have limited my ability to analyse the influences of the values
and meanings of individual volunteers at the ambulance service
interface thereby limiting the account of individual agency
(Ackroyd, and Fleetwood 2000: 12-13). Positivists on the other
hand by attempting to identity fixed laws that dominate the
social world, fail to account for the interactions of the broader
context (Ackroyd, and Fleetwood 2000: 12). Archer calls this a
downwards conflation resulting in explanations that have ‘too
much of society’(Archer 2000: 284).
The first benefit of the critical realist approach used in this study (as discussed in Chapter One) is that is privileges neither structure nor agency and instead studies the interplay between the two. Social practices depend on human agency, highlighting the importance of studying subjective beliefs and opinions, but social structures have a material dimension and so cannot be studied purely as an idea (Bhaskar 1975). Because of this critical realist understanding of ‘what is’, research such as this cannot therefore take individuals accounts as final and definite, but must instead evaluate them within their socio-cultural and real context. This requires an approach that can assess the interplay between structure and agency within a social, cultural, and historical context. Critical realism, CDA analysis strategies, and the case study method provide such an approach (Morrow, and Brown 1994: 250-266).
Application of a critical realist approach to this study was not an arbitrary or early decision. I began with a Foucauldian critical perspective, as Foucault’s insights about power and knowledge provided powerful tools for the analysis of volunteer identity (Foucault 1972, 1981, 1991a). However, quite quickly the acknowledged
inadequacies of Foucault’s approach, such as relativism and an ignoring of agency (Hall 2001a: 78-79; Katz 2001; Wetherall 2001: 393), became apparent and I
followed an emerging trend to combine Foucauldian insights with other theories (See for example Marsden 2005; O'Regan 2005). More particularly, others have
combined aspects of Foucault’s work and critical realism (Fairclough 1992; Marsden 2005) in order to capture the benefits of Foucault’s knowledge/power insights while circumventing gaps in his theorising and avoiding a relativist result.
The second major benefit of using a critical realist approach is that it enables connections between empirical data and explanatory theory. As this study aimed to inform a theory of volunteering, an approach such as critical realism was needed to promote the development of explanatory models (Marsden 2005: 134; Morrow, and Brown 1994). Both Marsden (2005) and Callinicos (2006) explain how this is done clearly, and I will make reference to their analysis of the explanatory benefits of critical realism as proposed by Archer (1995; 2000) and Bhaskar (1995; 2000; 1975).
In Chapter One the conceptual framework established that volunteer identity is part of a world that is both socially constructed and real. It is critical realisms’ ‘acceptance of the possible existence of real, yet non-empirical entities’ (Marsden 2005: 133) that sets it apart from other approaches and allows the development of explanatory theories.
The real world within a critical realist perspective has three distinct levels: the ‘real’, the ‘actual’, and the ‘empirical’(Marsden 2005: 134). The real includes
common-sense entities such as individuals who volunteer, unobservable entities such as gravity, and stratified social structures18 such as ambulance services and class (Archer 2000; Bhaskar 1975; Callinicos 2006; Marsden 2005). The real are connected structures that have causal powers, which are ‘intrinsic to [their] internal structures and mechanisms’ (Marsden 2005: 134). This means that social structures are real entities because they have ‘their own powers, tendencies and potentials… [and] because these relations which constitute structures pre-date occupants of positions within them, thus constraining or enabling agency’ (Archer
18
Social structures emerge from social relations and are a form of social organisation Willmott, R. 2000. “Structure, Culture and Agency: rejecting the current orthodoxy of organisation theory.” In Realist Perspectives on Management and Organisations, edited by S. Ackroyd and S. Fleetwood, pp. 205-19. London: Routledge.
1995: 106). The causative powers of the ‘real’ are referred to as ‘generative
mechanisms’ (Callinicos 2006: 161). So both ambulance volunteers and ambulance services need to be understood as ‘real’, with generative powers, but it is the interplay between them and the other unobservable real structures that are of interest to this study.
The ‘actual’ are the events and phenomena generated by interactions between the ‘real’. In this study, it is the ‘actual’ identity work at the interface between volunteers and ambulance services that is of interest. Because events result from interactions, it is unlikely that a single cause would be found for any event or phenomena
(Callinicos 2006: 168). So for example, as an apple falls from a tree (an event) the ‘real’ underlying generative mechanism is linked to the interplay between seasons, gravity and weather. ‘The actual world is then the outcome of a particular set of interactions between generative mechanisms’ (Callinicos 2006: 168). So the
volunteer identity work events are expected to have multiple interlinked causes, and it is unlikely that this study will uncover them all. The complexity and interplay of generative mechanisms means that studies such as this develop understanding of volunteers through an ongoing reflexive body of work. Therefore uncovering one mechanism will often lead to discovering others. The entry point to these two layers of reality is the ‘empirical’.
In the context of this study, the ‘empirical’ are subjective experiences and
observations of events and phenomena, and as such, ‘the empirical is tenuous, subject to reinterpretation and expands with our knowledge’ (Marsden 2005: 134). In this study observed volunteer identity work is the empirical layer of the real world under study. While the empirical is a contextualised interpretation of the real world, the real world still exists outside of these socially constructed understandings and generative patterns at this level are looked for. Following critical realist approaches therefore this thesis on the ambulance-volunteer interface involves retroduction ‘from manifest phenomena to generative structures’ (Marsden 2005: 135) to allow theorising about volunteering. That is, theorising from identity work to the underlying mechanisms that power the volunteer/ambulance interface (see Figure 1).
But the ontology of critical realism does not offer a research method and does not support any particular style of analysis (Marsden 2005: 136-137). The conceptual framework highlighted the importance of discourse in identity work and therefore Fairclough’s CDA (1992; 2003; Fairclough, and Wodak 1997) method of research was used to conduct this study. Figure 1 graphically represents the links between the critical realist ‘world view’, the study’s conceptual framework and the research strategy used to answer the research questions.
Through the CDA method the detailed analysis of texts (‘the empirical’) showed the form of volunteer identity work (the actual) which was used to uncover the broader social structuring of language about volunteers and also the social practices and structures of power within ambulance services (the real). Through discourse it was possible to examine volunteer agency within identity work to uncover the causal powers of volunteer agents and other causal mechanisms at the interface between volunteers and ambulance services.