My original ontology
At the commencement of this research I was located both in the academic networks as a student and in the vocational networks as an accountant, specifically in the finance department of a tertiary organisation. The latter department, or network, through ordered interrelationships of actors, Law’s (2004b) “heterogeneous engineering” (p. 381), processed numbers, with monthly and annual accounts and cashflows being the knowledge outcomes. Thus, it was through numbers that the network
constructed its realities, i.e., through the financial accounts that complied with international accounting standards, which other actors within the organisation, within other entities and within society relied on. Therefore, how the finance network was engineered and where actors were enrolled and located in those engineered relationships set the finance network and the actors within it apart from the other departmental networks and their actors in the organisation. In addition, this finance network shaped how the actors within it constructed their realities, understood these realities and told these realities to other actors in terms of numbers.
Thus, actor accountants like me learned to privilege the positivist theoretical framework with its quantitative-based research methods. This privileged framework, therefore, influenced the original phrasing of the research question, i.e., What factors limit the acceptance of telework within chartered accountancy firms in Aotearoa New Zealand? The assumptions behind this question being that there are universal answers to the telework question and that they could be found empirically through observation and experimentation. This presumption was reinforced when I attended an accountancy conference at which the majority of the presentations fell within this positivist tradition. Hypothetical
questions, for example on market trends and applicability of financial statements to networks, were answered using numerical data tied to reliability and replicability. The actors who presented the two qualitative papers would, I assumed, have felt most out of place, given that the paradigm that privileges the positivist framework views any other framework with scepticism, for fear that it may bring into question the paradigm itself (Kuhn, 1962).
Towards a critical ontology
This ontological understanding changed significantly during the research. The catalyst for this change was my transfer from being an actor within the networks of a finance department to a new location where I became a business manager within the patterned networks of an academic unit and so moved from working with numbers to working with people, both academic and administrative. I also moved to a different ordering of the materials with different enrolments and associations and, therefore, different constructions of reality. Now reality no longer lay in numbers but in people and language where decision-making, student learning outcomes, types of assessment and budgets were examples of this new norm.
Consequently, this vocational move to the new networks with their ordered relationships of actors generating knowledge in terms of educational outcomes required me to understand and enact the realities generated within these new relationships. This shift initially caused feelings of displacement because I, as an actor manager, was now located in a different network, with different ordering of actors to achieve different outcomes, or translations, resulting in different constructions of realities (Law, 2004a). These changes also raised a number of ontological and epistemological questions. For example, how were the networks that constituted the academic unit and the whole organisation, all with different patterns of relationships, all with different methods of maintaining and propagating their realities and all with different enrolments producing different knowledge outcomes linked, so that the network constituting the organisation could achieve its overall knowledge outcomes? Essentially, how did the networks of the firm generate, through enrolments, relationships that achieved coordination between these networks so that the required outcomes of the coordinated networks could be achieved? Furthermore, did this these relationships have implications for this research
One possible answer lay in the actors who, as social objects, bring their own knowledge, skills, histories and perceptions to the objects, the symbols they interpret. However, each actor has different knowledges, skills, histories and so on, “Thus they represent what they see in diverse ways” (Mol, 1999, p. 76). This diversity became evident to me when visiting the accounting firms. Even though
accounting actors, including me as an actor researcher, had all been similarly trained, educated and mentored in the networks of the universities and firms, there were many instances during the visits to the participating firms of miscommunication between the accounting actors within the firms and myself resulting from different constructions of realities. A possible reason for this
miscommunication lay in my accountancy history. My training in accountancy was located in the corporate world and therefore what I had observed and constructed as reality within that context was, at times, not what was observed and constructed as reality within the context of the firms. Thus, reality construction, as noted earlier, was the result of how the relationships within the networks of the firms were engineered and ordered. Thus, if there is no homogeneity of meaning construction, then the ontological belief that the answer to the research question can be known because there is an answer out there waiting to be found, is no longer a viable ontological position.
A consequence of accepting that the reality lived with is that performed in a variety of practices (Mol, 1999) is to understand that reality itself is multiple. Here was the realisation that there were not multiple realities but that the same object can have multiple realities. Having accepted this ontology, this reality society lives with, I now faced another issue. If there are now options between the different realities of the object in question, which version should be chosen? Or, was that my lingering positivism talking, since the understanding of all actors of their reality, for example of telework, enacted from their enrolled location within networks is to them the truth, the correct one. To reject some of these truths and accept others would be to stamp on the research my own learned or enacted version of the reality of the object or objects.
I as the actor researcher, therefore, should not be concerned with acceptance or rejection but with why the realities are different. That realisation returned me to an earlier question related to organisational translations. For Mol (1999), it is not enough to say that the differences in translations, i.e., how outputs are achieved, are the result of the patterned ordering of the networks of the actors, as these are influenced by the dominant actor, one who may implicate the real in the political (Mol, 1999) by manipulating the real for a particular purpose. This line of thought led to the realisation that in order to understand this political manipulation, this research would need to add the critical to the analytical. That realisation located me and the research question firmly within the critical analytical network of the academic community. From that location, the research question now sought to understand the reasons that limit the acceptance of telework within the chartered accountancy firms in Aotearoa New Zealand. That said, my positivist past still lingered causing tensions during this research.