Sobre la afectación al Derecho a la Libertad

I have come to believe that you cannot separate the researcher from their research. Every researcher brings their own history, culture and personality to their research. These shape

the researcher’s taken-for-granted assumptions, influence the way that the researcher thinks

and the decisions that they make during the research and analysis.

Consequently, as part of this PhD it is necessary to reflect how I, as the researcher, may impact upon the research and how the research in turn has impacted upon my own assumptions and understanding.

5.1.1 My Motivation

During my PhD I have frequently reflected upon what is the motivation that caused me to start off on this journey, and then to battle through the ensuing periods of private conflict and doubt. Personally, I identified three inter-related factors.

Firstly, I think I have always had an academic orientation. In many ways I felt I hit a peak level of performance during my final year of my first degree and never felt that I was quite as good in the ‘real world’. Due to circumstances –one of Clegg’s (2004) ‘small acts of randomness’– I ended up not pursuing a PhD 30 years ago. During my working career I was frequently pulled in a more theoretical or academic direction. Consequently, obtaining a PhD is a rather delayed completion of a natural trajectory.

Secondly, having worked for twenty-seven years in a multinational company, and having had the opportunity to take voluntary redundancy, I wanted to do something different. I needed a change from the ‘rat race’ of managerial life. I thought I would enjoy the academic

Power and Coordination in the Multinational Company Page | 82 experience, a view which was confirmed by my year studying for a MRes. In short, I embarked on a PhD to enjoy the process and have fun.

Thirdly, a likely future career for me was in teaching/academia. This would be a valuable way to spend my last working years – giving back to the next generation some of my experience and learnings from working in multinational company. As such, pursuing a PhD was a means to the end.

However, I found that while progressing on the PhD journey it became increasingly clear to me that I was also using the process to understand what I went through in my working career. With my background in Economics, I had struggled to understand why decisions were not necessarily rational, why profit/value was not maximised, and why people rarely behave as ‘homo economicus’ (Pareto, 1906/2014). This PhD has increasingly become a cathartic process of sensemaking about the world that I used to inhabit.

5.1.2 My Philosophical Journey

It is appropriate at this point to address my personal research philosophy and the interaction of this with my research. The words ‘interaction’and ‘journey’ are important, because during my research programme I have found my philosophical position shifting radically.

Journey from Positivism to Social Constructionism

My background is in economics, with a quantitative focus. During my first degree issues of philosophy were never discussed. I lacked the tools and understanding to do other than accept and embrace the realist ontology and positivist epistemology that dominated the discipline of economics.

The dominance of a positivist approach was largely reinforced by my subsequent working experience, where as a finance and strategy professional I sought to optimise the performance of the firm. My work was largely quantitative. Qualitative arguments would be used, but to establish the ‘truth’ and to identify the ‘right’ decisions for the company.

It was only early in my time at Lancaster, while undertaking an MRes, that I was exposed to the breadth of philosophical views. I increasingly found myself questioning the fundamental assumptions about the nature of truth, and the assumption of there being a discrete set of laws underlying social relations. Yet, with hindsight, I see that elements of this uneasiness had existed throughout my life. I had realised the inadequacy of simplistic laws of social action

Power and Coordination in the Multinational Company Page | 83 when studying Economic History. I became increasingly frustrated by quantitative models that used potentially spurious proxy variables to show statistical significance but with low explanatory power. As a researcher, should I not be primarily interested in the unexplained (see Clegg, 2009)? As I started to manage groups of people, I became painfully aware that they lacked the sort of rationality assumed by economic theory.

At the time, I could justify these experiences as being a result of the world’s complexity, that if the models were extended to include the right variables then the theory would work. However, as I took that first course in research philosophy, I started to question whether the more fundamental question as to whether ‘social-reality’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) can be considered in the same way as physical reality. Could it be that understanding may be best found in accepting the richness of life rather than through simplifying assumptions?

Reading two papers were key in this philosophical journey. In one, Viner (1999) highlights how the concept of ‘stress’ was adopted as an explanation for a set of physiological symptoms in rats and then developed from the 1930s onwards to be accepted as a condition and experience of people. In the second, Knights & Morgan (1991) highlight the discursive production of the concept of, and need for, ‘strategy’. The importance of these articles was that they highlighted to me how key phenomena, which are widely accepted as taken-for-granted ‘truths’, were socially constructed without the inevitability of their construction.

However, it is only a small extension from this insight to see that different individuals may interpret what is apparently the same phenomenon in different ways – that is that it is very difficult to talk about an objective ‘truth’, what we see are individuals’ personal, temporally situated understandings.

I have no doubt that this philosophical journey is continuing, and that awareness makes it difficult for me to assign static labels to an unfolding understanding. However, broadly I classify my research today as being informed by a relativist ontology –that is the “view that phenomena depend on the perspective from which we observe them” (Easterby-Smith et al, 2012, p. 344) alongside a social constructionist epistemology (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) that recognises that that ‘knowledge’ that we call ‘truth’ is not objective but constructed by people in the context of their culture and interaction (at least in social matters). As Holstein & Gubrium (2008, p. 3) summarised: “the leading idea always has been that the world we live in and our place in it are not simply and evidently ‘there’ for participants. Rather, participants actively construct the world of everyday life and its constituent elements.”

Power and Coordination in the Multinational Company Page | 84 My Understanding of ‘Social Constructionism’

Social Constructionism has emerged over the last fifty years as a set of ideas that challenge the positivist and post-positivist paradigms largely continue to dominate both the natural and social sciences (Duberley et al, 2012). True to its own principles, the term does not refer to a single viewpoint of the world, and social constructionist ideas and approaches may be identified in a variety of epistemologies, albeit with a number of commonalities (Burr, 2015). At its core, social constructionism focuses upon a view that the world as we understand it is constructed through social processes and discourse, and such understanding is therefore not predetermined (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). This challenges ‘subject/object dualism’, the separation of what is ‘out there’ and that which is ‘in here’ as perceived by the mind (Deetz, 2009). In turn, this has key implications for the researcher who can never be fully independent of that which they are studying.

A particular emphasis is given in social constructionism to the culturally specific use of language and discourse. Ideas (concepts, theories and/or ‘facts’) have a shared meaning as part of discourse between people in a social context (Wittgenstein, 1955/58), and through discourse certain descriptions become valid while others are rejected (Liebrucks, 2001). Consequently, both researchers and subjects are limited by the “hand-me-down vocabulary” (Gergen, 1999, p. 19) of language and ideas that are available within our culture.

Social constructionism takes a critical stance towards these taken-for-granted ways of understanding ourselves and the world (Burr, 2015), with Barbara Czarniawska (2003, p. 147), claiming “the vocation of social constructionism is … to reveal how the taken-for-granted becomes taken for granted”. Yet, this is not just about saying ‘X need not have existed. Rather, what is revealing is to understand why “in the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted, X appears to be inevitable” (Hacking, 1999, p. 12).

It has been empowering to recognise that much of what I had taken-for-granted need not inevitably be – be that the need for organisational strategy or the pursuit of the largely ‘American’ variety of capitalism (Hall & Soskice, 2001). This has allowed me to ask questions

as to why and how assumptions become ‘taken-for-granted’ and how then influence the day-

to-day life of the individuals in the multinational company. In particular, how do certain objectives, goals or strategies become taken-for-granted such that they become deeply rooted within the everyday assumptions of those working within the organisation?

Power and Coordination in the Multinational Company Page | 85 The Research Implications of My Emerging Philosophical Position

This philosophical journey has had significant implications for my approach to research, which has co-developed with my evolving philosophy during the last four years.

Firstly, in recognising that there will always be multiple perceptions, understanding is language-bound, and research findings are interpretations developed within the constraints of culture and perspective, I have come to see that it will never be possible to determine a unique ‘truth’. At least in the social world the (interesting) research questions are not hypotheses to be proven, but areas where understanding can be developed.

Secondly, as researcher, my role becomes one of understanding and interpreting the different accounts and explanations people give of their experiences and the processes by which their perspectives of reality emerge. Yet, at the same time I must accept that I observe from a particular perspective and cannot divorce my interpretation of phenomena from the ‘baggage’ of my prior experiences and knowledge.

This highlights the importance of self-reflexivity on the part of me, the researcher. This requires introspection, continually self-challenging the assumptions, approach and content of the sensemaking process. Cunliffe (2011) challenges the researcher to question our assumptions; question how we make sense of others’ experiences, and whether voices or conclusions are being excluded. Such reflexivity is not something to build in as a step in a research work plan, rather it is in a mind-set that continually questions what is being done. There is inevitably criticism that if ideas are socially created, and can never perfectly reflect an external reality, then there is no basis upon which to argue the value of your research (as it can never be ‘right’). Yet Guba & Lincoln (2006) provide a way forward in highlighting the criteria of trustworthiness and authenticity. Williams & Morrow (2009, p. 577) have suggested that the former of these criteria embraces the need for “integrity of the data, balance between reflexivity and subjectivity, and clear communication of findings”. The authenticity criterium requires “reassurance that both the conduct and evaluation of research are genuine and credible not only in terms of participants' lived experiences but also with respect to the wider political and social implications of research” (James, 2008).