What is Dialectic
Research?
David M. Boje, Ph.D.
Mgt 550/375v
Our MBA recommended
text
 Title:Methods of Sustainability Research in the Social
Sciences
 Author: Fahy, Frances, Rau, Henrike
 Date: 2013
3BL
3
CRITICAL about Triple
Bottom Line
 Triple Bottom Line advocates never actually
propose how to measure the ADDITION of
profit bottom line + People bottom line +
Planet bottom line…
 Without an agreed methodology, the income
statement trumps the people and planet
measurement.
4
For more CRITIQUE of the Triple Bottom
Line 3Bl please see this
excellent article
What are the Transitions?
http://www.eoslifework.co.uk/transmgt1.htm
Should we become School of
Sustainability or School of Resilience
SCHOOL OF RESILIANCE: “A group of selected students -local administrators, professionals, students, researchers,
innovators, corporations, civic and public leaders, and
startups--are in Como, from October 15-18, 2015, to learn
how to design resilient communities.” source
SCHOOL OF SUSTAINABILITY: Arizona State University
and the Wrigley Foundation
Definition of sustainability and resilience concepts (after Folke et al. 2010 and
Tuvendal and Elmqvist 2012) and McPherson (2014).
Resiliency Model
2 Types of Schools of
Resilience
 Socio-ecological from the systems resilience literary and
community resilience from the mental health and
psychology literature
 Why do certain systems and certain
people/communities (mental health, psychology) recover
from disasters and other disturbances while maintaining
their social structure?
Arguments against School of
Resilience
“The concept of resilience has been criticized as an abstract
structural-functionalist notion that fails to account for
community heterogeneity and power relationships (Berkes
and Ross 2013; Cote and Nightingale 2011; Folke 2006;
Leach 2008; Turner 2010)” source
Resilience of What
2 kinds of Strategy
Definitions
 Economic Resilience - capacity of socioeconomic system to
provide livelihoods into future (Scones, 2009:xx)
 Equity Resilience - capacity of community/city/sociality to
bounce back from disaster and disturbance while meeting
present needs without sacrificing future generations (UNDP
definition of sustainability)
 Ecological Resilience - capacity within socio-ecological
systems to sustain by strengthening resilience behavior. source
New Mexico Resilience?
 New Mexico as a semi-arid region (dry-land ecosystems)
are having trouble sustaining socioeconomic livelihood
needs of the people living here.
 As such New Mexico rural population is recognized as
one of the regions most vulnerable to global climate
change (among the poorest people in the US economy,
and hence socio-politically marginalized)).
Dialectic Research means
 The process of
empathic listening to actors
 Over a prolonged period of time
 In variety of settings
 In-order-to unravel meaning of their lives that emerge in
local interactions
Boje
 I am a dialectic researcher. I listen to
the actors in a situation of conflict
 Dialectic Reseachers produce
knowledge in solidary with action,
and vice versa
 I am a researcher-intervenor!
SOS
Sustainability is a
lost cause that might
have saved the world
G. K.Chesterton’s comment that “the lost causes are exactly those which might have
saved the world” (1010, Zizek)
Žižek makes reference to Niels Bohr:
http://www.unomaha.edu/idj/Issue4/Hyman_ReviewEssay.pdf
“at the level of the physics of microparticles, there is no ‘objective’
measurement, no access to objective
reality, not because we (our mind)
constitutes [sic] reality, but because we
are part of the reality which we
measure, and thus lack an ‘objective
distance’ towards it” (643)
Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism 9
From Marx back to Hegel
 We should return from Marx to Hegel, from narrow
proletarian who brings class revolution  to the notion
of alienation of sustainability possibility
 Hegel is path – sustainability cannot harmonize
everything into a harmonious order; show in dialectic
analysis how the excess is part of the system
 Transpose it as an expression of Spiritual
ASU SOS
 The Nation’s First School of Sustainability
 Established in 2006, the School of
Sustainability’s mission is to educate a new
generation of scholars and practitioners and
create innovative modes of scholarship by
bringing together leaders, stakeholders, and
people from multiple disciplines to develop
practical solutions to the most pressing
sustainability challenges.
What is Sustainability
Sustainability is improving
human well-being and ensuring
social equity for present and
future generations while
safeguarding the planet’s lifesupporting ecosystems. -Dean of School of
Sustainability, Chris Boone
Why has Sustainability
Failed?
Hegel equips us to think
Quantum
“for the problem is not ‘how to
reach objective reality which is
independent of (its correlation to)
subjectivity’; but how subjectivity is
already inscribed into reality—to
quote Lacan again, not only is the
picture in my eye, but I am also in
the picture” (ibid.).”
Hegel’s path of Reflexivity
 Reflexivtiy emerging from and between the QUANTUM
encounter between human and Earth (subject & object)
 We cannot see quantum reality, yet we are part of and
grounded in material practices that are Unsustainable
 For Hegel the Spiritual emerges out of the material &
contingent (that are never fully themselves; can only produce
focus & teleological in retrospective sensemaking)
 Spiritual emerges out of retrospective/prospective loops of
material & contingent themselves; we are not fully
ontologically constituted & grasp mattering in its becoming
Hegel Dialectic
 There is no Absolute directing, rather Absolute emerges out of
process of alienation to return to itself (291)
 Hegel’s dialectic is not determined by guiding hand of the Absolute,
rather each moment in dialectic process tries to cover over a gap.
 E.g. in Sustainability, a Gap between
espoused (thought & word) story and
the living practices (actions & habits)
AND Earth is fighting back in protest to
this GAP
Naïve Hegel
 Naïve reading of Hegel: thesisantithesissyntheses
 BUT THERE IS NP REAL SYNTHESES IN HEGEL
 Rather the movement to a 3rd is not synthesize the thesis
& antithesis into a RESOLUTION.
 Rather after alienation of no resolution, the thesis and
anithesis are not substantially the same as before
 Rather Negation of the Negation means the starting
point is LOST
Quantum Example
 Sustainability has failed (thesis)
 Resilience is contender to take over movement (antithesis)
 Both Sustainability & Resilience failed
 NOW WHAT? I am alienated from both of them
 Absolute Spirit – out of higher level both depoly solutions
 Materialism (reverses) higher element generated out of
lower; out of contingent interaction of quanta emerges to
collapse the wave/particle duality
Quantum Storytelling Dialectic
 Totalization-into-One-Narrative always fails, subversion
of what it purports to achieve, which is motor of
dialectical process
 The living story web of contingent play of difference of
accounts
 GAP does not reach synthesis, and Alienation breaks out
 Miss point if we make Narrative reading right & Living
Story readings wrong, or vice versa
See Hegel’s Text and
Make own Conclusion
“204. Dialectic as a negative
movement, just as it immediately is,
at first appears to consciousness as
something which has it at its mercy,
and which does not have its source
in consciousness itself. ”
 Excerpt From: Hegel, G W F. “Phenomenology of Spirit.”
Narrative, Living story &
Alienation
 The plurality of living story accounts is effect of
overflowing plenitude of reality itself, and is not resolved
by a narrative reduction to one plot.
 Rather Alienation results
EXAMPLE
How do you do Dialectic
Research
 Engage in DIALOGIC EXCHANGE with the local
social actors, the interlocutors
interlocutors: a
person who takes part in a
dialogue or conversation
 plural noun:
What are TOOLS of
Dialectic Research?
 Questioning as MODE OF DISCOVERY in:
 1. Interviews
 2. Participant Observation
 "Communication (including research)
is not a matter of extracting data from
an object but is more effective when it
occurs in the context of a
relationship” (p. 81).
The Processes of Dialogue
 In course of dispute, there are multiple
processes of Dialogue
 GOAL: To
understand the specific concept of
sustainability as deployed by local actors in
their dialogue
 THEREFORE: We need to recognise how the dominant
narratives (& counternarratives) are employed, refined and
transformed through the course of collective dialogic-action
itself.
Who started Dialectic
Research?
 Paulo Freire (1921–1997), the Brazilian author of
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED
 The method is authentic engagement with a community
of actors, learning their language, participating in their
activities, in-order-to understand oppression in its
dialectic.
AUTHENTIC
DIALOGUE
 “To be an act of knowing the adult
literacy process demands among
teachers and students a relationship
of authentic dialogue. True dialogue
unites subjects together in the
cognition of a knowable object which
mediates between them” (Freire, 1974: 29).
First Step of Dialectic
Research
“The researcher’s first move
therefore is to avoid a naïve and
uncritical imposition of an imposed
theoretical framework, but rather to
engage in a humble (and even
loving) human process of listening
through dialogue” (Fahy & Rau, 2013: 73).
Second Step of Dialectic
Research
“… reflect on the language which
emerges between researcher and
participants to determine whether it
truly conveys the views of the local
actors, but in such a way that it can
also make sense to outside
audiences” (Fahy & Rau, 2013: 73).
Two Important Factors in
Dialectic Research:
 Get into close dialogue:
 1. “where cultural identity is explicitly raised by
local actors” and,
 2. “where the dispute occurs over a significant
time period involving a diverse set of actors, thus
obliging local views and articulations to become
subject to refinement and development” (Fahy &
Rau, 2013: 74).
INAUTHENTIC
DIALOGUE?
 How do you know People are Pulilng Wool over your Eyes?
 You asked questions and you were jailed. (Corduff, M.
inGaravan, 2006: 56)
 There was nobody asking questions. (Ni Sheighin, C. in
Garavan,2006: 65)
 It was just a one-way sound. We talked but they didn’t
listen.(Corduff, W. in Garavan, 2006: 28)
 They never wanted to meet those who weren’t in favour. (Ni
Sheighin, C. in Garavan, 2006: 72)
NIMBY
NIMBY is a
“permanence-change
dialectic” (Freire, p.
179).
For more
https://libcom.org/files/FreirePedagogyoftheOppressed
.pdf
NIMBY
NIMBY is a “domesticated
dialectic: that “wants to slow
down the histroical process” to
“domesticate ‘time’ and to
domesticate mean and women”
(Friere, p. 38).
The NIMBY Intervention
Bring about relfecton by NIMBY
on their own domesticated
permance-change dialectic within
the historical situation of all the
oppositions of sustainable actioninaction
ANTE means BEFORE &
BET & BENEATH
 Before the NARRATIVE makes our living stories into
ABSTRACTIONS, there are these ANTES
 The NIBMY NARRATIVE, for example, covers up
BETS on the Future of generation upon generation
being sustainable
 NIMBY has not reflected on the ANTE, the Beneath
this structure of oppositions.
ABSTRACT NARRATIVES &
COUNTERNARRATIVES
 The opposition among abstract narratives
and their coucnter narratives is a
“dialectical relation between the subjective
and the objective” that begs for
antenarrative inquiry into the structural
situations of, the ground of the opposition
BEFORE (ante), BENEATH, (ante),
BETWEEN (ante), BECOMING (ante)
and the BET (ante) on the Future.
ANTENARRATIVE
 ANTE (the BEFORE, & BENEATH, & BETWEEN) is
discovery of the background, the deeper macro-micro (&
vice versa) dialectical oppositions among
SUSTAINABILITY NARRATIVES & their
COUNTERNARRATIVES, so the CODES of
CODIFICATION can be DECODED, in new matrix of
possiblities, a BET (ante) on the FUTURE of the
generations upon generations