johannesburg, South Africa and London, UK, the research collects and analyses data on how actors know when a transaction is (not) problematic, and how they deploy just the right routine at just the right time. Figure 5-4 below shows how thematic questions are generated from the conceptualisation expected to indicate how a vendor/broker makes sense of transaction situations and deploys, at the right time,

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the right resources to secure a potential buyer. These thematic areas are perception (1), market information (2), search conditions (3), search strategy (4), and search duration (5).

Figure 5-4: Thematic areas of inquiry

Source: Author 2015

These thematic areas correspond to the properties, dimensions, conditions, actions/interactions and consequences criteria in ethnomethodolgy outlined by Maynard (2012) and discussed under Specification in 5.2.3iv on page 121 below. Similarly, Charmaz and Smith (2003) maintain that a researcher [in grounded theory] establishes theoretical connections not only through thick description, but also by asking analytical questions about a [situated action] as a process to understand the properties, conditions, comparable processes, influence, and actions.