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A Foundering Research Project. Revisiting Three Posts

This sequence of three posts tells how the failure to communicate among researchers and their failure to see clearly and quickly their local reality had disastrous consequences for their research project.

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The original posts can be found at

(1) Sociological Research Project—Organization of Medical Services in a Neighborhood. Part I (August 28, 2007)

(2) Research Project in Social Organization Part II (August 31, 2007)

(3) Research Confusion. Interorganized Medical Units Part III (September 3, 2007)

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A government agency gives a research grant to Professor X who does not have time to do the work himself so he hires as principal investigator a drop-out graduate student Y with a growing family who needs a steady job. The grant money gives X the chance to start a research organization attached to the university. If successful X’s power and influence will increase. X is very generous and gives investigator Y an appointment to the graduate school as well as a regular salary and health insurance. Y is back on track to complete his doctoral work. Things are looking good all around.

But the relationship between X and Y is flawed. Neither is forthcoming. Hopes are hidden. X is not a skillful researcher. He is most comfortable with a thinly veiled centrist political vision. While he has received some attention in the field, mainly for his quick wit, he has reached a limit. Developing an active research organization will earn him a credibility he otherwise lacks. His repudiation for intelligence and energy will receive a necessary fillip. The department within which they work has a history of emphasis on research .

Y’s research strength is hands-on. In graduate school he studied with a man steeped in the Chicago School method and tradition. A close-in talking to and watching the actors in a setting. Allowing the story, the pattern, the insight to come to him from the inside. It combines conceptual sophistication with the journalist’s way with a story.

From the beginning there is a confusion over what the research question actually is. The starting premise is that over time neighboring agencies and organizations in the same field will develop relationships and these will take a systemic and cooperative form. The research job: to describe these interconnects and indicate how they work.

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In the original posts I used stories and songs and associated ideas to describe the experience. The theme is of partnerships that do not work.

It was a. research project whose first mystery was in the false trail laid by its sponsor. Y thought he had to find a natural association among the several medical agencies of a neighborhood. A growth toward an integrated system was expected to occur either without or in spite of any intervention from the outside.

But this is a classic case of misplaced concreteness. In a conceptual model a situation is described that may not exist in a particular concrete case. It is possible that a cooperative relationship is not there. But even if it is there, it may not be sourced in the voluntary inventions of locals but be imposed by external overarching controls. In the organization of medical agencies the imposed order comes from funding groups formed by religious communities and governmental agencies. The patterns of relationship found come from outside.

Local voluntarism in the form of networks of friends and colleagues in different agencies keeping in contact is informal.and episodic. The most significant of these nets might be at the upper reaches of administration and finance and law. They are not readily accessible to the outsider and are usually not consciously exploited within the formal system. This is a concrete question. Y did not have the direct method to test for its presence or its extent. Anecdotal evidence from informants suggested that it was not significant.

In the research Y found a medical organizer (let us call him Z), a young public health doctor, a Harvard graduate, who with an appointment at the local hospital, over a few years, gathered government grants and organized satellite medical agencies through the neighborhood and in the doing ballooned the medical order significantly. Through administration and finance these were anchored upon Z in his own person. He also organized seminars for local general practitioners in the neighborhood who had no hospital affiliations (were otherwise unconnected) and began to give them access and support. Z interventions were from the outside. He was a classic cadre mediator of funds and plans from government to local people. He had a more radical purpose than most but worked for the same old boss. The failure of his initiative should have been the central issue of the X-Y research project. In a perfect world X,Y, and Z should have combined to present the entire story.

The falling out of X and Y was unfortunate. They were holding the two ends of the same stick. The dilemma of cadre versus ordinaries. The question of the relative weight of a local democratic self-governing order versus an imposed external order however benevolent.

Y should have been more assertive. Demanded that X give the project more personal attention. They should have continued adjusting toward a more realistic model, blocking out issues and the methods needed for their their resolution. The research program and the work had to be flexible and yield and adjust to the emerging facts and ideas. Y had to confront X early on, make him part of the process. In the event X and Z were not aware that the other existed.

Looking back the study required a quick blocking out of the three major issues: (1) the formal system of order imposed by the power and financial centers, (2) the role of Z, the public health entrepreneur, and the resistance (as well as the support) he encountered among the people of the neighborhood and the various overriding authorities, (3) the issue of the impact of the informal orders at the several social levels—executive, line, clients.

X, Y, and Z with a little openness and cooperation could have produced a hell-of-a-study, including (1) Z’s initiative and his eventual defeat. (2) The role of the funding agency and the doubling back on Z with the seemingly blind research project assigned to X. (3) The political agitation of students and local groups (one agency was occupied by a local group protesting some policy or other while the research was on-going) set the background for the research attention that had been mobilized. And, (4) of course, Z’s exile to Hong Kong, X’s transfer to the basement of the White House, and Y losing his job and his last chance at a conventional career. In sum: the dispersion of the gang that never really existed.

C’est la vie.

Notes and out-takes possibly leading toward a sociology of research.

Social research is a conscious encounter where one attempts to mark the event and evaluate its content and outcome. It starts with a question, specific or implied. An unknown is converted to a knowing whose specific content is only revealed as it occurs.

The going out. The Buddha as child and youth had been protected by his parents from seeing the down side. They used political power and wealth to keep him in the light fantastic just this side of paradise. But behind the facade and the illusion were poverty, illness, corruption, indifference, pain, death. Sensing this other side of reality the Buddha decided to investigate and abandoning the pleasure dome he began a second life of research. Peripatetic, travel and wandering, engaging the other in all of its numbers and variety. But also a retreat into contemplation. Eventually he found and expounded the shared unity of the whole in the passing though that is our fate.

The act of research. A transient, open eye, rejection of deception, gloss, misinformation. Sensing what is and is not.. Using a reasoned method to know it. Intrinsically it is not a trivial pursuit. The first step is finding a mystery, an anomaly, an I-don’t-know-what. A lot of adventurers, those of the closed mind, lose their way at this door. Some seem to ask but then only accept a foreordained answer. One can predict, but to insist or ordain is not research. Research is like gambling. If the outcome is known the game has been fixed.

From American Indian lore another way to encounter reality. The way of the warrior, the body and the tools, the myths providing a history and a connection to the environment–the hunt, the raid, searching for a vision alone in the forest through starvation, drugs, dreams

This generalized research act centers on a carrying group with a culture, a history, and a social organization. These centering groups find mutually contradictory and alien answers, Disagreement is within the socio-cultural difference. Some mutual tolerance has developed through a dimly seem unity but among them there is also a mutual incomprehensibility. The method and way of the other makes no sense, is madness, error, even willful evil. A long history of persecutions and holy wars.

Pluralism has always been among us. It is a side-bar, an added proviso. My way is the right way but it is not your way and I accept that and permit that and continue on my way and wish you luck, comrade. We can be different and still in solidarity. Yet deep rejection persists..

So this act of research. This embrace of the encounter is an act of faith in itself. One always starts with the methods and concepts of his reference group but in the experience of the contact with the other one may be jarred lose, find the anomaly, the unexpected, the mystery inside of his own received way. And find his own line, word, identity. The wisdom gained will be here.

The study of this struggle with reality, this generalized notion of research as similar acts in different traditions belongs to the sociology of knowledge.

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A Foundering Research Project. Revisiting Three Posts

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