METHODOLOGY: A (CASE) STUDY I now turn to the methodology which shaped my study. I use the term “study” deliberately because it encapsulates the notion of paying close and continuing
attention to a topic, scrutinising it from various perspectives. The word can also mean a preliminary “trying out” of ideas for a more definitive later work. That, too, seems appropriate here. However, there is a third meaning of the word “study” which is relevant, one taken up by Massey in a provocative chapter on research methodology, “Imagining the field” (Massey, 2003), in which she invites the reader to reflect philosophically on the traditional dichotomy between research conducted in the field and in the study. Referring to the naturalist Georges Cuvier in late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century France, she rehearses debates about where researchers are best placed to carry out their work. The study (or in Cuvier’s case, the museum) offers distance from the field with the chance to reflect critically, make comparisons, gain an outsider perspective; the field, on the other hand, offers the vividness and immediacy of being an insider, embedded in a world in action. However, Massey is also concerned with how language itself shapes the researcher’s stance. In anthropology, for example, the imagination of the field is “a significant element in the articulation of the relationship between the anthropologist and the peoples being studied. It substantially affects, recursively, the nature of the encounter” (2003, p. 76). She dwells on Richard Rorty’s argument that since language is the means by which we come to know what we know, we need new vocabularies to articulate new ideas to replace those which have become entrenched or outworn; in Rorty’s words, we must make “an attempt at redescription” (Rorty, 1989, p. 45). Indeed, “the field” is not “out there waiting to be discovered; rather, it is already linguistically constructed and the researcher’s aim must be imaginatively to reformulate this construction in such a way that new avenues can be opened up, new ideas and practices can flow” (Massey, 2003, p. 77). The design of my research touched on many of these issues, for example, who might constitute the insider or the outsider at different points in the process or what constituted the field. Whether to describe my project as a case study rather than just a study raised yet more problems. Michael Bassey’s detailed account in Case study research in educational settings (Bassey, 1999) shows the hostility there has often been towards case studies and the accusation that they are lacking in rigour or unyielding of generalisation. Debates about case study research have whittled away some of its nuances, leaving it apparently enfeebled. Looking at earlier writing, the concept regains something of its freshness. Lawrence Stenhouse, for example, articulates ideas generated at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia in the 1970s. He argues that it is precisely because a case is an instance that it gains stature. Although it is not, like a sample, representative, generalisation can still arise where there is an accumulation of case study data, generated over time (Stenhouse, 1978). Bassey’s summary of the vicissitudes of case study research ends with an acknowledgement of one of Stenhouse’s former colleagues at CARE, Helen Simons, writing almost twenty years after Stenhouse about what she still perceives to be one of the essential strengths of case study, namely that the interaction it allows between the individual and the whole, the unique and the universal, can be construed as a paradox, not a problem. She argues that we need to welcome the inevitable complexity of the people and situations we research, analysing tensions but not always seeking to resolve them: “To live with ambiguity, to challenge certainty, to creatively encounter, is to arrive, eventually, at ‘seeing’ anew” (Simons, 1996, p. 238). Simons’ use of the word “encounter” signals an approach to research in which the researcher expects to come up against something that is different and to focus on what arises when different