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Through a critique of a bricolage project undertaken on teaching, Wagner criticizes taking a
narrow approach as being a “loose thread” (1990, p. 78), and instead considers that if
bricolage is to be rigorous, it must incorporate more facets, including recognising the abstract
in different forms of knowledge. Certainly, this project could potentially be regarded as
narrow by those who take a more avant-garde approach to bricolage. However, given that it is
steeped in both practical methodologies (CDA, visual analysis and historical research) and
abstract theories (for example, Gramsci’s and Althusser’s notions of hegemony and
ideological power), it can be seen to be making a concerted effort to construct a broad
encompassing methodology, thereby incorporating concrete and abstract forms of knowledge.
3.1.3 Bricolage and this project.
An important reason for adopting a bricolage approach to this research (even with CDA being
the leading and dominant methodology), is because of a concerted effort to overcome
potential criticisms of methodological weaknesses that could be lodged at using only a CDA
approach (see, for example, Schegloff, 1997, 1998, 1999). In this way, bricolage is being
used to strengthen the variety of approaches selected for this project. Ensuring that the
bricolage approach used in this research is grounded in theoretical understanding avoids a
potential hotchpotch of methodological ideas, with no links to each other, and sees that “the
methods…serve the aims of the research, not the research serve the aims of the method” (as
cited in Pink, 2001, p. 4).
In many ways, bricolage is still an experimental methodology. Drawing on a variety of
methodologies, theories and philosophies, the way it is being applied in qualitative research is
emerging as a new frontier of knowledge construction, with increasing moves against
research embedded only in positivist paradigms. Bricoleurs are thus able to undertake
research “…freed from reductionistic conventions in ways that facilitate their moves not to an
anything-goes model of research but to genuinely rigorous, informed multiperspectival ways
of exploring the lived world” (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 337). At this point in its history, however,
bricolage remains on the fringe of accepted norms of research. With increased use and
adaptation it will potentially become more accepted across a number of research fields,
including as already seen in social sciences, environmental studies, education, and business
studies. This project therefore, presents as a modest attempt at bricolage. There is further
ground to be made in order to start to integrate reconceptualisations of methodologies and
improvisation into this type of research. However, by combining only a small number of
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