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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