Context and Theorizing in the Global South: Challenges and Opportunities for an International Dialogue.
| Autor | Ger, Guliz |
Brazilian researchers have been encouraged to internationalize their research, expanding their insertions into high impact international journals. This task in turn demands thinking outside the commonly used Eurocentric prism. How can Brazilian scholars say something that would be of interest globally and have an impact on the work done in the global North? How should the researcher from the global South deal with context in the international dialogue to avoid being perceived as the exotic Other? This interview with professor Guliz Ger addresses these and other important issues related to the challenge of theorizing and publishing research from a global perspective. Professor Ger's work inspires Brazilian researchers in their internationalization efforts by offering concrete examples of how to theorize, strategies to overcome editors' and journals' prejudices and convince the international audience of the value of global South, and more particularly, Brazilian research. Professor Ger's experience as a visiting professor in numerous universities around the world including in Brazil, and her service on a number of journal editorial boards, including the Journal of Consumer Research, for which she served as Associate Editor, provided the background for this interview produced by Maribel Suarez and Thaysa Nascimento.
Maribel and Thaysa: What is the relevance of contexts in the construction of theory?
Guliz: Contexts are fertile and germane to the interrelated processes of generating research questions and conceptualizing the findings. The iterative interpretive spiral of theory-data (or, data-theory) rests as much in our ability to use our theoretical toolbox as our skill to use our context. The researcher, equipped with a perspective attained from the literature, can potentially notice puzzles, anomalies, or paradoxes while observing real-world phenomena or occurrences in their natural settings--in their contexts. A focus on what is not explained in a particular context by existing theories, conventional conceptualizations, or conventional wisdom in turn stimulates new research projects, discoveries, and/or problematizations (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) of the extant literature; and thus potential theory development and interesting contributions (Davis, 1971; DiMaggio, 1995; Locke & Golden-Biddle, 1997; Sutton & Staw, 1995; Weick, 1995).
It is misleading to think that context matters only for the so-called qualitative researchers. All researchers operate within certain contexts, whether they reflect on it or not. Evocative contexts serve to arouse curiosity among both quantitative and qualitative researchers. However, these researchers typically deal with contexts in very different ways. When collecting data, quantitative researchers aim to control the settings, and to isolate and manipulate variables, aiming to produce causal inferences. While the best quantitative researchers contextualize their findings, most assume their results are generalisable across times and places. Conversely, being aware of the specificity of contexts, many qualitative researchers, particularly from the global South, tend to assume that their findings apply only to their unique contexts. However, by identifying and theorizing the factors and dynamics in their context, they can also generalize via extrapolation, comparison of differences and similarities, and delineation of the boundary conditions. In other words, despite appearances and typical research practices, good practice for any research--qualitative or quantitative--is to reflect throughout the research time horizon on the cultural, social, temporal, and material aspects that permeate and enable or restrain a particular observation as well as the production of knowledge and its boundaries.
Maribel and Thaysa: Considering the relevance of context for qualitative researchers, how can it be used in favor of producing good theory?
Guliz: As Price, Arnould, and Moisio (2006) note, contexts offer texture and veracity for theoretical stories, but they do not substitute for theories. These authors comment on the dangers of focusing on or "overabsorption by contexts" (Price, Arnould, & Moisio, 2006, p. 108), as well as review how contexts have been used to build theory in extant literature. As their review also indicates, contexts help us theorize by inviting comparison. A well-chosen context reveals some difference - from what our theories and literature have accounted for thus far - from so-called conventional wisdom. Attempts to explain such a difference can potentially yield a new theorization or an extension or modification of existing conceptualizations. It is important that we do not lose ourselves in the context and treat is as something so unique that it cannot be compared with anything else. On the contrary, by comparing our observations in our context to analogous or homologous ones in other contexts in the literature, as well as relevant theoretical accounts, we can uncover new understandings.
Researchers develop theory based on prior theory, in dialogue with prior theories. The role of context is to provide a phenomenon, an event, a practice, or an occurence to be interpreted and understood through conceptual lenses. The eye trained in the literature (that is, theory) notices something interesting in some context. Alternatively, what a scholar sees in a context depends on her theoretical background or her favorite theory. That is, what we notice and don't notice tend to depend on our own theoretical focus. Hence, the link between context-theory is paramount with respect to both detecting a subject worth investigating as well as accounting for the findings.
The challenge is to locate the best context to spawn novel and interesting insights. A related challenge is to realize that a compelling, richly described context, by itself, is not enough to produce an understanding beyond mere description. As researchers, our endeavor consists of going beyond conventional explanations/understandings in the literature, sometimes by subverting common sense ideas, offering relationships and explanations that may not be discernable at first look, but are built by the researcher's ingenuity, theoretical depth, and analytical capacity. On the one hand, a given context is chosen if it is conducive to understanding a certain phenomenon and/or demonstrating a proposed theoretical relationship. On the other hand, the researcher needs to skillfully and insightfully weave connections between the observations (and smells, sounds, textures) offered by the context and the abstract ideas that she develops, in dialogue with the literature, so that she can offer a new contribution.
Maribel and Thaysa: Given the importance of context, should we highlight it as an integral part of our theory?
Guliz: Context is not a part of our theory; however, it is an integral part of the process of building theory. Context is part of the scholars' theory-building toolbox, akin to our methodological and theoretical toolboxes. Contexts give us boundaries including how, when, where, and under what conditions our theories apply. Contexts show us unexplained differences. Thus, context is germane for us to generate a framework to show how, when, and why the theorization is not restricted to the specific context in which it was generated. Good qualitative research is bound to seek theoretical generalizability or extrapolation, evidencing new constructs and their complex interactions in social life, which can also occur in other spatio-temporal conditions.
Let me give a concrete example related to my experiences interacting with Brazilian researchers. When they present their projects, Brazilian researchers usually begin with In Brazil... or the Brazilian popular classes. This assumption of and emphasis on singularity from the start, limits the potential broader contributions and generalizibility of their findings. I've studied and worked in the USA for ten years and no one there starts their presentation with an assertion such as in the United States..., the American women... It is always the women, the middle class, etc. What a Brazilian scholar finds about Brazilian popular classes can well be extrapolated to other social groups in other socio-cultural contexts, even if the phenomenon might not be the same at the manifest level. That is, generalization or extrapolation may require analogical thinking and abstraction. For example, based on the voluntarily-covered urban-educated women in Turkey, my co-author and I can generalize our insights about stigmatization and destigmatization, not to other covered Islamic women, but to other stigmatized groups of people and dynamics of destigmatization.
Maribel and Thaysa: What is the problem with this excessive emphasis on Brazilian peculiarities?
Guliz: Why do we have to limit our thinking so much? Why do we have to start with the assumption that some practice, activity, process, event, form, interaction, relationship, etc., that we see in Brazil can only be observed in Brazil and only be explained by Brazilian characteristics? Doesn't this assumption amount to a view that (social) theory cannot be universal but should be context-specific? Generally, Brazilian researchers only describe what is happening in their unique context referring to Brazilian features, dynamics and elements. I live in Turkey and it is the same with many academics in Turkey. Of course, there are specificities about each place, contexts are unique. However, such a priori assumptions end up offering barriers to generalization and extrapolation, as well as contribution and impact, and thus internationalization of Brazilian research. If you assume that what you will find will apply only to Brazil, you will interpret what you observe as a Brazilian feature. This gives rise to the second assumption, which is that you cannot contrast and compare what happens here with any other context. Third, such...
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