ANÁLISIS INTERNO
5.3 MECANISMOS DE SEGUIMIENTO Y CONTROL CON LOS QUE SE PUEDA MONITOREAR EL PLAN ESTRATÉGICO PARA LA COMPAÑÍA.
In explaining the rationale for my sample, I have partly explained my research strategy that is the use of critical case study (See my explanation a little bit later; section 6.4.3) explored in four units of analysis. Here, I give a more detailed rationale for choosing a case study approach and its dialogue with counter-narrative and critical ethnographic approaches.
6.4.1 The critical ethnographic locus:
In the traditional sense, my study cannot be called ethnography as it excludes observation of participants of their contexts in the field. It is ethnographic in its ontological sense, where, it negotiates participants’ voices in the postcolonial, critical multi-culturalist and critical hermeneutic emancipatory criticality. Researchers ague that critical ethnographic research deals with the rhetorical and performance agenda. It engages situated, differentiated and contextual nature of participants’ voice in provokingly engaging with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality and identities (Hess, 2011). Furthermore, critical ethnographic approach takes into account reflexive strategies, that is; it can blend ethnography and narrative research so as to make the ethnography more public, contextual, embodied and political in character (Denzin, 2003).
Critical ethnographic research vehemently resists the established sociological
explanations which mute participants’ perspectives on issues of racism and identities. Furthermore, it disregards objectifying processes of “working on” participants rather it builds spaces of participatory listening, “working with” (Cameron et al., 1992) and democratic iteration (Cornwall and Jewkes, 1995). More importantly, a critical ethnographic approach invokes the emic performance of research-participants about their contexts in the reflective and reflexive space of theory (Madison, 2012). It is in the above senses, I have called my research ethnographic. It is ethnographic, in the nature of social justice questioning, emancipatory theoretical position and stand point ontological consideration. My research is ethnographic in the axiological and process senses as well. The narrative space of data is not considered in itself participatory and reflexive, but, the space has been constantly democratised and made critical by closely working with my participants and in iteratively engaging with theoretical considerations (see this chapter how access, negotiation, process of interviewing and post interview engagement has been performed).
6.4.2 The counter-narrative orientation
The present research is not narrative in the traditional sense. It does not consider narratives as self-contained, de-contextualised, structuralist or symmetrically
chronological (Bamberg, 2006). Neither do I consider narratives as socio-historically de-temporalized, local and mere interactional sites (Freeman, 2011). My research considers the potential of narrative in its theoretically counter-performative sense (Bamberg, 2004). Performance is not understood as mere acting out but it is considered as politically reflective, reflexive and projective stance staging of social actors.
Furthermore, it is understood as interpretation, explanation and meaning making theatre and counter-articulation of experiential action against dominant cultural-political problem framing of marginalised positions (Harris et al., 2001).
My research has positioned my participants’ counter narratives in critically exploring the complexity of misrecognition social reality (concreteness) and sees how the
contradictions are expressed in the framing of their identities, agency and belonging. It critically explored the politicisation of my participants on how they have strategically positioned themselves in their counter-narratives and whether they have displaced the binary accounts of ‘master narratives’ by re-situating societal narratives about their
identities in liminal position (Harris et al., 2001). My research has engaged with the lives of participants on a provocative social problem which is socio-historically and contextually experienced by them across different embodied times and spaces. Neale (2015) neatly puts the time and space horizon of the narrative in which this research has engaged in locating the misrecognition narrative performance of my participants:
This dimension concerns the intrinsic connection between time and space – or when and where – as a key mechanism to locate and contextualise experiences and events…‘When’ and ‘where’ can be added to our
understandings of ‘how’ and ‘why’ to further enrich the meaning of social processes. While time–space is pervasive in life experiences and processes, across the micro–macro spectrum it offers particular scope for the
development of temporal geographies, for comparative temporal research, and for the study of borders, boundaries and spatial transitions
(Neale, 2015; p. 37).
My research studied the misrecognition ‘borders, boundaries and spatial transitions’ about my participants’ counter performance of ‘time and space’ across ‘micro-macro’ re-articulation of their educational and social contexts in manifesting the politicisation about their identities, agency and belonging.
6.4.3 The critical complex case study strategy focus:
Now this takes me to the discussion of why and how have I invoked a case study strategy. Firstly, I have used the term “strategy” by taking influence from
VanWynsberghe and Khan (2008) who consider that case study should be considered as a “prototype” a “strategy” and “trans-paradigmatic heuristic”. Case study in this sense is not a philosophical methodology, design, prescription for data collection and analysis methods; but it is “heuristic”, a way of thinking about research framing. It “allows variability” about drawing in philosophical, methodological and methods pluralism for capturing “careful”, “contextual” and “extendable detail” about a research phenomena (VanWynsberghe and Khan, 2008).
It is in the above sense, I connect in my case study the conceptual framework
(misrecognition), ontological theories (critical multiculturalism, postcolonial, critical hermeneutic), axiological thinking (recognition of listening), methodological
Once I decided, the philosophical and methodological set up of critical case study; I then stretegically negotiated my data collection, coding, data anaysis and synthesis strategies to the demands of my research questions; and by considering how to maximise the participation of my participants.
Secondly, I also invoked the definition of case study that helps me study a unit of analysis that can give indepthness about phenomenon-context dialogue. In this regard, Yin argues that case study is about:
A case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident (Yin, 2009; p. 18).
In the above sense, I consider the politicisation phenomena of British Muslim identities inseparable from the performance of educational and social context. Furthermore, I consider that phenomenon-context dialogue in critical case study sense. In this respect, case study research does not merely deal with studying research phenomenon in its descriptive and exploratory in-depthness senses; but in its emancipatory interpretive and explanatory senses to re-describe social reality for social justice in displacing the
contemporary-historical dominant framing by means of testing critical cases:
"One rationale for a single case is when it represents the critical case in testing a well formulated theory (again, note the analogy to the critical experiment). The theory has specified a clear set of propositions as well as the circumstances within which the propositions are believed to be true. The single case meeting all of the conditions for testing the theory can confirm, challenge, or extend the theory" (Yin, p. 47).
Athough, I agree with Yin that a critical case has ‘a clear set of propositions’ with a ‘well-formulated theory’, however, I believe that critical case propositions and case theory hermeneutically becomes specific. This is because critical
hermeneutic knowledge is dynamic in its conception, in which, researcher has a well-informed critical understanding of the problem in the beginning, however, his own knowledge about the problem gets iteratively particularised in the research process. Therefore, I came up with giving three iterative versions of the problem context in gradually spelling out a ‘clear set of propositions’ (See chapters 1,2& 3). In this way, each version of the problem became more specific in heuristically developing critical case propositions. This in other words built ‘complexity’ critical sense of testing the misrecognition case of politicisation of
British Pakistani Muslim consciousness. The complexity implications of case sense is described by Hetherington (2013) in these words:
Using the complexity thinking approach considered in this paper, we can extend this argument to collectives as well as individuals. This is an interesting approach to case study in relation to complexity theory for two reasons. Firstly, it is compatible with a notion of nested levels in the complex system that is the location of the case, and is also compatible with the notion of multiple, interacting perspectives (p. 79).
In the above cited research, I accept the thrust of the argument by Hetherington (2013) that critical complex knowledge (here, it is critical hermeneutic,
postcolonial and multicultural) explore (misrecognition) phenomenon in its notions of ‘multiple, interacting perspectives’. However, I do not borrow the idea of ‘nested’ in my selection of cases nor do I use the idea that complex cases are unbounded and open-ended. As Hetherington (2013) herself acknowledges that complexity is only meaningful when it is theoretically and methodologically cohered and balanced:
A complexity theoretical framework rooted in the key concepts of emergence and complexity reduction, blended using a both/and logic, is used to develop the argument that case study enables the researcher to balance the open- ended, non-linear sensitivities of complexity thinking with the reduction in complexity, inherent in making methodological choices (p. 71).
But, if we combine insights from Yin (2009) and Hetherington (2013) discussed above, we can say that a critical complex case is iteratively and richly bounded. That is for complexity critical sense of the case to be meaningful the testing case remains single (with iteratively rich set of problem propositions and perspective). However, its unit of analysis become multiple so that problem propositions and theoretical perspectives can be richly tested in meaningful ‘multiple and
interacting’ senses in accepting, rejecting, refining and extending the theory. It is in this sense, I have reached the notion of critical complex case to study the misrecognition phenomenon of the politicisation of British Pakistani Muslim consciousness in four information rich purposive units of analysis (Please see my sample see pp.117). By synthesising critical and complexity insights, I argue I have contributed a new definition of case study.