Lo fónico

Reading in the broad areas of social theory and organisational analysis (Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Crotty, 1998; Deetz, 1996; Easterby-Smith, Thorpe, & Lowe, 1997; Girod-Seville & Perret, 2001; May, 1997), I developed a preference for the writings of social constructionism. This was, in part, out of dissatisfaction with positivist modes of knowing – prevalent in the literature on corporate

53 philanthropy – that appeared to be treating philanthropy as a measurable object,

particularly as a ‘determinant’ or ‘product’ of profitability (Czarniawska, 1999). Chapter Two revealed this criticism.

My reading taught me that social objects are all meaningful human constructs (Allan, 2006) and that language marks their co-ordinates, fills them with meaning and has the unique capability of preserving that meaning (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). In addition, it revealed how face-to-face interaction affords the optimal situation for gaining access to such meaning (Stryker, 1980), allowing us to define and re-define meaning in an ongoing manner (Allan, 2006, p.11). But what is social constructionism as a broad philosophical perspective?

Social constructionism urges us to “...take a critical stance toward our taken- for-granted ways of understanding the world...” (Burr, 2003, p.2) and while it teaches us to question the existence of an unproblematic world, it warns us to be suspicious of our own critical assumptions. Social constructionism is also concerned with meaning and understanding as the fundamental features of human experience and it is the language-based interactions between human- beings that allow us to create meaning and understanding (Allan, 2006). Certain events and experiences and ways of understanding them are, social constructionists maintain, defined by time and place and as such vary across and within cultural contexts (Lock & Strong, 2010). Narrative analysis seems an appropriate partner to social constructionist theory building.

In this research, social constructionism is regarded as a much needed and timely critical approach for interpreting corporate philanthropy, since it encourages us

to be “suspicious of our assumptions about how the world appears to be” (Burr, 2003, p.3). In this research thesis, the statement has relevance. The literature maintains the problematic illusion that the world of corporate philanthropy

54 research is, and should be, centred on guiding giving-managers and their corporations to more efficient, effective and profitable ways of conducting their giving programmes. Suspicion was aroused in Chapter Two and that suspicion materialises through the research aim which seeks to explore corporate philanthropy as a construct of importance to those who receive.

Social constructionism invites critical reflection on practices that involve constructing knowledge and this starts with the acknowledgment that people, as cultural members of society, cannot disconnect from cultural surroundings or systems of meaning (Eagly, Beall & Sternberg, 2004, p.213). My research embraces this simple principle. I am not an objective neutral observer existing outside the social world being studied but rather culturally and locally situated within the processes being studied. This commitment, in the production of knowledge, is an explicit commitment to the idea that there is simply no such thing as a value-free research project. The research is participatory and collaborative, joining multiple players in an ongoing dialogue (see Denzin, 2001).

This research is interested in understanding how managers attribute meaning to the corporate philanthropic relationships they engage in (Turnbull, 2002; Charmaz, 1990). We know that understanding human language constructions of their experiences is closely aligned with qualitative methods (Carroll, 1979; Fioravante, 2011). Qualitative methods allow researchers to explore culturally located vocabularies (qualities), instead of privileging the researcher’s vocabularies and then seeking responses from participants to them (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007; Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2000). Of course, qualitative approaches are varied but it is generally accepted that they allow researchers to discover meanings and understandings that researchers do not already know (Weinberg, 2002).

55 Social constructionism offers some variation to the broader landscape of qualitative approaches in that it is less about discovery than it is about comprehending how humans experience the world and make sense on it (Burr, 2003). For social constructionists, the publicly available social institutions that precede us, and that we inhabit and are inhabited by, are the source from which we make meaning (Crotty, 1998; Fish, 1990). Meaning is thus constructed through the inherent engagement between humans within a shared experiential social world (Lock & Strong, 2010).

Since we influence each other and make sense on the world through ongoing negotiations of meaning, meaning-making is “embedded in socio-cultural processes...specific to particular times and places” (Lock & Strong, 2010, p.7). Given the lack of research attention received to date, my engagement with managers who experience corporate philanthropic relationships in New Zealand on a day-to-day basis, provides a unique opportunity for exploring how they experience, make sense of and give meaning to corporate philanthropy.

Turnbull (2002, p.324) has outlined a process including eight iterative steps to building theory from research that adopts a social constructionist frame of reference. Figure 5 outlines Turnbull’s process and this framework is adopted, with slight variations, for my own research purposes.

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Turnbull’s process embraces some of the same basic procedures proposed by Charmaz (1990) for building theory drawing from social constructionism.

Turnbull’s theory building process is intuitively simple yet looking deeper into it relies on a rigorous and critical process whereby decisions are made that are consistent with social constructionism in that they are iterative and they allow the researcher to seek deeper understandings of the phenomenon under study. The aim of my study into New Zealand corporate philanthropy has been established above which, in part, satisfies Turnbull’s (2002, p.324) first step in the theory building. The balance of this chapter explains the remaining steps toward building a theory of the corporate philanthropic relationship, beginning with the second aspect of Turnbull’s (2002) first step: where to study the topic (a social setting).