Research as Stories: A Subjective Academic Narrative

Abstract

The subject of this paper addresses how the academic world depends upon peer reviews of scholarly narratives. The goals of this paper are to present a challenge to how such narratives are usually performed subject to a strict set of rules and regulations that have become formulaic since the Enlightenment processes of scientific methodology dominated the academy). Over the later part of the 20th century and this early 21st century, there has been much debate about the relationship of social science methodologies and those of the natural sciences. This debate reveals that the various natural sciences themselves have formulated different methodologies and that the social sciences have moved from aping the natural science methodologies to an array of qualitative ones. At the same time, the refereed peer reviewed journals almost all ask for Enlightenment style articles to disperse social science knowledge within a continuing paradigm that bows still to the Enlightenment values of Adam Smith and David Hume. The method of this paper is to practise and to survey the telling of a research story as a narrative that discusses documenting case studies through recording and analysing interviews; the case study and/as narrativity and the methodologies emerging through ethnography and auto ethnography. The theoretical perspectives engaged with include postmodernist deconstruction and the rhizomatic text as well as narrativity and the anecdotal within scholarship.