Escuela Descriptiva

As already discussed, the focus of this thesis is knowledge as it was enacted in the everyday support of older people with an intellectual disability. My

attention was on knowledge as the foundation of human action (Burr, 1995;

Dalitz, 2005; Gadner et al., 2004; Schön, 1987; Stehr, 2007; Stehr &

Grundmann, 2005), and I viewed knowledge as the platform that underpinned worker practice. This position was underpinned by Stehr’s (2007) assertion that the value of knowledge lies not in its claim to ownership of fact or thought but in its ability to generate action:

Knowledge is no longer simply a means of accessing, of unlocking, the world’s secrets but itself represents a world in the process of coming into being – a world in which in all spheres of endeavour knowledge is increasingly becoming both the basis and the guiding principle of human activity. (p. 37)

My interest was, therefore, on understanding knowledge as it could be used by workers to affect the lives of older people with an intellectual disability.

This pursuit of a unitary knowledge of practice was, I soon realised, a naïve one, with my foray into the literatures on knowledge replete with reminders about the dichotomous nature of knowing.

Epistemological warfare: Finding a place for positivism and relativism in everyday life

Knowledge is often conceptualised as belonging within two key domains of epistemology (Peile, 1994; Stehr & Grundmann, 2005): positivism (also known as empiricism or science) and relativism (or interpretivism or

constructionism). The first of these understandings, positivism, arose during the Enlightenment in response to the dogmatism and authoritarianism of

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revealed knowledge (see Crotty, 1998; Popper, 2005/1956), and proposes that knowledge must represent an accurate depiction of the world (Benton &

Craib, 2001; Crotty, 1998). This form of knowledge is supposedly divorced from human influence via the rigorous application of objective, transparent and systematic procedures (the scientific method), and thus results in the discovery of accurate, universal, explicit and unambiguous truth (see Crotty, 1998; Marlor, 2010; Popper, 2005/1956).

Application of the scientific method has resulted in an enormous body of factual knowledge and extensive technological achievement (Crotty, 1998;

Mick & Fournier, 1998) that has improved the human condition across a broad range of domains, including life expectancy (Bunker, 2001). The considerable benefits provided by the empirical approach contributed to the ascendancy of positivist epistemology within the last three hundred years, eventually

replacing religious knowledge as the state-sanctioned way of knowing in contemporary Western culture. As such, science replaced one form of presumably superior, universal knowledge with another, producing what Freyerabend (1975) refers to as the “church of ‘critical’ rationalism” (p. viii).

Despite the widespread promotion and growing dominance of scientific knowledge within contemporary culture, this systematised strategy for knowledge production is recognised as failing to accommodate other, less measurable and transparent forms of knowledge. Positivism, for instance, does not address such existential matters as ‘meaning’ (Collins & Evans, 2007) and is therefore limited in its ability to explain a vast range of fundamentally subjective aspects of the human experience, such as disadvantage, ethics and justice. The meanings attributed to these experiences have instead been explored within the relativist domain, an epistemology which makes room for all understandings of lived experience, and positions knowledge amidst

multiple realities made by human beings (Benton & Craib, 2001; Crotty, 1998).

Relativism is, as such, an epistemology of diversity.

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Implications for a knowledge of practice

While both positivism and relativism make important ontological

contributions to understanding the world, both positions have been heavily criticised for their lack of contribution to a practicable, actionable paradigm of knowledge. Positivism and its offshoots have been critiqued for a range of reasons including their: failure to deliver answers to real-world problems (Masters, 1993); unanticipated consequences of applying standardised knowledge across widely varying contexts (Schön, 1983; Stehr, 2007); the subjugation of non-scientifically derived ways of knowing (Broom & Tovey, 2012; Foucault, 1980; McIntosh, Dulson, Bailey-McHale & Greenwood, 2010;

Rose & Gidman, 2010); unrealistic claims regarding the objectivity of the scientific process (Freyerabend, 1975; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Polanyi, 1958); the vulnerability of scientific knowledge to paradigmatic upheaval (Kuhn, 1970);

and the extraction of the human from the practice of social care (Butler &

Drakeford, 2005). Relativist understandings of knowledge have been critiqued for other reasons including: the destruction of a shared standard for

evaluating the worth of knowledge (Groff, 2004; Hacking, 1999; Longino, 1993, 1996; Masters, 1993; Schwandt, 2000); imposing a socially deterministic understanding of knowledge at the expense of unique individual contribution (Dant, 1991; Mannheim, 1936; Masters, 1993); and the negative influence unscientific knowledge – such as bias, unacknowledged values, and defensive routines – may have on progress (Argyris & Schön, 1974, 1996; Benton &

Craib, 2001; Sternberg, 1999).

This dichotomy of epistemology generates significant challenges for an

understanding of the nature of knowledge that can operate fluidly across both the scientific and the experienced, and transcend the long-standing dilemma about which knowledge base should underpin the practice of human service practitioners such as social workers (Nothdurfter & Lorenz, 2010). As Peile (1994) argues, over-investment in a dualistic conceptualisation of knowledge has contributed to a polemist epistemological stalemate (see also Breton,

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2007) that resists attempts to synthesise the two positions into a recognised alternative. The tensions inherent in the positivist-relativist divide have translated to the workplace context, where professional knowledge has typically been conceived as dichotomies of “theory and practice, public knowledge and personal knowledge, propositional knowledge and process knowledge, analytic and intuitive thinking” (Eraut, 1994, p. 19), and

knowledge within organisations as co-existing codified (explicit) and personal (tacit) knowledge (see Durant-Law, 2012; Mládková, 2012; Nonaka, 1991;

Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Windeknecht & Delahaye, 2004).

Epistemological rigidity poses problems for conceptualising knowledge as it is used in the everyday working lives of practitioners because knowledge is not operated with such polarity, a point acknowledged within the pragmatist position:

[Pragmatists] argue that it is the spectator theory of knowledge – with its stark cleavage of the knower from the known – that must be abandoned. They construe knowledge not as an ethereal and

otherworldly reflection of the world but as a constituent feature of it.

The acquisition of knowledge thus consists not in transcending history to develop what Rorty (1980) called a mirror of nature but, less ethereally, in developing habits and practical skills that promote the good of the individual and society....We must increasingly appreciate the need to naturalise our regard for our own epistemic bearings, locating them empirically in the historical legacy of our craft and in our worldly aspirations for that craft, rather than the otherworldly realm of a putatively transcendental analytical logic. (Beart, Weinberg & Mottier, 2011, p. 484)

Converging epistemology

In The Mangle of Practice, Pickering (1995) argues for a synthesis between the cultural studies of science and the performative orientation of doing that shifts science away from too great an emphasis on knowledge and disciplinary divides, and more on to its material powers to affect action. He goes on to discuss the impact of an engagement between science and practice:

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The mangle thus deflects our attention from any special concern with the particular variables that the disciplines traditionally invite us to focus on and conceptualize in a peculiar way, and directs us instead toward the unitary terrain of practice in a space of indefinite cultural multiplicity. (p. 216)

Pickering (1995) highlights a need for an epistemology of knowledge that transcends the positivist-relativist dichotomy and focuses on whole

knowledge as it abides in the experiential entity known as action – or more specifically, repeated action or practice. Because, as Schön (1983) suggests, the need for real-world applicability is of greater importance than holding tightly to the rigour espoused by technical rationality: “the difficulty is that the problems of the high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern” (p. 42). What is needed, therefore, is an epistemology that reflects actual engagement with life.

The notion of knowledge as evolving through the experience of living has been proposed by a number of authors. Of note are Berger and Luckmann (1966) who, in their seminal discussion about the social construction of

reality, highlight the dialectical relationship between knowledge and everyday life, where both inform each other in a continual process of mutual

construction and reconstruction. The understanding of knowledge and lived experience as co-constructive has also been discussed in the area of expertise, with Collins and Evans (2002, 2007) arguing for a third wave of science⁵⁶ or sociology of expertise (2007) that conceptualises proficiency in practice as comprising substantive experience within a particular domain of operation.

Within this conceptualisation of proficiency, science and interpretation both inform and emerge through practice, and result in a body of credible expertise

56 Collins and Evans (2002) summarise the three eras of science as the age of authority (first wave), the age of democracy (second wave), and the age of expertise (third wave). Hamlin (2008) states that the first wave of science was anchored in the empirical domain

(credentialed experts); the second wave positioned within the social constructionism of the 1970s (the incorporation of perspective regardless of knowledge or experience); and the third wave of expertise (experienced, yet often uncredentialed, operators).

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(see Marlor, 2009, 2010) that enables its operators to work flexibly within contexts of considerable complexity:

Components of expertise will include not only narrow technical competence but the ability to recognize the need for action, to

recognize and criticize multiple options, to understand the political and social structures in which knowledge is to be applied, and to privilege practicability and flexibility. (Hamlin, 2008, p. 179)

The movement towards an epistemology of practice is further reflected in discussions across a range of disciplines by authors who have identified the circularity and holism of knowledge within professional practice (see, for example, Argyris, Putnam & McLain Smith, 1985; Cervero, 1992; Eraut, 1994;

Fook, Ryan & Hawkins, 2000; Kolb, 1984; Mott, 2000; Schön, 1983, 1987).

These authors and others argue that knowledge and its use are inseparable, and are operated in mutual co-construction known as expertise. Argyris et al.

(1985) and Schön (1983) refer to the construction of knowledge through action as an epistemology of practice.

Knowledge within this study was thus positioned within this third epistemology. It accommodated the merger between science and

interpretation in the space of workplace activity which, for disability support workers, was located in the everyday lives of older people with an intellectual disability.

Towards an operational understanding of knowledge