Abstract
This chapter closes this volume by contextualising the preceding conversations about methodological choice and epistemology within the constraints and pres-sures researchers face as knowledge workers rather than as scholars. These con-straints can and do affect methodological choice and therefore methodological provenance and evolution. The chapter borrows the metaphor of the ‘knowledge frontier’ to both locate researchers in social work and education at a crossroads between servicing stakeholders and the academy, and to present the research exer-cise as an eternal frontier. To illustrate, a case study is presented inviting the reader to consider the social scientific approaches available, under what circum-stances one approach might be brought to bear over another, and the range of in-formation or data that might be collected and for whom, questioning the relation-ship between social complexity as a contemporary phenomenological condition for social science research, knowledge production and transdisciplinarity.
There is a mutual interest in whether social science research intended to influence policy is actually ‘used,’ but before that … it is essential to understand what ‘using research’ actually means
(Weiss , 1979. p. 426).
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Notes
- 1.
Curiosity-driven research, or what is often equated as ‘pure basic’ research, relies heavily on government funding in countries with a public higher education system such as Australia. In 2004–2005, for example, 77% of such research was funded by Federal government sources; however, total Federal government funds were directed by a ratio of 2:1 into applied research over pure basic research. Experimental research, on the other hand, was largely funded by business, while both Federal government and business attributed approximately 40% of their R&D spend on applied research (Productivity Commission, 2007: Table 2.4).
- 2.
Meanwhile, other ‘soft’ science areas, such as the Humanities, have become far more commodifiable and patentable, notably in the so called ‘creative industries’, championed by academic-entrepreneurs like Richard Florida (2002).
- 3.
Somewhat removed from Kuhn’s original idea of public policing of the integrity of knowledge through peer review, see Kuhn (1970). At the other end of the spectrum, also far more extreme, than Latour’s suggestion that scientists’ ideas and activities are (and should be) influenced by the social (Latour, 1987).
- 4.
Following the general claims of the cultural turn in social science about subjectivity, as well as social transformation theory concerning the construction, flow and appropriation of ideas and knowledge. Cf. Giddens’ explanation of institutional reflexivity where the means and ways of describing society, often institutionally bound or influenced, are transformative (Giddens, 1992).
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Brownlee, P., Irwin, J. (2011). Research Frontiers and Border-Crossings: Methodology and the Knowledge Industry. In: Markauskaite, L., Freebody, P., Irwin, J. (eds) Methodological Choice and Design. Methodos Series, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8933-5_24
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