Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

1 “Unsettle, criticize, and challenge taken-for-granted, repressed meanings
2 Invite moral and ethical dialogue while reflexively clarifying their own moral
position
3 Engender resistance and offer utopian thoughts about how things can be
made different
4 Demonstrate that they care, that they are kind
5 Show instead of tell, while using the rule that less is more
6 Exhibit interpretive sufficiency, representational adequacy and authentic
adequacy
7 Are political, functional, collective, and committed.”
A good auto-ethnographic story should prevent that lives are turned into categories
and theories, narratives should be more than another source of data to
advance social theory. Good narratives are about a struggle between the personal
and the cultural meanings, about that human suffering - in a broad sense –
matters and that good narratives require a reflexive reader who wants to enter
in dialogue with the writer (Bochner, 2001).
Some remarks concerning auto-ethnography and a complex responsive
process-approach
An important difference between auto-ethnography and a complex responsive process-approach
is to be noted regarding how the purpose of a narrative is articulated.
As far as narratives of auto-ethnographic origin are meant to provoke resistance,
utopian thoughts and political engagement, it will become clear that a complex responsive
process-approach is quite restrained in connecting a general political engagement
to its research. Instead of a messy world, a complex responsive process-approach
departs from an unpredictable world and by that becomes logically bound to a
rather modest point of view regarding the possibilities of intentional social or organizational
change. However, that does not alter the fact that narratives should be for
instance unsettling, dialogical, caring and authentic.
The radically reflexive character of auto-ethnography, the premises and key features
as painted, and the demands for a good narrative lead to the questions of what
standards for good radically reflexive research might be appropriate. Where reflexive
research possesses auto-ethnographic features, the demand to account for e.g. the
authenticity of the narrative will need an appropriate definition of credibility. Concerning
relevance and external and internal validity of auto-ethnographic and more
special of research from a complex responsive process perspective, I will frame the
discussion on relevance and external and internal validity. After that I will return to
how relevance and ‘external and internal validity’ - then between brackets - can be
accounted for from a complex responsive process perspective.
In the extremes the tension between a realistic or positivistic and post-modernistic or
anti-foundational orientation on science plays a part with regard to the soundness of
research from a complex responsive process perspective. Radically reflexive research
2. Research from a complex responsive process-approach | 43