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Philosophies of research into higher education

In this book Brown and Baker are concerned to display the variety of background assumptions made by researchers into higher education. They try not to hide the complexity. The authors point out that competing assumptions are made about the very nature and purpose of higher education. There is huge diversity also in researchers’ presumptions about the appropriate way in which one should go about the task of explaining or understanding higher education. And the field encompasses research at various levels of analysis from the individual through the interactional to the sociohistorical (with serious disparities of approach at each level). Underlying all this are contested epistemologies and ontologies. How messy this research field is! In exasperation, the then UK Secretary of State responsible for education Blunkett (2000, 2) demanded that educational researchers should focus on issues relevant to policy; they should ‘take into account the reality of many people’s lives’ and should stop presenting as ‘intellectual inquiry or critique’ work which was actually thinly disguised ideology. We have here a crisis of legitimacy. There can be tensions, then, between politicians and educational researchers, and between educational researchers and practising teachers or lecturers, and Brown and Baker set out to look for ‘ways in which research, practice and policy could be made to converge’ (1). They began their work, apparently, in the hope that research into higher education could be more ‘useful, innovative and better designed’ if researchers, politicians and teachers were all clearer about the bases of research methods. However, by the end of the book the hope of greater mutual understanding between the interested parties when it comes to research in higher education has waned, though ‘we do not want to convey the impression that research is useless or that attempts to know the social world of education are futile’ (158). The problems which beset mutual understanding include the complexities of the field and the highly contentious question of methodology. The book is an introductory one, aimed at familiarising readers with such orientations as positivism, realism, interpretivism and postmodernism (3). Though the accounts of theoretical positions are introductory, at the same time an effort is made throughout to stress the complexity and contested nature of the field. So the introductory chapter moves quickly from Talcott Parsons and functional analysis to Gadamer, stressing the contrast between these two Gadamer focuses not on the functions of social systems but the fusion of horizons between members of the conversation that is society. Then we have Lyotard and Foucault, telling us about knowledge and power, Bourdieu (on forms of capital), Popper (claiming falsifiability as the mark of scientific knowledge), Geertz (on knowledge not as falsifiable