vit_r

Severin 2024

Пни Страуса!

Ещё раз про книгу о Grounded Theory. (См. Социология социологической науки / 10 kB / 2024-09-06)

Это была бы очень важная, очень нужная и очень полезная книга. Я бы настоятельно рекомендовал бы эту книгу к прочтению. Я бы советовал изучить её всем, кто хочет узнать, как методология превращается в культ. Из этой книги можно было бы понять, почему развитие информационных технологий пошло не туда. Это была бы одна из лучших прочитанных мною книг.

Если бы...

Если бы автор сам понимал, чего хочет написать.

Вместо того, что могло бы быть, книга превратилась в игру "Пни Страуса!"

Надо сказать, делает автор это метко и со знанием дела. Вот, несколько примеров.

Chapter 2, Preface

I wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to Anselm Strauss with whom I began the grounded theory enterprise in 1965 with intense nightly phone conversations around the evolving research methodology and methods that emerged from our initial work: Awareness of Dying, 1967. Awareness is now published in four languages and still sells today. It was Anselm 's genius that obtained the dying study grant which resourced our enterprise.

Chapter 3, Basic Considerations

How quantitative and qualitative research methods can be used together effectively for a qualitative analysis depends on the research project. Most projects, however, place their emphasis on one form of data collection or another because of conviction, training and the nature of the problem under study. Once into a project the focus of collection and analysis of data becomes quite clear. Most of this book will, obviously, focus on qualitative analysis of qualitative data, because of locale, training and relatively low cost of collection and analysis compared to quantitative research and analysis. Qualitative work can even be done without a grant!

Chapter 9, Axial Coding:

This chapter in Basics of Qualitative Research is a very clear example of Strauss' lack of scholarship in his entire book. It also a clear example of the replete, demanding elegance that preconception and forcing of theory on data can take, when it is sanctioned by a formidable sociologist, no matter what its grounded legitimation. But in this writing the confusing legitimation of Strauss' methods are not happening! Lets us take examples in order as I rewrite his chapter.

Книгу можно было бы использовать как учебный курс, когда на столе лежат те книги, в которых описана методология. И лежит книга Страуса, к каждой главе которой Глейзер даёт свои замечания.

Во-первых, это было бы полезно социологам, чтобы понять что надо и что не надо делать.

Во-вторых, при тщательном анализе можно было бы дойти до тех вопросов, которые автор так и не осилил.

Вместо скучных причитаний о моральной ответственности можно было бы подумать, почему так получилось и какой из этого следует вывод.

Только в последней главе автор пытается поднять философские вопросы, которые надо было задать в самом начале. И на основе которых надо было строить повествование.

Дальше большая цитата, с вырезанными несущественными деталями, а потом мой комментарий.

Chapter 17, Intellectual Property:

When I read Basics of Qualitative Research, by Strauss and Corbin, I discovered to my shock the emergence of the problems of intellectual property in the academic enterprise. It took me eight months of studying the data to discover the basic social process of resolving these problems: writing corrections or just plain correcting wrongs.

As co-originator of the methodology of grounded theory, my history is this. Anselm and I co-authored and originated grounded theory as set forth in 1967 in The Discovery of Grounded Theory. It was an explication of the methodology use in Awareness of Dying. Then in 1978 I wrote Theoretical Sensitivity: Advances in the Methodology of Grounded Theory. Then in 1987 Anselm wrote Qualitative Analysis.

Anselm has never denied my co-origination, but what he has done is totally ignored the study and learning of my input into it from the start, as I discovered while writing Basics of Grounded Theory Analysis. Strauss never took my intellectual property away; he never really gave it but lip service from the start, and always singularly pursued his own methodological bent untouched by the ideas of his co-originator. He never knew nor inquired into my history as it inputed into grounded theory, but more of this in a later section.

Intellectual property has several properties that distinguishes it from material, personal or real properly. It has originators, but no ownership rights of a sticking, binding nature. Who indeed owns what, once it is published? Therefore how does one control, husband and manage his intellectual property without the rights of ownership? What can be done about theft, misuse, abuse, use ignoring the originator? Not much, except maybe a little social control, and usually nothing, especially when it is not easy to understand the material in depth.

Thus, after much thought and contemplating all forms of recourse of control over the fate of grounded theory and over Basics of Qualitative Research, all my efforts turned out useless. I tried three solutions which failed. One was to request that Strauss pull the book off shelves and out of production as just plain wrong. His answer was a clear "No." Another was to go over the book with the idea to hammer out what I though was wrong on virtually 90% of the pages and submit a revised version. Again his answer was "No." Another was to just edit me out of the next edition, whenever. This was just a unilateral effort on Anselm's part to placate me. Strauss' position was that it is the academic's license to just write books as he see fit. My ownership rights were irrelevant — even meaningless to him.

After these futile attempts at repair and much soul searching and thought, I came upon the solution of writing a book of corrections. It was a solution that allowed me to meet my obligation to the many students and colleagues who for 25 years or less have used grounded theory; and if they used it correctly, they would be astounded and confused by Basics of Qualitative Research. They needed to have the methodology of their choice kept accurate. They needed proper backup and references to show how they are doing research and the use and legitimation of their theories; their intellectual products. It is my responsibility to maintain the integrity of grounded theory as set forth in the previous three books and numerous articles. It was necessary to correct the immoral undermining of the original formulations on grounded theory, by returning to the scholarship that Strauss ignored, when I looked squarely and honestly at his purported changes. I am not a neutral third party just writing a critique. I am one of the originators, with the right to keep my product on course for its users.

As the reader has seen in this book, Anselm and I have a profoundly different views of Grounded Theory. What started out as a book of corrections ended up showing that Strauss indeed has used a different methodology all along, probably from the start in 1967, and it was not obvious until our more recent articulations and formulations. Anselm's methodology is one of full conceptual description and mine is grounded theory. They are very different, the first focusing on forcing and the second on emergence. The first keeping all the problems of forcing data, the second giving them up in favor of emergence, discovery, and inductive theory generation. The first exerting super control over the data by preconception, the second trusting to emergence and patience and being controlled by the data. The first keeping the notion of verification and the second starting the notion of generation and suggested hypotheses.

One can follow the methods of Grounded Theory methodology and come up with a substantive theory; it produces it. Anselm Strauss is a writer of great renowned, an author of many significant, excellent monographs. Fortunately, he is not a writer of methodology, so his books could never be arrived at by following his methodology of full conceptual description. Just compare his books to his methodology and see how the former could have been arrived at by using the later. It is doubtful to the max.

The impact of Basics of Qualitative Research on this book has been to render it shallow, which is not my style of dense indepthness. But I was constrained in my task of correcting by the level of his writing methodology. I certainly could not delve into the current problems of grounded theory with thought and subtle process.

My intellectual product's life was at stake. So as regressive as this book may seem, it is necessary. I intend to write another book on new uses and directions in grounded theory.

Not let me get more detailed on these matters by discussing first Strauss's new method, then my intellectual history, and lastly Corbin 's, possible, role in all this.

[...]

Different intellectual properties can be quite hard to discern from each other at times. They can easily look the same to all but the skilled, experienced eye and may even fool the experienced before hard studying. Thus I did not realize Strauss' divergence from grounded theory at first.

When I first read Basics of Qualitative Research, I was outraged at the nonscholarly changes in grounded theory, the reversion to the verificational approach and the required paradigm, the putting back of all the ills of preconception and forcing into the method, why it didn't appear like he had truly read and understood what we had written together, why he seemed to ignore my fundamental inputs into his version of grounded theory and so forth.

Strauss' distortions and wrongs about our intellectual product devastated me. But upon extensive study I began to realize that our joint intellectual product was really two different ones, and was so probably from the start. And one was not an offshoot of the other, nor a gradual transformation over the years of the other. But now I realize that distortions and wrongs were not so, not a transformation of the past. Full conceptual description is a wholly different method from grounded theory. It grew up from the same research as grounded theory, but at the hands of a different research analyst. It is a "new" conceptual method, uniquely suited to qualitative research, that simply uses the grounded theory name, with the author having no realization of what grounded theory was in the first place — what it was in goals, methodology, freedom, level of abstraction, constant comparison, naturalism, emergence, trust and care about what the participants perceive and what their problems are.

No wonder that Strauss wrote Basics of Qualitative Research as if it sprung anew. He never understood grounded theory from the start. Thus Strauss was unfretterred by grounded theory methodology with no need for scholarship and explanation of changes. He had his own methodological program.

Therefore my consolation is that it is another method. And I declare and dissociate myself from his method and book: Basics of Qualitative Research.

[...]

Again he never understood grounded theory in the first place, he never tried to understand, he was totally involved in his own qualitative research program. And it is not the right of intellectual property to advantage one property by claiming it is another, which is more popular, by giving it the same name. So I rename Strauss' method "full conceptual description".

[...]

Anselm loves me, but he never understood me or my roots in sociology and my thoughts and idea input into grounded theory, which shaped it as we know it today. Nor did he ever try to understand my background. As a result, he had no idea he was tampering drastically with my intellectual product. He was just innocently working on his, and misrepresenting me. And this pattern cannot be allow to destroy me, my intellectual property and my products, if Strauss is an honest, moral man.

However, this lack of awareness, still does not obviate the great claim my intellectual roots and forefathers have on the formulations of grounded theory methodology. He had no notions of the meanings of my training under Robert K. Merton, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Harus Zetterberg, Herbert Hyman and Hannan Selvin. He himself certainly was not trained to see and understand the ideas I wove into grounded theory such as elaboration analysis, reason analysis, property space and fourfold tables, consistency analysis, content analysis, matrix analysis, latent structure analysis, conceptual level, different types of sociological units vs process, interchangeabiltiy of indices, concepts and indicator, ecological fallacy, partial analysis, computer sorting, quantitative compared to qualitative methods and analysis and so forth. The list is long and it is well referenced in Discovery of Grounded Theory and Theoretical Sensitivity. I was well trained in a methodology that was out of view of his perspective and program. Anselm just loved what he was doing and assumed I was doing the same thing. Anselm's presented innocence is astounding and it totally blankets his guilt, his exploitativeness and his immorality. He does not get it!

[...]

Julie Corbin presents a clear issue with respect to intellectual property. She is a third party that came along many years later after its origination. She was a student of Strauss' who tried to use grounded theory.

[...]

When I mentioned this issue to Strauss he made very light of her contribution, "she was not very involved," he told me. He intimated that she was just another one of his student, young colleague co-authors, of which there are many in his books, that he generously puts on title of a book. His generosity is because they helped a little, but he is really the main idea man. True or not, Julie did what she did.

[...]

This concludes my effort at correction of Basics of Qualitative Research to a degree of clarity that suits me. I hope to have met my obligation as co-originator of Grounded Theory to save students and colleagues in two ways.

(l) Rescue them from the myriad of non-grounded theory rules and dictums in Basics of Qualitative Research that are required and given under the rubric of grounded theory but are not part of this methodology.

(2) Rejuvenate support for the true nature and integrity of grounded theory and what it stands for in relationship to other methods so i ts users can get directly down to the business of discovery of grounded theory for monographs and papers.

Социологи выясняют, что происходит в обществе и что люди думают. Традиционные методы могут разделить людей на заданные категории, но нужны способы создания новых теорий.

Речь идёт о методологии создания теорий, которая так и называется grounded theory.

И через четверть века после создания в рамках дальнейшего развития один из соавторов пишет книгу, которая превращает методологию сбора и анализа материала в культ.

После чего и происходит этот замечательный срач.

Один соавтор заявляет: "Всё получится само, если правильно собирать и анализировать материал".

На вопрос, почему получится само, и что делать, если само не получится, первый автор ответа не даёт.

Второй соавтор заявляет: "Если вы хотите доказать теорию, то нужно собрать и обработать материал такими-то методами по таким-то протоколам. В результате, у вас получится Наука!"

Вопрос о том, откуда брать теорию, второй соавтор не ставит. Культ работает всегда, потому что он не зависит от реальности и качества собранных данных. Была бы теория пооригинальней и погромче, чтобы импакт фактор отрастить побольше, а дальше уж дело техники. (См. эпиграф.)

Вот на эту тему от самого Страуса.

"Qualitative Analysis For Social Scientists", Anselm L. Strauss, Cambridge University Press, 1987, Fourteenth printing 2003

Prefrace, page XIV:

One last comment: My colleague and co-developer of the grounded theory style of qualitative analysis, Barney Glaser, teaches and uses that style in research essentially as I do. There are some differences in his specific teaching tactics and perhaps in his actual carrying out of research, but the differences are minor. I am very much indebted to him, of course, for his crucial part in the evolution of this analytic style, for continued vital discussions over the years about teaching and doing analysis, and in this book for permission to quote extensively in Chapter 1 from his Theoretical Sensitivity (1978). Indeed, the second half of that chapter is essentially his except for some amplification. The quotations from his book and some from our co-authored volume, Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967), are distinguishable insofar as they are separated from the main text by quotation marks, and occasionally slightly edited or rephrased to suit present purposes. I recommend both books as supplementary reading to this one: Discovery for the general background to this approach to qualitative analysis, and Theoretical Sensitivity for its greater detail concerning some procedures and further discussion of what lies behind their use (see also Charmaz 1983).

[ Charmaz, K. 1983. "The Grounded Theory Method: An Explication and Interpretation." In R. Emerson (ed.), Contemporary Field Research. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., pp. 109-26. ]

Проблема социологии в том, что люди пластичны. Обычно они говорят не то, что думают, а то, что хочет услышать исследователь.

Этим-то и пользуются создатели, проповедники и последователи культов в гуманитарных науках.

Как нетрудно догадаться, борьба с культом оказалась бесполезной. Под термином "grounded theory" cовременные социологи понимают ту гору ненужных ритуалов и диких предположений, что наваял Стаус поверх рабочей методики. А Глейзер известен как чудак, боровшийся за какие-то абстрактные идеалы.

Что же касается остального, смотрел в этом направлении по поводу методов структурирования идей и знаний. Выяснил, что у них технологии занимательные, но у меня лучше.

Что, собственно, понятно, потому что я профессионально работаю с потоками информации между человеком и компьютером. Другое дело, используемые мной методы не масштабируются.

Dmitriy Konstantinov, Garden Modern, 2024-09-22:

Почему в "садовой отрасли" мало хороших специалистов?

Все очень просто. Классный специалист в любой отрасли, это - мутант. Когда я в давние времена руководил отделом в Детском экологическом центре специализирующемся на дополнительном образовании, в сентябре появлялись мамаши-ходоки. Приходит такая и говорит:

- Мы-то с мужем нормальные, но у нас сын/дочь с приветом. С рождения любит птичек (как вариант: зверушек, насекомых, мхи, простейших, цветочки, окаменелости). Английский и математика побоку. Поможете? Или может я не по адресу?

- Очень даже по адресу! Давайте нам вашего мальчика/девочку. Все будет хорошо.

Далее детеныш попадал в узкопрофильный кружок, учился в среде таких же мутантов, ездил в экспедиции, потом поступал на биологический факультет какого-то вуза и далее в профессию.

Сейчас эта дорожка заросла. Детей генетически предрасположенных к занятию околобиологическими направлениями в достаточно раннем возрасте ломают родители, школа, окружение и соцсети. Их судьба незавидна.

Вы можете представить выпускника школы, который говорит родителям: идите в жопу с вашей профориентацией, я хочу быть ботаником!

Лично я - не могу.

И они становятся менеджерами, юристами, банковскими служащими и т.п. Всю жизнь занимаются херней, которую искренне ненавидят. Некоторым удается соскочить с этого тупикового вектора в возрасте 40+, но уже поздно. Образование не то и скоро в грунт.

Напоследок, интересное из сегодняшней ленты.

Томер Цабан, Исповедь "псевдоараба", 2024-10-22:

Однажды мы с командой играли роль "шахидов". Это было нужно для того, чтобы собрать толпу и выявить тех, кто ею манипулирует и руководит. Мы с товарищами идем во главе шествия, выкрикиваем антиизраильские и юдофобские лозунги, а за нами — тысячи арабов, которые смотрят на нас с обожанием и восторгом и повторяют каждое наше слово. Происходит такая сюрреалистичная картина, как будто бы мы находимся внутри фильма, и грань между реальностью и выдумкой стирается. С одной стороны, это огромный выплеск адреналина, чувство опасности и невероятного приключения. С другой, когда понимаешь, что у тебя начинается раздвоение личности, и ты уже плохо отличаешь правду от вымысла, становится по-настоящему страшно. В какой-то момент я начал понимать, что схожу с ума, и тогда решил, что пора заканчивать с этой службой. Но это произошло спустя три года.