Power, Passion, Rapport and Reflexivity:
Political and Personal Implications of
Biographically Situated Research(ers)
Cec Pedersen
Faculty of Business and Law, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
P. A. Danaher
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Paper presented at the 9th University of Southern Queensland Faculty of Education Postgraduate and
Early Career Researcher Group research symposium,
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba,
27 April 2012
1
Overview
Much current scholarship about education
research is predicated on taking seriously the
notion of the biographically situated researcher.
This notion has significant political and
personal implications, including particular
stances on research ethics, negotiating multiple
roles and responsibilities, and understandings of
research quality and impact.
2
Introduction
This paper elaborates these implications in terms
of four principal themes in the literature as well as
in the authors’ respective research work: power,
passion, rapport and reflexivity. The intersections
and tensions among these themes provide a
framework for designing, implementing and
evaluating research that is potentially engaged,
illuminating and hopefully transformative in
specific ways.
3
This framework is illustrated by reference to
two current research projects:
1. the enactment of distributed leadership by senior
managers in an Australian university; and
2. the exploration of academic work and identities in
the Australian university sector.
Each project draws on key elements of the respective
researcher’s biographical situatedness and also deploys
the interactions among power, passion, rapport and
reflexivity to conduct research with considerable
political, personal and professional implications. 4
Project 1: the enactment of distributed leadership
by senior managers in an Australian university
• The researcher has been a member of the academic staff of the
university since July 1995. During that time, he has been actively
involved in a range of management and governance roles ranging from
academic, to Acting Head of Department, to Faculty Board member,
to being an elected academic staff member of the university’s
governing Council. This has involved the simultaneous and competing
roles of academic staff member, researcher and Council member. Most
of the researcher’s teaching has been in the overall discipline of
management, with specific focus on the areas of human resource
development and international management. Research and
publications have focused on human resource development topics and
tertiary teaching processes with a number of international conference
presentations/publications, book chapters and journal articles.
5
The issue of researcher subjectivity is relevant on
several levels:
1. as a researcher within the institution being studied;
2. as a member of the academic staff of the institution; and
3. as a member of the governing Council of the institution during the early
tenure of the Vice-Chancellor who was involved in the study. This
knowledge was built into the research design and added a depth and
textualisation which otherwise might not be available in such a study
because the researcher has:
-
a sound understanding of the governance and managerial processes, including the
development of super-ordinate strategy, for the institution being studied;
access to and understanding of secondary data sources (documents) which might
ordinarily not be available to a researcher conducting a similar project;
a higher level awareness of political and governance developments within the
Australian university sector over the past decade; and
ongoing reflexivity in relation to the researcher’s subjectivity (Lather, 1992) such as
fortnightly meetings with supervisors and interviewing the V-C twice.
6
Project 2: the exploration of academic work and
identities in the Australian university sector
•Currently experiential and informal; hoping to develop
into a more formal, preferably multi-institutional study
•Interested in three distinct groups of academics:
- early career researchers (Laudel & Glaser, 2008)
- professors (Macfarlane, 2011)
- research leaders (Meek, Goedegebuure,
Carvalho, & Santiago, 2009)
•Theoretically informed by identities as dynamic,
multiple and performed
7
The issue of researcher subjectivity is relevant on
several levels:
1. A continuing member of several academic
communities
2. Daily engagements with competing priorities
and multiple pressures
3. Daily applications of affective, behavioural,
cognitive and social-emotional dimensions of
identities
4. Seeking to understand others and self in the
context of formal, paid work
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The biographically situated researcher
• How researchers position themselves and the
resulting textual legitimacy have been
discussed by a number of writers (Brown,
2001; Lather, 1992; Prain, 1997)
• Power, passion, rapport and reflexivity
confirmed as useful encapsulating themes in
conducting both research projects and more
broadly in engaging with contemporary
education research
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Conclusions
• A writer (and researcher) does not have to be
free of bias in this sort of study; however,
s/he should be fully transparent so the reader
knows the researcher’s perspective.
• The never-ending story (or at least the
unfinished project) of taking seriously the
political and personal implications of
biographically situated research(ers)
10
References
Brown, L. M. (2001). Leading leadership development in universities: A
personal story. Journal of Management Inquiry, 10(4), 312-323.
Lather, P. (1992). Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and poststructural perspectives. Theory into Practices, 31(2), 87-99.
Laudel, G., & Glaser, J. (2008). From apprentice to colleague: The
metamorphosis of early career researchers. Higher Education: The
International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning,
55(3), 387.
Macfarlane, B. (2011). Professors as intellectual leaders: Formation, identity
and role. Studies in Higher Education, 36(1), 57-73.
Meek, V. L., Goedegebuure, L., Carvalho, T., & Santiago, R. (Eds.) (2009).
The changing dynamics of higher education middle management. Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Springer.
Prain, V. (1997). Textualizing your self in research: Some current challenges.
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Journal of Curriculum Studies, 29(1), 71-85.