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3 Research as Innovation: An Invitation to Creative and Imaginative Inquiry Processes
Celiane Camargo-Borges and Sheila McNamee
Much has been written in the past few decades questioning whether or not the scientific research tradition is the best one for exploring and understanding the social world (Law, 2004; Parker, 2005; McNamee and Hosking, 2012). Particularly today, in our technological, globalized, and interconnected world, the ability of traditional research methods to address complex matters is called into question (Camargo-Borges, 2018a; Hilary, 2000; Karakas, 2009; Nowotny et al., 2008). This questioning is not focused on whether or not the scientific research tradition is right or wrong; the question is whether this research tradition is the only legitimate form of research.
In 1973, Kenneth Gergen argued that social psychological research actually presented an historical description of the social world, not a predictive one as claimed by social scientists (Gergen, 1973). In the same decade, Latour and Woolgar (1979) showed us how scientists actually construct, through the research process, what come to be considered facts. And in 2014, Gergen illustrated that, rather than mirroring what is actually going on in the social world (an assumption made about the research process), research actually serves to form the (unknown) future, uniting his earlier argument that research is historical with Latour and Woolgar's acknowledgment that research is about creating possibilities. In other words, our research endeavors are less an exploration of ‘what is’ and more an opening to ‘what might be’.
Relational approaches that explore the creation of new understandings about the social world, such as social construction, argue that research practices should be intertwined with context, culture, and local histories (McNamee and Hosking, 2012; Gergen et al., 2015). In this way, research can be seen as a process of innovation, embracing contemporary challenges and creating potential futures. Innovating in research is the act of conducting research that might point us (and the communities we examine) in a generative and useful direction. In this chapter, we will explore the metaphor of research as innovation and examine the role of creativity and imagination in the process of inquiry.
Here, we use the term creativity in the sense that the focus of our research is on collaborating with people, communities, and institutions to examine together how the complexity and multiplicity within which we live can be embraced. In creative inquiry, the researcher moves away from the logic of either/or1 and navigates toward the spectrum of opportunities, not thinking in oppositions or polarities, but embracing ambiguity, uncertainty, possibility (Montuori, 2006), and multiplicity. We use the term imaginative in the sense that we support modes of research that seek to envision and explore ideas, meanings and scenarios that have previously remained unspoken or minimized. Instead of asking the very same questions validated by previous research protocols and instruments, imaginative inquiry is more interested in developing new questions that will offer new intelligibilities – new ways of understanding our social worlds – thereby forming new futures. Imagination adopts a fluid and less fixed view of meaning, encouraging ingenuity, spontaneity, and novelty.
To that end, imagination can be seen as the ability to produce and simulate novelty in practice. Thus, like Janowski and Ingold (2012) who see imagination as not exclusively a cognitive process, we propose that imagination is linked to place and body. Imagination also involves setting up relationships with materials and people.
This suggests that, in our research efforts, we cease asking questions concerning the best way to achieve some specific outcome and instead ask questions concerning how we might coordinate together and construct new, useful possibilities. In this sense, research serves as an intervention – a process of transformation (McNamee, 1988). To acknowledge any research process as a form of social intervention/transformation, is to accept that, in defining the research process, selecting the participants, and framing the questions, we are already setting the stage for reflections, dialogue, and opportunities for new configurations in the system. We are not (as is often presumed in more traditional understandings of research) simply promoting knowledge about a system – knowledge that has presumably been ‘discovered’ due to the researcher's formulation of the right questions, examination of the right phenomena, and use of the proper tools of analysis. As a consequence of acknowledging research as a process of social transformation, the results of research are already moving researcher and participants toward an unfolding and newly constructed future.
We call this process research as innovation. As a consequence, we also stop seeking the best method for collecting data. Instead, we examine what sort of methods, resources and practices we can embrace as researchers who acknowledge what is, to us, the most important aspect of examining the social world – finding ways to go on together (Wittgenstein, 1953). That means the focus is on the participants, the process and the context. In other words, research is always situated and, depending on these situational features (e.g., participants, processes, and context), different methods are likely to be considered useful in different moments. If our attempt is to be innovative – to create new possible ways of making sense of the social world and to create the possibility for new ways of acting – we must remain fluid in our approach to research and sensitive to local, cultural, and contextual features of a given inquiry process.
We begin here by providing a brief overview of some of the main distinctions between the scientific research tradition and research as a process of social construction. Our attempt, as stated previously, is simply to make visible the taken-for-granted and broadly unquestioned understanding of research so that we might open the possibility for a plurality of approaches. We then move on to discuss social construction and research as innovation. We will close with some illustrations of research approaches that fit squarely within the constructionist attempt to focus on relationality, participation, collaboration and the creation of potential and possibility.
The Research Tradition and Constructionist Assumptions
The dominant research tradition has emerged within a modernist worldview (McNamee, 2010). Modernism assumes that, with the proper methods, tools and techniques, we will be able to discover reality, as well as describe it, as it really is. Of course, part and parcel of this assumption is the belief that there is a reality to be discovered.
Constructionist thinking, on the other hand, challenges the notion that there is one reality to be discovered. In fact, research within a constructionist frame challenges the very idea of discovery, itself (McNamee and Hosking, 2012; Gergen, 2014). Rather than discover reality, the assumption is that we create reality in our interaction with our topic of research, with the framing of our research objectives and questions and, consequently,
