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On some discursive positions on scientific excellence and visibility taken by Finnish natural and social scientists: How metaphorising could make sense of what research interviews are about

Seppo Poutanen* (University of Turku), Jutta Ahlbeck-Rehn (Åbo Akademi University), Anne Kovalainen (Turku School of Economics) & Susan Molyneux-Hodgson (The University of Sheffield)

*Theoretical developments and interpretations of empirical material in this article are the

responsibility of Seppo Poutanen only

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Introduction

- a researcher must begin by positioning her- or himself in relation to her or his research material: experimental application of Alison Pullen’s ideas

(A. Pullen 2006: ‘Gendering the Research Self: Social Practice and Corporeal Multiplicity in the Writing of Organizational Research’. Gender, Work and Organization 13, 3: 277-298)

- researcher and her subjects are corporeal multiplicities (Pullen 2006)

- metaphorising as a method is not based on exact

phrasing or semantic idiosyncrasies expressed by interviewees (Poutanen 2008)

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Methodological underpinnings

From Pullen (2006):

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The methods/strategies of re-writing ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’

From Pullen (2006):

- re-citing: strategy of redeploying discursive

resources to expose the intertextuality of self-making

- re-siting: strategy of pulling women out of such epistemological spaces that make them abject sources of knowledge

- re-sighting: new ways of seeing should also be striven for as a strategy

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Putting Pullen’s methods into work: Metaphorising as re-citing, resiting and re-sighting

metaphorising has potentiality to:i) metamorphose often too-polished looking

autobiographical confessions of a researcher into something more interesting and intertextual (re-ci.);

ii) contribute to construction of, for example, a gender perspective that is, to quote Silvia Gherardi, “ironic, nomadic, and eccentric” (Gherardi 2003, 232) (resi.); and

iii) make us see our research practice in a new and illuminating light (re-sig.)

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Master metaphor: a research community of Finnish natural scientists as a node in an international network of espionage

- scientific documents are photographed as a matter of routine

- fixing the value of some new piece of information is complicated business

- a seemingly prestigious scientific organisation may in fact be a sham organisation

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Master metaphor: a research community of Finnish social scientists as a contentious family business

- the small size of the family business does not stop the kinsfolk from disagreeing what not only success but even the branch actually means in this business

- nobody is born to be a social researcher, but many have rather drifted towards the field than actively chosen it as their career

- polite indifference normally prevails in ceremonial family meetings, such as yearly nationalconferences in the field