Language & Communication, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 141-145, 1993. Printed in Great Britain.

0271-5309/93 $6.00 + 0.00 0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd

AUTHORS’ RESPONSE

REPLY TO COMMENTS

DEBORAH CAMERON, ELIZABETH FRAZER, PENELOPE HARVEY, BEN RAMPTON and KAY RICHARDSON

When social researchers ask questions about relations with research subjects, and propose something like ‘empowerment’ as a worthwhile goal of doing research, two reactions are common.

The first is to wonder whether the whole problem of power is being exaggerated, over- emphasized or misconstrued by critics of traditional methodology. It is misleading, even patronizing, the argument runs, to assume that research subjects are passive and powerless: just like researchers, they are competent social actors, perfectly capable of defining and pursuing their own agendas. ‘Empowerment’ is something they neither need nor want.

The second reaction acknowledges inequalities in the research process that mirror, and help to reproduce, more serious and damaging inequalities in the wider world; but argues that researchers are deluded if they imagine that changing the way they do research will have any effect on the realities of power. Such a supposition is seen as naively idealistic at best, while at worst it indicates an arrogant refusal to notice that, far from having any solution, academic researchers may be part of the problem.

Both of these reactions are evident in the responses to our piece on ‘Ethics, advocacy and empowerment’, and we will therefore consider them in turn.

In response to the first objection, we ought perhaps to begin by restating our view that to characterize fieldwork as an encounter between all-powerful researchers and downtrodden powerless subjects is a serious mistake. We agree with Becker and others who draw attention to the complexity and variability of researcher-researched relations. In some situations, subjects do have power over fieldworkers; in virtually all cases, the relationship is a complex, shifting and multidimensional one. This is a recurring theme of the case histories we discuss in Researching Language.

Yet there is one area where researchers have a significant structural advantage, and our critics give surprisingly little attention to it: the representation of subjects in research reports, conference papers, articles and monographs. Whatever authority they may possess on their own ground, research subjects typically lack the authority researchers have to create public representations and to insert these into dominant discourses.

Unless one assumes, along with Becker and Harrt, that research is independent of politics, this control over representations is an important form of power. The advocacy model explicitly acknowledges that research can be politically consequential; we are broadly in sympathy with the aims of advocacy, but in proposing the notion of empowering research we are asking if researchers can spread this capacity for political intervention more widely. It is possible to conceive of processes within the research encounter that could broaden ‘ownership’ of the findings and increase subjects’ opportunities to participate directly in shaping their public interpretation.

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Of course, we are under no illusions that researchers have total control over their findings once these have entered the public domain. A lot of well-intentioned research gathers dust; some backfires and produces undesirable effects. Even so, at the crucial point of representation, the researcher is more ‘in charge’ and less accountable to subjects than may have been the case during fieldwork itself. ‘Research’ is a discourse possessing certain kinds of power, authority and prestige; and when researchers address the question of inequalities in the research process, we must consider not only our face-to-face encounters in the field, but also the relationships constructed in the final text.

What of the second argument, that the claims of any kind of research to be ‘empowering’ are illusory, since nothing researchers do can make a dent in the unequal social relationships that produce disempowerment?

This argument implies a monolithic notion of power as a set of almost immutable structures that nothing short of wholesale revolution can alter. We do not accept this conceptualization of power. Certainly, social actors live within historically constituted social relations that they cannot just will away (those of class, race, gender and generation, for example); but these are not immutable, separate from and unaffected by the individual and collective practices of social actors themselves. Engaging in research as a researcher or an informant is clearly a social practice, with the potential to reproduce or challenge particular social relations. It would obviously be unwise to make huge claims for the political significance of this particular social practice, let alone for any single instance of it, but it is surely just as foolish to dismiss it as totally insignificant. As Peter Miilhausler remarks of researchers generally, modesty becomes us: yet too much modesty can be as arrogant as too little, if it stops us from taking responsibility for whatever impact our activities do have.

In her response, Caroline Ramazanoglu makes a useful distinction between ‘intellectual’ and ‘experiential’ empowerment. She notes, for instance, that a young woman can come to understand she is oppressed in certain ways, yet still be unable to act to change the material conditions that put her in this position. This would be an example of intellectual empowerment without experiential empowerment: and the implication is that our model of ‘empowering research’ would be concerned with intellectual empowerment but fall short of offering experiential empowerment.

Leading on from this, Howard Giles, albeit from a rather different perspective, raises the question whether intellectual empowerment is actually empowering at all. He points to the paradox whereby women or elderly people, confronted with intellectually convincing accounts of discrimination against them, are likely to feel more disempowered-distressed, confused and self-critical. Many people who have undertaken psychotherapy, or feminist consciousness-raising, would agree that these processes of reinterpreting experience are often disturbing and painful, even when deliberately sought. But does that mean that ignorance, or lack of reflection, equals power? This would reduce empowerment to a ‘feel good’ factor, which seems patronizing as well as paralysing.

In fact, there is likely to be a relationship between Ramazanoglu’s ‘intellectual’ and ‘experiential’ empowerment. Admittedly the former is neither a necessary nor sufficient precondition for the latter; but in practice, active political involvement tends to change people’s understandings of the world, while conversely changed understandings can lead people to become active in political struggles. Nor does it follow from the (accurate) observation that you can understand the workings of racism and sexism and still be vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, that the understanding does not in itself make any

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difference. Knowledge can empower by giving people arguments with which to counter prevailing wisdom, even if only in their own minds; or by persuading them their problems are not simply personal inadequacies.

It is also worth pointing out that traditional research methods do not necessarily leave people’s understanding of the world undisturbed. Filling in a social scientist’s questionnaire, taking part in a census or an opinion poll, involves informants in reflecting on their experiences, opinions, identities and tastes in a way that might well prompt unwelcome insights and difficult questions: witness the controversy and unease surrounding the introduction of an item on racial/ethnic identity in the U.K. Census. A researcher explicitly concerned with empowerment will at least make space to discuss the impact such questions may have.

Giles wonders if empowering research is empowering; others wonder if empowering research is research. For some respondents, it seems that the project Ramazanoglu calls ‘intellectual empowerment’ is no different from non-research activities like teaching or journalism. We agree there are areas of overlap, but there is also an important difference: the difference between disseminating knowledge, which is the primary concern of a teacher or journalist, and constructing it, which is the special business of academic research.

The question of knowledge construction enters into the meaning of empowering research in two rather different ways. Firstly, the use of dialogic methods gives subjects a more direct and ongoing input into what will eventually be presented as knowledge about them, This obviously differs from the typical classroom situation, where a pre-existing body of knowledge is presented to students (who can challenge or criticize, certainly, but not rewrite the book). Secondly, the knowledge researchers can share with their informants is not just a matter of factual content. It is also about how knowledge itself gets constructed and validated. Here we are in agreement with Esther Figueroa, that the priority is not so much ‘the imparting of information’ as ‘a training process whereby those involved in a project are able to have the tools to continue to make critical evaluations for themselves’. This does resemble what ideally goes on in the classroom, but it is hardly on a par with handing out newspapers.

On the other hand, we do not agree with Figueroa that in order to enable people ‘to have the tools . , . to make critical evaluations for themselves’ it is necessary to make empowerment ‘the defining principle, the goal of the research’, if this entails researchers subordinating their own academic agendas to the agendas of their subjects. For us empowerment is a a principle, one goal of research; for that reason we have been careful to define empowering research as research ‘on, for and with’ subjects rather than ‘on, for and by’ them.

From our point of view the ‘on, for and by’ paradigm exemplified, for instance, in ‘action research’ has certain limitations. Its orientation to practice can result in a lack of theoretical sophistication and a failure to build on existing academic knowledge. In many cases, too, action research lacks the dimension of critique: the researcher adopts the standpoint of the researched rather than entering into a dialectical relationship with it. There is a difference between engaging with subjects’ perceptions and agendas and accepting these uncritically at face value. So although one of our goals is to make research more accountable to the researched, we are not willing simply to abandon the alternative standpoint researchers have as members of academic communities. We want to hold on to the notion of research as a distinctive activity whose goals may legitimately be defined in academic terms, and whose value may be judged on criteria other than utility (to the researched or anyone else).

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Maybe Figueroa’ stance arises from her positioning within a specific (U.S.) academic institutional structure. One of her anxieties is that idealistic talk about empowering research, or perhaps any socially responsible research, looks like hollow and hypocritical self- justification in a context where doing research is so inextricably bound up with climbing the academic career ladder. In contemporary Britain researchers have rather different anxieties. Current government initiatives are making research more and more marginal among the professional responsibilities of academics, so that we have come to see our right to do research at all as a cause that has to be defended.

But if these developments in British Higher Education make us less concerned than Figueroa about balancing the demands of conscience against the imperatives of careerism, they also force us to think seriously about Michael Toolan’s nightmare scenario, in which servile ‘ghostwriters’ work collaboratively ‘on-for-and-with’ corporate sponsors. As central funding for independent research has become more and more restricted, and as researchers in government-funded projects are increasingly being given contracts that make a travesty of academic independence, commercial consultancy has taken on a new importance. We must acknowledge, then, that empowering research is not always the most appropriate paradigm for the brave new world British academics are beginning to inhabit, and that

the dialogic methods we favour could be put to some pretty unsavoury uses. Indeed, in the present climate it is increasingly necessary to return to the most basic questions of the ethical framework, such as who you should take money from and for what purposes.

In conclusion, there is no one blueprint for doing empowering research: proposing a theoretical framework is not the same as drawing a blueprint. In constructing our own framework, we have tried to recognize that research involves complex rather than simple relationships; that it may well have unintended and unforeseen consequences; that conflicts of interest can often arise, and that some will be genuinely hard cases (for instance, Peter Miihlhausler’s question about weighing a community’s desire for the short-term economic advantages that language shift brings against the long-term objective of preserving linguistic diversity).

A number of respondents explicitly remark that the issues we raise about power and method should receive more attention both in postgraduate training programmes and in the exchanges of professional academic researchers. Obviously, we agree. At the same time, this discussion has underlined some of the difficulties involved in any attempt to talk generally about these issues. The responses collected here illustrate that every fieldwork situation is different, that different kinds of research pose different questions, and that the institutional frameworks in which research is done may position researchers in quite different ways. When we try to discuss an activity affected by so many complex variables, there is inevitably a tension between our desire to focus on general issues about research and the need to remain accountable to particular instances of research. The difficulty is especially acute when the issues involved are of such close and enduring concern to so many of one’s professional colleagues.

It seems clear that the piece we wrote is not wholly successful in resolving the tensions its subject engenders. To work from case studies (as we do for the most part in our book Researching Language) risks obscuring broad philosophical issues with a mass of descriptive detail. But at the same time, to make abstract (and contentious) statements while leaving the concrete basis for them only sketchily described risks sounding embarrassingly jejune, or else intolerably smug and pompous.

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Criticisms of nai’vety or smugness are obvious ones to make in a context like this, and in a sense we have courted those very responses. But finally, we believe it is necessary to get past them if the discussion of power and method is going to advance.