Morphologies of inquiry: the uses and spaces of paradigm proliferation¹

1. Thanks to Kevin Leander for a reading that helped me avoid some conceptual problems.

Abstract

This paper examines paradigm proliferation in the context of ongoing efforts by the federal government in the US to regulate academic research. It argues that these efforts amount to an attempt to reposition and de‐center universities as sites of knowledge production, not just about education but across domains. The paper examines this politics as a struggle over the geographies of knowledge‐constitutive networks. It examines the morphology entailed by state methodologies, and sketches alternatives being developed in educational inquiry.

Notes

1. Thanks to Kevin Leander for a reading that helped me avoid some conceptual problems.

2. For example, the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program (1997), the Reading Excellence Act (1998), and the 2002 reauthorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (’No Child Left Behind’). These restrictions are crucial. Federal support for educational research (let alone qualitative inquiry) has always been modest. A tiny fraction of the Department of Education Budget—itself very small compared with that of other departments—goes to basic research (about 15% of OERI’s budget went to research in 2001, Olson & Viadero, 2002, p. 2). The use of contract/rfp mechanisms to focus research on official priorities has been standard since the early 1980s, with a lot of the federal money going to Centers, Labs and Consortia dominated by elite universities.

3. Why bother with such a roundabout means? Musil (1953/1930) suggested early in the twentieth century that ‘only criminals’ ‘presume to damage other people nowadays without the aid of philosophy’ (p. 227)—these days you need methodologies too.

4. Even the state needs to appear transparent as a mediator. As I write this a newspaper story out of California reports that the state’s ‘Academic Performance Index’ (API) is under attack by business interests: ‘Jim Lanich, president of California Business for Education Excellence, called the system … “gobbledygook.”’ ‘The API definition and how it’s calculated is incomprehensible,’ he said. ‘Parents want to know if their kids are reaching grade level, and AYP is a no‐nonsense, clear and much more accurate gauge of how kids are doing’ (Chavez, 2005, p. B1).

5. Donmoyer (this issue) quotes Gene Glass to the effect that, strictly applied, the gold standard would force federal agencies to back off policies on coal dust, speeding and the like. Is it not possible that undermining the science behind regulatory policy is the idea (indeed, this would seem to be a prime motive behind the Data Quality Act; Michaels, 2005)?

6. In a sense this is an example of the government taking on an older agenda formerly promoted, with considerable success, by large corporations (Rampton & Stauber, 2001).

7. It is debatable how firm university control ever was in some fields. There is a long history of military and corporate dominance in key science and technology fields, and even in education, textbook and test‐publishing corporations have long indirectly shaped a lot of ‘university’ research. What seems to be changing is the density and extensiveness of such linkages, and the weakening institutional resources for resisting or avoiding them.

8. Note the historical resonance of the term. The nineteenth‐century introduction of a ‘gold standard’ in the US was coupled with a recall of other nonconvertible paper currencies. The effect was to shrink the money supply at a time of population increase and falling crop prices, producing a downward pressures on wages and pushing the Midwestern farm economy into depression (Phillips, 2002, pp. 44–45). Thus the gold standard was a key move in revving up industrialization and reinforcing the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of capitalist elites in their newly assembling corporate forms (Phillips, 2002, pp. 44–45, 237–238). The analogy should give pause to those who offer the reassurance that gold‐standard centralizations are intrinsically unstable and bound to fail in the long run. Granted, local, bottom‐up practical knowledge is essential for complex systems and cannot be eradicated (Scott, 1998; Tilly, 2002). Indeed, as Zelizar’s (1994) studies of late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century currency standardization demonstrate, alternative forms of money continue to be produced after standardization. But it is also true that the scale and articulation of such ‘earmarkings’ is much less extensive than those of pre‐gold standard alternatives (cf. Lee et al., 2004). The inevitable failures and subversions of standardization do not mean it will go away or be replaced by anything better.