Researchers’ Identities and Identifications in the Era of an Audit Culture

Anna Tsatsaroni, Associate Professor, University of the Peloponnese, Greece[*]

Despina Tsakiris, Assistant Professor, University of the Peloponnese, Greece

Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Geneva, 13-15 September 2006

I. Introduction: formulating the research problem

Political decisions by national governments around the world regarding research, and initiatives by supranational entities - in particular E.U. policies to create a ‘European Research Area’ – have evidently resulted in the establishment of systemsof evaluation and public accountability of research activity. In the official documents this interest in research is linked to the need of national or regional (e.g., E.U.) political authorities to create competitive economies, and better organised and/or more just societies. However, such policies very often end up constraining research practices rather than achieving their stated aims. This all pervasive ‘audit culture’ has substantial effects on current research activity - though, in the related literature this is seen as being constantly resisted and discursively re-articulated in specific organizational and institutional sites.

This paper is an attempt to use work-in-progress to reflect on current conditions of research from the point of view of Educational Studies, a field we consider to be a privileged point of entry. This is for many reasons. Some are discussed later with reference to the Greek context; here we mention two. First, like education, educational research is high on the agenda of policy makers; and so it is more likely to be affected by the latter’s activity. Second, because as Middleton (2004) notes, the imperative of the currently dominant discourse to ‘be a researcher’ (e.g., an ‘active researcher’) might re-inscribe hard-won positions and understandings of what it means today to be an educational researcher/scholar (see also Nixon et. al., 2003).

One important aspect of research activity today, especially in the Social Sciences, including Educational Studies, is that the model of production of knowledge is changing. For example more emphasis is given to:

  • applied research;
  • principles of co-operation and competition, in order to increase productivity of knowledge creating efforts;
  • co-operation of the public with the private sectors;
  • co-operation of university and stakeholders.

Also emphasis is given to the creation of strong networks and groups of researchers with national, inter-national and global dimensions, and of critical masses of researchers for advancement in knowledge creation. The repositioning of research (cf. Goodson, 1999) and the changes in the model of knowledge creation and research practices (cf. Beck & Young, 2005) may lead to changes in the identities of researchers. Hence the question of how identities of researchers in the field of Educational Studies are formed today.

The topic of our work-in-progress is the orientations, identities and identifications of Greek academic researchers working in Education. The broad parameters framing our attempts to constitute our research object within the Greek context result from the following features:

  • The complex history of the development of the field in Greece, the ‘upgrading’ of Colleges of Education into University Departments that took place in the mid 1980s- with its politics around processes of staff (re)selection - being only one, albeit crucial, moment;
  • the absence of a Greek national body representing the various specialized fields of research, for example in the European Educational Research Association (cf. Kenk, 2003, EERA, 2006);
  • the fact that education researchers have been participants in a ‘resistance movement’ of Greek academic staff, which up until now has refused to accept or negotiate a system of evaluation of Higher Education institutions;
  • the clientilistic practices for the allocation of national and European resources going into research;
  • the substantial increase, since the late ‘80s, in the research production in Educational Studies, which however leaves open the crucial question as to what it is that is produced.

Our current work aims to develop a problematic to organize empirical research on this topic. It is aided by a re-examination of two studies conducted previously, each involving one of the present authors.Both projects had concentrated on the textual productions of researchers in the fields studied. Following this work, our current work in progress builds on the premise that the text is the space where the subject ‘Educational Studies’ and the subject as subjectivity of the educational researcher are constituted (cf. Middleton, 2004). Text is the space where social practice is inscribed and (re)articulated. An approach to the field of (education) research as constituted in and through its textual productions, might differ from approaches that focus on the narrative stories of its practitioners (Solomon & Tsatsaroni, 2001); though the latter can be understood as an instance of the former.

The paper consists of five main sections. Section II reviews studies on education research practices, critically considering the notion of ‘audit culture’ that this research seems to presuppose. Section III revisits a study on mathematics education research practice done by Lerman and Tsatsaroni (Lerman et al, 2002; Tsatsaroni, et al, 2003), and discusses its approach. Section IV discusses current theoretical concerns, which inform our problematic which itself builds on Bernstein’s work of intellectual fields and knowledge structures; this provides a way of thinking about educational studies as a field of research practice. Section V introduces a completed project by Tsakiris (2005) and assesses its possibility for utilising the available data by building a research tool to explore questions about educational studies as a field of research, and the forms of social regulation of the practitioners in the field. The final section, section VI, summarises theoretical and methodological concerns, posing further questions.

II. Scientific-research practice and the ‘audit culture’: A brief literature review

In discussing the socio-political climate in which research activity is currently carried out, researchers often take issue with a perceived lack of space for social science, understood as an effect of the dominance of narrow evaluation criteria of efficiency and policy driven agendas of research. Thus paradoxically, whilst funding levels for social science research may have increased, selectivity may be resulting in the undermining and undervaluation of forms of social scientific discourse and practice, as well as their appropriation and distortion by powerful policy discourses: a perceived double danger for social science knowledge creation, reproduction, use and dissemination (Cooper and Tsatsaroni, 2006). Thus the threats to research are obvious. Powerful discourses require social research to account for itself in different terms and to be subject to an increasing pragmatic sensibility which questions the value of certain practices and forms of research (Cooper and Tsatsaroni, 2006). So, as Moore (2005) also notes, partly as an instrumental response to such requirements, and partly through an internalization of a wider discourse of pragmatism, pragmatism itself is conceived of as a virtue and takes on ideological significance.

Central to these descriptions and understandings of practices of knowledge production is the notion of audit, which has been explicated by a number of social and political theorists. Thus Power (1997) defines an ‘audit society’ as a society organized to observe itself through the mechanisms of audit in the service of programmes for control. Rose (1999) uses the notion of audit technologies to refer to a rather mundane set of routines that purport to enable judgements to be made about the activities of professionals, now including academics; a process in which the technical requirements of audit displace the internal logics of expertise.

In educational research the literature on the topic of educational research (in the current socio-political context) has been steadily growing and so are the perspectives, levels of analysis and issues addressed. The notion of audit has been taken up and this has led to three analytically distinguished forms of research writings.

1.Theoretical work such as Steven Ball’s on (supra)national policies on education and research which draws on the concept of audit. This work conceptualizes policies as ‘disciplinary tactics’ which attempt to change not only what academics do, but who they are (Ball, 2001). Connecting this notion with concepts such as performativity and governmentality Ball draws a line between instrumental political discourse and practice and critical (sociological-scientific) discourse and practice. The latter is used to critique and argue against the impositions of policy on research practices and the identities of academics. In his essay on ‘Educational Studies, Policy Entrepreneurship and Social Theory’ (1998/2006) he addresses the restrictive ‘steering’ of educational research by the state and the development of a hegemony of ‘state relevance’. ‘Effectiveness Research’ is here used as a prime example to illustrate the current state of educational research: its gradual fragmentation, and its re-incorporation into the state and its objectives, what he describes as the ‘taming of academy’:

We can re-envision educational studies as a whole as a disciplinary technology, part of the exercise of disciplinary power. Management, effectiveness and appraisal, for example…work together to locate individuals in space, in a hierarchical and efficiently visible organization. In and through our research, the school and the teacher are captured within a perfect diagram of power; and the classroom is increasingly one of those ‘small theatres’, in which ‘each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (Foucault, 1979a, p.20). It is thus that governmentality is achieved through the minute mechanisms of everyday life and the application of ‘progressive’ and efficient technical solutions to designated problems. Governmentality being that ‘ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics, that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population’ (Foucault, 1979b, 20).

It is in this way that epistemological development within the human sciences, like education, functions politically and is intimately imbricated in the practical management of social and political problems.

(Ball, 1998/2006, p.59; emphasis in the original)

2. Empirically orientated research which aims to study the impact of audit on academics. A representative example is Middleton (2004). Her study aims to reveal, through detailed interviews, ‘powerful stories’ showing how such systems of evaluation are ‘disciplining the subject’. This, it is argued, affects academics’ senses of professional identity, the substance and methods of their research priorities, the choice of how and where to disseminate their findings, and their willingness to participate in institutional activities and responsibilities.

3. A third category of research writings concerning research can be identified by looking at scientific texts which are contributions to current debates and disputes in the field. These texts could be seen to be responses to perceived or actual political imposition on research. Examples here include: Taking a position for or against the proliferation of competing theoretical discourses; defending expanded notions of ‘scientificity’, to help sustain education as a field of scholarship and research; and showing concern about what is seen as a reassessment and re-ordering of theoretical traditions taking place, as an effect of audit (e.g., Clegg, 2005; Yates, 2004, 2005; Hodkinson, 2004; Wellington & Nixon, 2005; Lather, 2006).

These forms of research writings are significant contributions to the topic of research on research, yet such approaches entail certain ‘dangers’. The first, discussed in Cooper and Tsatsaroni (2006) is an ‘analytic danger’ that might result from the way the problem is formulated, where educational research (or certain disciplines, or areas of study within such disciplines) are taken in essentialist terms as bounded, internally consistent entities that are under threat from external forces. Paradoxically, this tends to proliferate theoretical languages, each of which, posed as unique, can become a new orthodoxy in a given field of research. There, in turn, lies a second danger, that is when theory becomes ‘a sacred within a profane world' (Cooper & Tsatsaroni, 2006, p.6)[1]. This is, for example, when the perception of a theoretical approach as being opposed to the audit culture invests it with (critical) value as a source of resistance, whether epistemological or political. This often serves to exclude the possibility of the theory to be submitted to a critical reflection within the research community itself. We would argue that such an approach to research though it may not coincide with powerful policy discourses on research, it is not completely foreign to it.

A third reason why we think that current approaches to research about educational research are limited, is that they serve to create a context in which audit as control excerts its hegemony on other possible meanings of evaluation – a view which is imposed through its (often mechanical) repetition in different research sites. That is to say, in aiming to reveal the mechanisms of control and the power relations inscribed in audit processes, significant processes of evaluation which could work in the interests of reflexivity become penalised and discarded (Ardoino et Berger, 1989).Furthermore, the overwhelming interest in an audit culture and its effects on researchers or research productions does not allow enough space for debateson the basic notions of audit, evaluation, control, and the social realities to which they refer – and consequently on reflexive practice on the field’s own research discourse. To put it differently, the implicit assumption of researchers that such a research culture has been already fully instituted within the field, does not allow questions about it to be raised. This mirrors the ways in which policy makers understand reality, and on the basis of this act selectively on perspectives or theoretical paradigms which they think (or simply argue) would improve it.

The issue can be raised thus: when reference is made to audit in the fields of educational studies, the term audit culture is used. And here there is some ambiguity: is it a political program, or an already existing culture that permeates not only the political sphere but the scientific practices, too? But culture is not something which is imposed, it is formed and expressed in practices when the latter become solidified. In the absence of such research on practice, the term audit culture in the scientific discourse is used unreflectively[2]; raising questions about the empirical validity of the claim.

Thus there are contradictions and tensions within both spheres:

a. Within the political discourse there is a tension as policy makers attempt to impose something which by definition cannot be imposed, but develops in different contexts through practice.

b. Within scientific discourse, especially in educational studies and research, the audit culture is taken for granted, and researchers are only concerned with its consequences and implications either on the research production itself, or the persons that produce research. In taking for granted the existence of an audit culture, educational researchers - in ways that mirror policy makers - become instrumental, in that they help to impose a particular scientific discourse which is used unreflectively as the dominant interpretation of a social reality.

From this brief critical review of the three analytically distinguished – though only indicative and not exhaustive[3] - categories of research on current research practice in conditions of auditing, we can argue that though this research is important it still can serve to reproduce the dominant political discourses rather than challenge them. These somehow critical points about the existing literature on audit in research practice allows us to keep open the question of how to study current research practices, given the political programmes which attempt to control research, in many fields and in the fields of educational studies in particular.

III. Developing a methodology to study changes in research practices: The ‘Mathematics Education Research’ study

The ‘Mathematics Education Research’ study, led by Steve Lerman (Lerman et al. 2002, Tsatsaroni, et al. 2003) and funded by ESRC (U.K.), was carried out in the period 2001-2003, and aimed to examine systematically the research productions of the mathamatics education community, a small but key community within educational researchers. Drawing on Basil Bernstein’s work, especially his essay on ‘Vertical and Horizontal Discourse’ (Bernstein, 1999) this study sought to raise questions concerning the field’s standing, the position of the actors in this field and their positioning vis-à-vis other knowledge fields, the official discourses, and the field of school practices. In order to study changes over time in the form of specialization of this research activity, a systematic sample of published papers in the field (n=423) was selected over a period of 12 years. Three research publishing sites, chosen to depict practices characteristic of this research sub-field at the international level, were used. These were as follows:

-ESM (Educational Studies in Mathematics)

-JRME (Journal for Research in Mathematics Education)

-PME (Proceedings of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

The first is the key English-language European journal. The second is the journal of the National Council for the Teaching of Mathematics and is the key journal based in the U.S.A. The third relates to the annual conference proceedings of the international research group for the field of mathematics education. This was established in 1976 and enjoys high recognition by practitioners in the field.

A research tool was developed for multi-dimensional classification of the sampled research studies; for a detailed description of the methodology of the study, see below and also Tsatsaroni et al. (2003).

The features of the activity that the data represents were identified on the basis of an interpretative schema consisting of two axes: A vertical axis, which provided information on the agents’ positioning in their activity, the two extremes of the axis characterised as looking inwards and looking outwards, respectively. ‘Inwards’ referred to either, or both, the wider intellectual field, or/and their own field, while ‘outwards’ referred to either, or both, the public sphere or/and the state/school field. The horizontal axis provided information on the formof the agents’ engagement with the activity. This again involves either a critical or a functional stance, as the two extremes of the axis. ‘Critical’ presupposes an engagement with intellectual resources (of their own or others) with a view to developing their (and other) field(s) resources of research or an engagement in activity seen as strengthening the public sphere (including the schools). Functional refers to an engagement with their (or others’) field(s) resources which is using the resources to describe (educational) reality, or an engagement which uses the resources to prescribe actions in the field perceived as the field of its application.