Section I. Research Methods
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing.
– John Cage[1]
The University of Texas at Austin (UT) offers a fascinating case example of the initial stages of a university’s reorganization into an overt profit-making multinational corporation and the resistance of those opposed to this transformation. I have relied upon my experiences as part of a number of student movements since 1985 in conjunction with my own training as a sociologist and what Boyd Littrell called “adversarial methods” in order to offer a case study of what I call the “entrepreneurialization” of UT to substantiate my critique of the university in contemporary capitalist society.
Using what Boyd Littrell calls “adversarial” methods,[2] I argue that social scientists have great opportunities to understand critically their everyday lives and the institutions in which they work in order to transform the way we live. This can only be accomplished by articulating the relationship between our own everyday lives and the distant institutions, peoples, ideas, and issues we study. Unfortunately, this is not being done. While the universities are hardly monolithic and are home to many critical voices, only a very few of these voices are talking openly about the universities. Misperceiving themselves as vulnerable voices in the wilderness, these critics overlook that they are voices of an already existing and potentially powerful power base opposed to the corporate activities of the university.
Adversarial Methods
To study the universities (which I roughly define as the 183 “research” oriented campuses in the US) requires direct action types of methodologies to break open the rigid, closed structures that govern their operations. Large, complex hierarchies in which even those at the top know little about the whole operations of the campus govern contemporary universities. There are some avenues for shedding light on its internal workings, such as through state-enforced Open Record Requests (which only apply to state universities and not private campuses), and the federal Freedom of Information Act. However, considering their strict enforcement of secrecy (especially in the case of financial, military and business activities), close relationships with multinational corporations and organizations and the federal government, and their ever rapid integration into international global capital, universities cannot be adequately studied with standard sociological or even journalistic techniques alone.[3] Rather, we need to utilize existing power bases of student, faculty and community social movements concerned with the universities in order to exert the necessary pressures to not only force the release of sensitive information but to put that information to use in changing their operations. This is the basis of adversarial methods.
Littrell’s distinction between “cooperative” and “adversarial” methods employed by sociologists can help explain this alienation of the researcher from their own everyday experiences. The adversarial research act is “one of mutual antagonism between researcher and researched” (p. 208). Littrell builds upon Norman Denzin’s discussion of the research act, recognizing “data as the products of negotiations between researchers and researched, and that the ‘research act’ (or the acts that comprise it) affects the social milieu under investigation”.[4] According to Littrell, adversarial methods “must be considered (1) when social groups or their agents define researchers as antagonists; (2) when agents act to block, misdirect, or mislead researchers; and (3) when researchers decide to proceed with projects, despite opposition” (p. 208). Rather than assuming cooperative methods are either necessary or sufficient to get at the data needed, Littrell seeks to develop a methodology that recognizes the inherent antagonisms between the two parties and prescribe the means for carrying out the research.
My advocacy and utilization of adversarial methods does not mean that I preclude cooperative methods. I used the latter in my participant observation and interactions with university offices and officials in collecting information. Since we work within the university itself we can use cooperative methods or feign cooperativeness as “professional academics” to gain access that would otherwise be closed. Yet, cooperative methods alone are incapable of cutting open the multinational corporation that is the university since it is predicated on the myth of academics as autonomous individuals while ignoring the organizational character of the university in which they work.[5]
Recognition and participation in one’s local power base is the first step toward cracking open these immense structures that govern the universities. One may participate in student movements, for example, that challenge the nature of the university from the many perspectives of students such as “minorities”, graduate students, or anti-militarists, or with faculty groups and unions that investigate and challenge institutional decisions. In times of crisis, such well-sealed information is leaked as challenges to the authorities structures crack. Countless examples abound, such as the liberation of documents from the Stanford Research Institute by student occupiers in 1967 that exposed Stanford’s central role in the Vietnam War and urban counterinsurgency in the US.[6] Members of such movements are already doing adversarial research in order to prepare themselves better in the pursuit of their interests and to gain friends and allies. I learned my adversarial methods “in the street”, so to speak, not in my sociology seminars, although these methods have been honed as a result of efforts to theorize about these experiences in the classroom.
With recognition of the entrepreneurial organization of the university within a multinational capitalist system, a reevaluation of sociological methods for studying large scale organizations is vital. As sociology has grown dependent first on government research money and support after WWII and corporate money and support since the 1960s it has become prone to the very interests I seek to expose. Its subservience to these interests was facilitated by the dominance of the natural science method which legitimized the emerging organization of society.[7] In the process, critical voices were pushed out or silenced as sociology became unwilling and incapable of investigating transnational organizations such as the university.
Facing further cutbacks and closings of sociology departments (such as the defeated effort at San Diego State University in 1991-92), sociology has intensified efforts to demonstrate its usefulness to these interests by further embracing quantitative methods and attempting to directly apply them to the needs of business and the state – as is the case with the 1992 appointment of an IC2 fellow to the chair of the UT-Austin sociology department. Ironically, in wake of this transformation, I have undertaken an investigation of entrepreneurialization of the universities. As a result, I have combined sociological resources such as “adversarial methods” with existing approaches from investigative journalism and activist research efforts in order to devise my own.[8]
Just what are the adversarial methods I and others devised in the process of our participation? I use a wide range of methods including textual analysis of secondary and primary official documents, student movement literature, participant observation, simple expressions of quantitative data, and first hand investigative collection of data using the Texas Open Records Act and the federal Freedom of Information Act.
How did I conduct my textual analysis of these written sources? First, the term “textual analysis” is partially misleading since I do not rely only on written texts but also observed and recorded actions. Because it is difficult to impute intention to someone’s writings, it is important to test the validity of my interpretation against their actions which are either observed firsthand or documented in one or more journalistic accounts, written memos, letters and reports garnered by Open Record Requests. Following the old adage: “actions speak louder than words,” I flowcharted a person’s actions until the repetition of their actions indicated a close fit with their written comments. If they were engaged in two or more actions fitting the motives of their own writings I perceived their writings as equivalent to a personal interview. If less than two actions occur, I quote them with a qualification that no pattern of actions can be imputed to fit with their comments. In this way, I found that their actions became a reliable indicator of their written comments. I believe this is complementary to participant observation in many ways since we can observe one’s actions while also knowing their thoughts though limited to those articulated in writing and has the advantage of observing the person engaged in social activity not always pursued by interviewers.
But can one read actions in the absence of written text or personal contact such as interviews? I would definitely say so. Much of reconstruction of pre-industrial societies and “marginalized” social groups has relied on non-verbal information such as ruins, art, tools, and even myths. Because it is often the powerful that write and rewrite history to legitimize their position, we are left with the actions of people to decipher not only motives but the effects of their actions. Working class history, for example, relies on a rereading of capitalist law and the media to document the actions of otherwise unrecorded organizing efforts, strikes and marches that may still remain known only in song, legend or street signs. Without actually speaking to the “actors” we can still impute their motives by the ways in which their actions were recorded.
However, the sources of data cannot be separated from the means by which I gained access to them. I often gained access to the most enlightening data while participating with Students Against War and various graduate student organizations that used its power base to gain access to internal UT and UT System documents regarding military research, financial reports, business dealings, sexual harassment, and a number of other topics. Without the publicity about these groups’ actions and efforts, these documents may have been harder to pull loose from the UT administration even with the Open Records Act and at times still remained very difficult.
These approaches have been flexible and ever-changing depending on new research strategies learned from others or failures of existing methods. It has been, as Littrell points out, “a partly fixed and partly evolving research design” (p. 218). I have utilized many sources of public information provided by the UT-Austin and UT System administrations, related state and federal agencies, trade and business publications, newspapers, alternative student newspapers, pamphlets and fliers produced by student groups, electronic mail, open meetings, press conferences, informal interviews, and when necessary to crack the forces of secrecy, Open Records requests under Texas law and the Freedom of Information Act.
Studying the university as a “participant observer” implies certain sociological methods. While I agree with the necessity to take the perspective of the “subjects”, on which qualitative sociology is founded, I reject both a passive perspective of “researcher” and “subject” and attempt to go beyond this duality.[9]
Littrell points out how “‘community participation,’ … requires participation in the community in a sense quite different from many discussions of participant” and he describes ways in which the “researchers” can use action and alliances with adversarial groups (p. 217). By implication, the methodology I chose serves to flesh out the everyday experiences of myself, as the sociological researcher, in order to articulate what is happening at this juncture in the university as part of an ongoing pitched battle between students and those that manage higher education.
More than simply observing a “community”, my approach recognizes that the researcher is already part of one. Much too often, researchers choose topics, communities, cultures, places and times far distant from their everyday lives. This occurs for many reasons including a protection against political retribution for covering hot topics too close to home. Dorothy Smith articulates the process by which the researcher is alienated from everyday experiences by sociology’s central focus on conceptualization for the purposes of categorizing and managing the subjects we study. “Sociology provides a mode in which people can relate to themselves and to others in a mode which locates them as subjects outside themselves, in which the coordinates are shifted to a general abstracted frame and the relation of actions, events, etc., to the local and particular is suspended or discarded.”[10] This distance is often still left standing long after the research is completed and analysis produced. Little or no connection is made between the source of study and the life of the researcher. Typically, no copies of the research report is given to the “subjects” to study. Even in the case in which another movement or struggle is studied, little attempt is made to draw the links to immediate issues or struggles in which the researcher is a participant.
Working inside the entrepreneurial university, the academic researcher can either help reproduce the role of the university in capitalism or participate in efforts to resist it. An adversarial methodology must transcend simply critically studying something to making the substantive connections between the subject of study and our lives in or around the universities. Studying our own everyday experiences as people who also happen to be academics is one method for refusing the alienation from our own experiences as sources of knowledge about the world that Smith describes. The almost complete lack of focus on the universities themselves by academics – but not students – suggests that many of us face disincentives from doing so or lacked the research skills or power base to carry out such research. This is beginning to change with research into sexual harassment and sexism, racism, and peace studies but these efforts are far from comprehensive. It is time for this to change. This dissertation is predicated on my own experiences as part of various struggles to confront and transform the universities while making the links to broader struggles against their international business operations.
The need for adversarial methods is highlighted when attempting to research large bureaucratic organizations such as universities, multinational corporations or the government. As researchers we must examine the differences of power between ourselves and those we are studying.[11] These differences in power bases need to be known since they influence the methods we choose and the data we can collect. (Littrell, p. 214). In my own research, the power base of a student resistance movement (such as the anti-war or graduate student movements) often served to inform my adversarial methods and generate data that I could otherwise not have accessed working alone. As a result, I have been able to study the very university in which I am a student in order to draw broader theoretical conclusions about the university itself.
The Advantage of Adversarial Methods
Recognizing and activating differential power bases gives the researcher an advantage over traditional sociological methods. Whereas cooperative methods accept the contention that individual corporate subjects must be protected under the unstated guise of objectivity, adversarial methods recognize that the researcher has a political position within a larger socio-political context.[12] When this political position is antagonistic to the subject, adversarial methods means using the political power at one’s disposal to gain access to the information.
Such objectivity is extracted from researchers under the requirement that they protect corporate secrecy. Cooperative methods of organizational research often carry an inherent requirement of legitimacy before the corporate subject, be it a business, university or government agency. Cornfield and Sullivan recommend obtaining such legitimacy to protect the subject from conflict and antagonism: “Social scientists seeking access to oligopolistic enterprises must legitimate themselves before managers, who fear exposure of business strategy and sensitive data to competitors and the public. The social scientist is an outsider to the corporation who may harbor ideas foreign to the business world, and fear of the outsider qua outsider persists” (p. 260). In effect, the researcher that gains access in this way is one hand-picked by the corporation. It is not surprising that given Sullivan’s inclination to protect the corporate subject from such ideas “foreign to the business world” that she was appointed an Assistant Dean of Graduate Affairs at UT in 1991 ensuring protection of UT entrepreneurial activities.
While such an approach ensures the collection of information useful to the corporate subject about itself through the eyes of an outsider it offers nothing useful to “outsiders”. This same critique could be made for any qualitative sociological methodology whether they be “reality reconstruction” or “formal sociology.”[13] Both privilege the individual as data source: reality reconstruction privileging the interviewee and formal sociology privileging the researcher’s interpretation of her everyday life. Cornfield and Sullivan may be explicit about their intentions but they do not deviate from the self-imposed limitations and even censorship required by these methods.
In advocating formal sociology, Schwartz and Jacobs confront the predicament of whether what we learn from individuals can be used to suggest “patterns”, or as far as I’m concerned, socio-political organization. Reality reconstruction faces the problem that “It is not the perception of order on the part of individuals is the cause of the emergence of actual order in social behavior. Rather, the two are so inextricably intertwined that they should be collapsed into one problem” (p. 374). This problem occurs in the various methods that Schwartz and Jacobs call reality reconstruction such as interviewing, participant observation, life histories, and content analysis all of which privilege data culled from individuals and used to explain society.
Likewise, formal sociology of ethnomethodology, phenomenology, conversational analysis, and dramaturgy, are faced with extrapolating social organization from everyday life. This problem is quite pressing for “the more daring formal sociologists who reject the idea that studying everyday life consists of studying ‘other people’ as they interact within a real world.”
These sociologists see themselves and their own activities as irreparably part of what they are studying. Science, as ordinarily construed, is abandoned in favor of a transcendental way of learning about social life that collapses “us” and “them,” “the real” and “the apparent,” or “the subjective” and “the objective.” This is all well and good. Yet, as far as we the authors are concerned, no one has come up with a workable way to do this and still answer “How is society possible?” in any meaningful way (p. 375-376).
Both methods face the problematic of how to go about understanding social organization by simply studying the individual. What Schwartz and Jacobs overlook is that even if these patterns are simply created in people’s heads, enough people have reproduced similar patterns to result in the formation of organizations and structures. Adversarial methods attempts to bypass this dilemma by recognizing that however these structures come to exist the academic has a political position which must be recognized and acted upon if they are to crack them open. Simply interviewing corporate subjects or writing about one’s own everyday life as an academic cannot get the job done alone.
Nonetheless, interviews were one means of gathering information necessary both for my involvement in various political struggles and for investigating UT and other universities. I have spent many hours interviewing UT and other university officials in person and by phone and/or letter regarding their research, and the analysis of financial statements and annual reports, as well as to gain access to relevant documents through the Texas Open Records Act and the federal Freedom of Information Act. Many students, local residents and journalists have also been interviewed regarding their activities or those related to UT and other universities and used in conjunction with published interviews and first hand written accounts of those involved. Informal verbal interviews were extensively used in ways that did not draw attention to the interviewee as a “subject” or even “data source.” Rather, what we might call interviews were often times informal conversations with a self-active social individual either specifically sought out or engaged in some common event related to a particular student movement at UT. Although these interviews are used in this dissertation, they are not relied upon as the primary data source.
Such an approach differs greatly from Michael Moffatt’s ethnography of students living in a dormitory at Rutger’s University where he is a professor. Moffatt’s study offers a good example of how this dilemma is played out by participant observation of the university.[14] Living among the students a few days a week during 1977 and 1987, Moffatt interviewed his fellow students and hung out with them, making many observations about race, gender, schoolwork and relations between students and the university administration. However, Moffatt had little to say about the university as an organization beyond his interview questions and everyday experiences playing student. The university was reduced to simply a backdrop in which his subjects worked, played and lived but never critically analyzed. We get the student’s attitudes on a wide range of topics but never an understanding of the very organization that brought them together and keeps them working – Rutgers university.
By focusing on the individual within the corporate organization we bear the costs of an indirect objectivity. Why indirect? A strict focus on the individual leaves us nothing to say about anyone other than the individual, leaving the organization in which they exist unexplored. Since the individuals do not simply add up to the organization, such research looks at the individual out of its context and leaves the organization untouched. Focusing on the individual also serves as a gatekeeper to what can be found out about the organization. This is the case with Cornfield and Sullivan who not only suggest giving interviewees censorship privileges but never advocate other methods for researching the corporate subject other than through interviews.
Where the individual is not the only focus of one’s research into a corporate organization, an adversarial stance becomes necessary. Getting at internal documents, records, reports and other inside information is bound to stir resistance from the corporate subject. Littrell’s adversarial approach offers a means to match such resistance with a power base to get access to this information and create a way inside that would not be possible through reality reconstruction and formal sociological methods. An adversarial methodology has a wide advantage over these other two methods by recognizing that such organizations are antagonistic to research efforts whose objective is critical analysis and transformative change, options unavailable to those using methods that privilege the individual.
For this study, I have chosen to utilize a variation of “community participation” along with a critical analysis of a wide variety of written material. This methodology grows out of my experiences as a UT student since 1985. In this time, I have been able to study patterns and processes of change that are relatively unobtainable by methods of surveys, interviews and other forms of quantitative analysis. In fact, I have had a longer period of time to do my first hand research than most social scientists utilizing these other forementioned methods. Time is a different factor for academics under deadline to publish in order to keep their jobs while the time limits for me have been more flexible or non-existent. Without such deadlines, I have able to more thoroughly investigate particular issues and even wait for years until a power base could be organized to further the research. For example, my research has been aided by the reemergence of alternative students newspapers concerned with UT’s business activities (first the Polemicist, then The Other Texan and currently (sub)TEX). Community participation provides me information unobtainable by solitary interviews by those unfamiliar with the multiplicity of languages, cultures and forms of organization that exist among students, faculty and the bureaucracy in and around UT (I do not claim to be familiar with more than a few of them). Without such first hand experiences, my analysis would depend on making inferences from interviewees who may not want to provide essential information, make mistakes of memory, or interpret events differently than if I were to also experience them.
This is the case in Ronnie Dugger’s study of UT, Our Invaded Universities,[15] who, because he was not a day-to-day participant at UT relies on interviews – almost all of them with only faculty and administrators – for a good bulk of his information. Dugger is dependent on second hand accounts even from people he knows personally, and the need for checking and rechecking their validity. My strategy for studying UT differs fundamentally from Dugger’s even if we agree that UT has been subordinated to corporate interests. We cannot ignore however that Dugger’s study is that of an outsider, and as a result of his reliance on personal links to faculty and administrators he frequently either takes their perspective or at least personalizes them in his analysis while dehumanizing the students whom he rarely knew or understood.
As a student, I rely primarily on my own experience and observation of other students, faculty, administrators and government and corporate bureaucrats in the reorganization of UT and the organizing of various student movements. This is supplemented by a wide range of secondary sources including publications and other local and national alternative news sources like the New Liberation News Service bi-weekly dispatches, Polemicist, The Other Texan (which I help publish), the Griot, Tejas, (sub)TEX, the University Review, Discovery, Alcalde, and On Campus. These sources are essential to my research because they are self-expressions of those involved in the process of entrepreneurialization, or engaged in activities antagonistic to it, that I am studying and would in most cases be unavailable to the distant academic researcher or non-student.
This is also the case for obtaining state, university and local foundation and institute documents that served to present the views of industries, corporations and individuals involved in the entrepreneurialization of the university. As a result, I also use simple demonstrations of quantities in my analyses of the UT-Austin budget and commercial operations that originate directly or are abstracted from such sources. On a broader level of higher education as a whole, books, scholarly journal articles, national magazines, daily newspapers, conference presentations and reports, and so-called private sector research reports were instrumental.
Each of these types of primary and secondary sources provides crucial elements to this study. My use of local publications of the university, corporations, state agencies, neighboring communities and students provides a wide range of voices for each type of political actor. These publications are written to varying types of audiences and as such provide a diverse array of faces for each that would be unobtainable from solitary interviews or surveys. A number of published interviews provide access to communication between and within each of the relevant groups (such as numerous studies of industry-government-university partnerships) illustrating many of their actors’ own perceptions about their role in the transformation of both UT and higher education as a whole. Such primary sources offer texts written by the actors themselves concerning their thoughts about these issues. This becomes apparent when one cross checks simple newspaper articles or interviews with any high tech booster or administrator that offer only scant information with internal documents produced by their organization that outline detailed processes and intentions.
By examining a variety of documents from a multiplicity of sources within the debate over the reorganization of the university I am able to explore the larger issues of the process of entrepreneurialization and the role of the university in capitalist society.
An Example of the Social Construction of Data by Adversarial Methods[16]
How did this research and use of materials take place and in what context? Although my interest in students and student activism began in 1987 with my own initial involvement in student activist movements at UT-Austin, the in-depth investigation of UT-Austin itself did not begin until 1990.
Initially, my research into UT was limited to narrow concerns of student organizations until I participated in a student group working with homeless organizers and Blackland community residents. In 1988, this coalition successfully blocked UT from continuing to destroy homes in that predominantly black neighborhood to expand the baseball stadium parking lot. This experience precipitated my interest in investigating the business operations of UT. While it is only one of a number of similar types of experiences I have had since then and plays a minor part in the research that will end up in the dissertation, I want to offer it as an example of the way Littrell’s adversarial methods has plays itself out among grassroots resistance efforts.
Much of the information culled about UT’s attempt to buyout the neighborhood originated in searches of corporate and government documents such as titles and mortgages to learn how UT had quietly hired a realtor to purchase the homes while concealing the name of the actual owner. This information was then circulated through articles and letters in the Austin-American Statesman, Nokoa/The Observer and our ownshort-lived newspaper Ecesis to elicit responses from UT and local politicians. This publicity concurrently generated a student documentary film about Blackland and news articles in the Statesman and investigative articles in the Austin Chronicle, all of which served to confirm much of our research while adding additional information of which we were unaware and allowing us to check our “facts”. The response came one Saturday afternoon when a UT Regent personally oversaw the bulldozing of 16 houses.
The bulldozing, our demonstration, squatting, and the campaign of a neighborhood woman for state representative Wilhelmina Delco’s (D) position, eventually drew attention of the NAACP, local politicians and UT officials, who began to negotiate once again with the neighborhood. To support the neighborhood and homeless activists, about twenty students organized a demonstration on campus and fed about one hundred homeless people, after which we marched to UT President William Cunningham’s office and held a sit-in in the lobby. A few weeks later we also held a bike tour of Blackland. Over the next two years, when a moratorium on UT’s purchases and destruction of houses in the western eight blocks of the 16 block neighborhood was agreed upon, much of our research was confirmed both directly by UT in public responses, personal letters from top UT officials and in negotiating meetings.
Even over the course of the negotiations, additional information was uncovered about UT’s refusal to abide by an earlier agreement with the city to restore some of its boarded up houses for low income housing. Open meetings, memos, city council reports, press conferences and additional newspaper articles added further to what we knew about the situation. The negotiations had served by this time to remove any direct challenge to UT’s plans by the previous coalition by dragging it out over a period of a few years by which time many people had lost interest or a direct say in the negotiations. Decisionmaking had moved from behind closed doors of UT to public debate but the forces that stimulated this change were stripped away in the process. Direct action served to force UT and local politicians to the negotiating table. But this refocused the efforts of the neighborhood coalition from implementing their own decisions about their neighborhood to handing back that decisionmaking power to UT and the city council.
My interest in investigating UT and the growing student movements developed further in 1989 with the publication of the Polemicist, an alternative student newspaper that investigated the everyday operations of UT. In 1990, I began to also investigate UT on my own using the Polemicist’s research as my starting point, eventually participating with other students and staff in uncovering UT’s role in the Persian Gulf War, issues of austerity and entrepreneurialization, and the role of graduate students in UT. During 1992-93, I assisted in the publication of The Other Texan which investigated many of these issues. In each case, many of our experiences paralleled those of the Blackland case.
My involvement with the Blackland struggle was the first time I actively participated in investigating the operations of UT-Austin. Since that time, I have also participated in active investigations regarding UT-Austin’s partnerships with the military and multinational computer companies, budgetary issues and austerity measures, and issues concerning the organization of graduate students. Although the complete details of research from all of these investigations are not included in this dissertation, they were part of the process of informing my methodological approaches. This is especially the case with the attempt to organize graduate students. Like the lone researcher graduate student organizers face the sheer power of the multinational university which not only seeks to disrupt their efforts but puts in question their very role in the corporate process. Revolting graduate students have the potential to become academics who use their collective strength of a movement and research skills to investigate, expose and resist the corporate activities of the university. This was the case in 1989-90 when graduate student researchers exposed hidden funds forcing UT to restore health benefits for graduate employees that had been defunded. There are other recent cases of graduate students successfully using adversarial research methods that combine an analysis of the university as a business with their organizing efforts.[17]
Perhaps this development among graduate students to focus their research on the university in which they work indicates a slow transformation of the research process within the university about the university? Currently, such efforts are not widely supported. As Littrell laments: “Sociologists usually work from weak power bases. Their professional associations offer little or no help. There is no discussion of the impact of power on methods in research methods textbooks. There is no preparation or guidance about when to submit to power or about when and how to resist it. In brief, sociologists have no methodology for research in antagonistic settings” (p. 224). Maybe such experiences that informed this dissertation can contribute to the articulation of adversarial research methods for sociologists.
Comparative Case Studies
The heavy use of local materials originally informed my case study of the entrepreneurialization of UT in my MA thesis. I chose to do a case study of UT primarily because I am driven by a need to better understand the context in which I live and work and relate these everyday experiences in broader sociological terms. Orum, Feagin and Sjoberg develop this idea terms of the usefulness of the case study to understanding our everyday lives, which is certainly in short supply among many graduate students and faculty in the social sciences. The “case study,” they write, “seeks to capture people as they experience their natural, everyday circumstances, it can offer a researcher empirical and theoretical gains in understanding larger social complexes of actors, actions, and motives.”[18] It offers us an inroad to the very perceptions of the actors themselves: “such analyses [of the case study] permit the observer to render social actions in a manner that comes closest to the action as it is understood by the actors themselves. Here the observer wishes to make claims that are grounded in the claims of those who make them.” (p. 8)
This is certainly the case when using documents written and produced by university administrators and students engaged in entrepreneurialization and student movements. Much like interviews, these publications offer direct testimony of the ideas and motivations of these participants although they determine which topics are covered, which is important in itself.
Orum, Feagin, and Sjoberg’s methodology does not account for what happens when the researcher is himself an “actor” as well which is a significant issue in participant observation literature. While some would raise questions of validity in this case, it is possible to recognize the researcher/actor as writing his own oral history which is played off the perspectives of other actors and a vast array of government, university and movement documents. The false distinction between researcher and actor and the remaining myth of objectivity (still seemed to be held to a limited extent by Orum, Feagin and Sjoberg) are shattered.[19] Most apparent in my own case of a graduate student researching the university is the inseparability of the actor/researcher from the institutional context of the university in which I do my research.
Class Power and Methodology
Universities are full of knowledge; the freshmen bring a little in, the seniors take none away … the knowledge accumulates.
-Mark Twain
The potential for successful investigation lies in the recognition of not only the researcher’s position in society as a whole but the very institution in which she works. In my own investigations into UT-Austin specifically, I found my own intent for challenging repressive features of the university complemented those goals of numerous student organizers, organizations and faculty groups focusing on issues such as racism, homophobia, the Persian Gulf War and other like political issues in which I already took part. My limited formal training in sociological research methods which suggested avoidance of controversial topics, direct confrontations, explicit political motivations, and a pseudo-objectivity, could not offer me the methodological means for a thorough investigation of UT-Austin or any similar multinational institution. Like Alexander Cockburn, I found my research methods in the innovative and confrontational approaches of the movement participants with whom I worked, methods both borrowed from past and current student and other “grassroots” movements and methods devised in the heat of the moment. The methods of investigation became inseparable from the means of struggle, a process in flux with the changing nature of struggle:
Direct action – sit-ins, occupations, etc. – is contagious and cumulative among students because it gives them a glimpse of disalienation. During such events the rocksolid structures of the institution seem to dissolve. The mysterious operations of bureaucracy are exposed. Familiar unquestionable routines no longer seem part of the natural order of things. Pretensions of authority seem arrogant and hollow. Before the laughing audience the conjurer has lost his mirrors, his curtain, his false-bottomed hat and his capacious sleeves, and is reduced to simulated jocosity and fervent hopes that the attendants will throw them all out.[20]
Such knowledge of the university as a business becomes possible through the struggle and not merely careful academic observation from the sidelines. Those rising in rebellion throw aside not only that which creates for them alienation in the abstract, but their imposed duties and roles as passive linear students and teachers, devising the means for not only making sense of their world and everyday experiences or just for the sake of knowing or understanding but to change it to serve their many needs and desires. These are the adversarial methods of the class struggle, methods that inform my own dissertation.
Bibliography
[1] “Lecture on Nothing,” reprinted in John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, New Hampshire: Wesleyan Univ., 1959.
[2] Boyd Littrell, “Bureaucratic Secrets and Adversarial Methods of Social Research,” chapter 5 in A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, edited by Ted Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg, and Larry Reynolds, NY: General Hall.
[3] Sjoberg, Gideon and Ted Vaughan’s “The Bureaucratization of Sociology: Its Impact on Theory and Research,” p. 54-113, in Vaughan, Sjoberg and Reynolds, outlines the limitations of sociological methods in studying large multinational organizations such as universities.
[4] Norman Denzin, The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods, 3rd ed., NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989.
[5] Barrow, 1990, p. 250.
[6] Ann C. Bauer and Harry Cleaver, “from Student Minority Report on the Stanford Research Institute,” in Charles Perrow, The Radical Attack on Business: A Critical Analysis, NY: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1972, p. 135-149.
[7] See Vaughan and Sjoberg.
[8] For investigative journalist techniques see John Ullman and Jan Colbert, The Reporter’s Handbook: An Investigator’s Guide to Documents and Techniques. NY: 51. Martin’s. 1991; and Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. (IRE) magazine which coordinated this handbook.
[9] William Filstead, ed,. Qualitative Methodology: Firsthand Involvement with the Social World, Markham Publishing Co., 1970. Filstead makes this argument in the “Introduction,” especially p.7.
[10] Dorothy Smith, “A Sociology for Women,” in the Prism of Sex, ed. by Julia Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck, University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, p. 160.
[11] We often hear of vital data being leaked by unnamed individuals outside and against their official duties. Les Kurtz reminds me that “often when individuals are approached on a personal basis (especially in anonymous contexts), they reveal bureaucratic secrets because they relate as people rather than officials.” (Communication with the Author, February, 1995.)
[12] Daniel Cornfield and Teresa Sullivan, “Fieldwork in the Oligopoly: Protecting the Corporate Subject.” Human Organization, vol. 42, no. 3, Fall 1983.
[13] Howard Schwartz and Jerry Jacobs, Qualitative Sociology: A Method to the Madness, NY: The Free Press, 1979.
[14] Michael Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989.
[15] Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play for Five Stages, New York: Norton & Co., 1974.
[16] While useful for demonstrating my adversarial methods, further discussion of the following movement is not included in this dissertation .
[17] This is discussed in detail by David Barker, “Why we still have health insurance: A case study of the Graduate Professional Association,” The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 3; Karen Palazzini, “The micro and macro of student organizing,” The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 6; and Robert Ovetz, “Who says it can’t be done?!: A history of graduate student organizing and unionization in the US and UT,” The Other Texan, Fall 1992, p. 8.
[18] Anthony Orum, Joe Feagin, and Gideon Sjoberg, “Introduction: The Nature of the Case Study,” chapter 1 in Feagin, Orum and Sjoberg, A Case for the Case Study, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991, p. 8.
[19] Although Ted Vaughan, with whom Sjoberg often works, attacks the researcher/actor dichotomy and locates its origin in the natural science method which provides subjectivity to the researcher to exempt herself from greater forces while positing the actor as having no control over their own lives and constrained by natural social laws. See Vaughan, Sjoberg and Reynolds, p. 32.
[20] Alexander Cockburn, “Introduction,” Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis. Action, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Robin Blackburn, Baltimore: Penguin and London: New Left Review, 1969, p. 12.