What are empowering methodologies?

To understand what is meant by empowerment, we must also reflect on what we mean by power. There are many ways of understanding power, including ‘power-over’, involving domination or control, as well as a Foucauldian understanding of power, as distributed and circulating through the operation of social structures and cultures (see Lukes, 2004 for a summary). There are also many sources of power inequality that affect interactions and relationships between research participants and researchers, including gender, ethnicity, age and class. Here, we focus on a particular structural source of power that has a significant influence on how organisational knowledge is produced today. This stems from core/periphery relations between the global north and the global south, and the colonial, neo-colonial and imperialist assumptions on which this is based. We will be questioning these logics of knowledge production that encourage ‘international’ research to be understood in terms of Western theories and methods produced in American and European contexts.

In organisational research, the phenomena that are the focus of study include businesses, non-profit and public sector organisations, as well as organisational practices that occur informally, i.e. outside traditional institutional structures. The primary purpose of organisational research is to enable better understandings of how and why social practices are organised. Knowledge produced through organisational research thus has both an academic purpose (by enabling a contribution to knowledge) and a practical purpose that arises from the possibility of using that knowledge in constructive ways, which are potentially of value to members of organisations, and those who are engaged in organisational practices, as well as to wider societies within which organisations are located. The determination of research value is understood here as an ethical, rather than a practical, instrumental judgement, which is based on moral assessments about improving society in the broad public interest, rather than (for example) enhancing shareholder value of private businesses in a way that increases, rather than decreases, social inequalities.

We explore further the question of what research empowerment means in Film Focus 1.

Activity: Film Focus 1, ‘What are empowering methodologies?’ – Emma Bell

Watch the film and make your own notes in response to the following questions:

  • What is your experience of power relations in research?
  • How does becoming aware of power relations make you feel?
  • When doing research, how might you do things differently in order to empower yourself and others?
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To understand empowerment in research we need to think about methods as the cultural practices, norms and values that are accepted within a given research community as ‘the right way to do things’ (Abbott, 1992: 13) These ‘stylized ways of conducting… research that comprise routine and accepted procedures for doing… [social] science’ (Abbott, 2004: 13) are learned through legitimate peripheral participation. Examples include quantitative and qualitative techniques and procedures for collecting data, such as questionnaire surveys, interviews, focus groups and documentary sources. Methods also include approaches to analysing data, such as qualitative (narrative or discourse analysis) or quantitative tools (analysing numerical data using statistics).

It must be emphasised, however, that the approach taken in this course is not focused on teaching such techniques, as we think this can encourage an overly rigid and prescriptive approach to organisational research, that encourages rule-following. Instead, the aim is to empower you to develop a more imaginative research practice. Hence, the methods used in empowering research are seen as inherently improvisational, learned through skilled practice and sensory attentiveness to one’s surroundings.

How we go about producing knowledge of organisations also depends on what we understand organisations to be. Organisational research is founded on ontological assumptions (what it is possible to know) and epistemological assumptions (how knowledge ought to be produced). These philosophical judgements inform researchers’ choices about what methods can legitimately be used to study a phenomenon, and how they are applied.

Taken together, ontological and epistemological considerations and methods constitute a paradigm: a set of accepted beliefs, values, assumptions and techniques that determine what organisational researchers choose to study, how they study it and how their research findings are interpreted (see Burrell and Morgan, 1979). Doing organisational research can therefore be understood as ‘an orientation and an identity that is embodied and enacted based on value judgements and beliefs about what constitutes proper behaviour and what matters’ in a particular field of study (Bell and Clarke, 2014: 250). In Section 5 we will extend the concept of methods by considering the use of methods within an empowering framework as a methodology.

Stories from the field