A postmodern critical theory of research use

A Postmodern Critical Theory of Research Use

John M. Watkins

The knowledge use field is in a state of conceptual disarray that has contributed to problems in the dissemination and use of knowledge. Ex- arnining the nature of knowledge in a critical realist epistemology results in a reconceptualization of knowledge use from a postmodern critical theorist perspective. This theory takes as its focus the study of research, dissemination, and use as cultural structure, ritual, and ideology; and addresses concerns about knowlege use by articulating a conceptual framework that triangulates among issues related to knowledge construction, power and action, and ethics and ideology, as integral to any concept of knowledge and its use.

Recently I had the privilege of sitting in on a shared leadership meeting in a school that uses inquiry to facilitate their decision-making processes. Two professors from the local university at tended as guests. I was present as a representative of the Northeast Regional Laboratory, in an ongoing "partnership" to aid them in their attempts at inquiry and change. The school had experienced an increase in the number and intensity of various kinds of crises among children and their families over the past few years. They had decided that their leadership team needed to find a way to address this issue, using a modified action research approach.

They talked for three hours. They referenced the school's emerging vision and questioned their knowledge of other less explicit belief systems operating in the school. They worked to develop a set of questions that might guide their inquiry, and some sort of "construct" that could frame it. They spoke of the complex contexts within which children act and within which teachers interpret those actions and construct responses. They ment ioned the work of various psychologists who had written widely on needs and meeting them. They discussed their own crises, of

John M. Watkins is a private consultant at Inquiry and Learning for Change. His primary work is in the area of action research and critical inquiry with schools and communities. Address for correspon- dence: 1401 S. East St., Amherst, MA 01002. Email: jmwatkins @ aol.com; fax (413) 253-7618.

Knowledge and Policy: The International Journal of Knowledge Transfer and Utilization, Winter 1994, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 55-77.

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being out of balance and burnt out. They talked about summer institutes where they might spend more time exploring their emerging understanding of these issues, and of ways to gather data from others in the school to broaden their sense-making, In the end, they began developing a plan to move this inquiry forward.

How might traditional models of research, development, dissemination, and use make sense out of their conversation? It would be easy to say that there was nothing of merit going on. The conversation was too chaotic and disorganized to result in anything of consequence. The speak- ers were not engaged in traditional research design or conduct with the aim of producing generalizable knowledge about crisis management. Since they are personally embedded in the issues, hold strong values about them, and have a stake in how they get addressed, they could not hope to achieve the objectivity necessary for valid results. Nor did their conversation look like traditional teacher research, with only locally useful knowledge being produced, and thus with different requirements for validity and generalizability. Neither they nor the university nor lab people present were either developing "practical" knowledge about how to man- age crises from research findings or disseminating that knowledge to the school staff. They were not involved in designing a problem-solving process whereby they would select a proven innovation to implement to address their crisis problem. They were not designing an implementation process to put into place a new approach to crisis management. They did not seem to be making decisions about what to do about crises. The conversation flowed in an almost random manner, following interests, concerns, questions, strategies, solutions, visions, beliefs, anecdotes, etc. The topics ranged far and wide. The talk did not conform to a rational, or even a bounded rationality, model of decision making, or even to a paradigm for action research.

Yet I would argue that their conversation was representative of a so- phisticated inquiry process, and evidence of a school that is a voracious knowledge creator, seeker, and user, with a high degree of cultural support for doing their own inquiry and using research in virtually every aspect of school life. Conversations like this one can result in major, systemic change in schools, and in the creation and use of considerable knowledge. I would argue that this school is an ideal setting for research use, and that this kind of conversation is highly relevant to the knowledge-use field.

I interpret the conversation as one stage in a school's own research into crisis management. While it is to some extent a conversation about designing an inquiry, it is not the beginning of that design. Staff have already spent many years in inquiry into crisis management, in their daily experience, training, problem solving, reflection, and struggles to make sense out of a dramatic increase in numbers of children and families in crisis. In this renewed discussion, set against an emerging vision, the discussion is about how to make sense out of various staff's defini-

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tions of and experiences with crises, so as to move toward a "grounding" for cont inued inquiry.

In other words, the team is trying to design a s tudy that would construct actors' definitions and uncover their belief systems, describe some current experiences with crises and variations across staff responses to those, set those against their vision, take advantage of staff and their own expertise, and seek out various resources, including research findings, outside of the school to help them make sense out of this issue. Finally, they are trying to develop strategies to address crises before, as, and after they emerge, by creating a process to organize their knowledge about crisis management into usable categories. Their ideas about dissemination are all oriented toward local unders tanding and action: an increased sense of coordinated and balanced work together as a school communi ty toward crisis management that is consistent with their vision.

During the conversation, many ideas from outside the school are incorporated, albeit in pieces, to address immediate sense-making, or a longer term strategy, or a speaker's need to shift the dialogue in a certain way. Those ideas are filtered through the team's beliefs about crisis and their collective work. The inquiry process itself, organized through the use of a nonlinear inquiry f ramework they are learning, but that may seem random to outsiders, results in certain kinds of "constructions" from the ideas brought forward. Those constructions are partial and con- tain some contentious areas; there are, after all, many interests present in the construction. The orientation toward action and out of a vision of a "caring communi ty" frames the kind of knowledge they want to consider and will construct. That they can talk together this deeply, for this amount of time, and about this issue is itself worth noting. Many school cultures would not support, or even understand, such a conversation, even among individual teachers, much less among a "shared leadership" team.

If we accept this interpretation, it will have important consequences for a redefinition of research use. Let's examine why. We must address new definitions of research, researchers, and research use to explain this conversation. We need a new idea about dissemination and disseminators. We need to reconsider what it means to be a research user. The deterministic image of a linear directionality to research, dissemination, and use that comes from traditional research-use field, even the modified cyclical one Huberman proposes (this issue), will not help us explain what is happening at this school. There is no clean movement of a clearly defined body of research knowledge from a research study through a dissemination effort to a receptive school. There is no school telling a disseminator what practical knowledge it needs to move its work forward, thus fueling a search for empirical and conceptual studies of crisis management .

To reconsider those phenomena in ways that enable us to make sense out of the crisis management conversation as research and research use will necessitate a different epistemology. That definition will acknowl-


edge the embedded nature of knowledge, that it is socially constructed, and that it is partial, contended, and influenced by the interests and values of those creating, promoting, and using it. Such a view of knowledge is possible from a critical theorist perspective. Thus, our story and commentary about one school's inquiry into crisis will form the basis for a new theory, a postmodern critical theory, of research use.

Background: A Critique of Theories of Knowledge

What has led to confusion in the research-use field about images of research, dissemination, and use, I would claim, is that successful advo- cates of research use have in their practice found a pragmatic approach to this work that does not conform to the modernist epistemological underpinnings or assumptions about the transfer of knowledge that define the traditional research-use paradigm. When asked to describe their work, these knowledge disseminators often present a hodgepodge of practices that together result in successful knowledge use. If you ask them to talk about their views of knowledge, many contradictions ap- pear. And, if you raise questions about issues of power or ideology, or values underlying the knowledge they propose to disseminate, they are often mute. Muteness on these issues creates problems when they inevi- tably arise and affect work in the field (Giroux, 1992).

For those reasons, it makes sense to revisit the epistemological underpinnings of modernist notions of knowledge use. The traditional view of an objective, generalizable, disseminable, and usable body of knowledge being generated through research derives from positivism, a modernist interpretation of the Enlightenment idea of scientific inquiry. Philoso- phers during the Enlightenment posited scientific inquiry as the core knowledge production process. They argued for that supremacy because they were trying to create a system of knowledge, legitimated by evidence that anyone could have access to, to replace more traditional views that supported the continuation of the arbitrary exercise of universal power among the monarchy. They saw the potential for a scientifically derived knowledge base to support, enlarge, and sustain "rationality, freedom, and democracy," and, as such, to provide a moral alternative to knowledge that justified "dogmatism, authoritarianism, and centralized power" (Giarelli, 1992: 3). In effect, they proposed an democratic hegemony of scientific knowledge (democratic, unless you happened to be a king).

Modernists developed the idea of positivism, in an attempt to create knowledge that was even more "objective." But in doing so, modernist philosophers believed that scientific inquiry had to deny any evaluative framework. For Enlightenment philosophers, that evaluative framework meant valuing a democratized knowledge; for philosophers before that, it evalvative framework meant valuing knowledge because of the purity of the person having it, as say, a king's or clergy's knowledge (Rabinow

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& Dreyfus, 1983). At the same time, positivist thought maintained its claims to the supremacy of the scientific process for determining what is "true," and thus the knowledge it generates. Critics of positivism argue that by denying its genesis in democratic values, positivism lost its ability to take on questions of the "worthwhileness" of its knowledge and processes in favor of questions of their "efficiency and effectiveness" (Van Manen, 1977: 209). We shall explore why. Underlying both Enlight- enment scientific inquiry and positivism is either a "naive realist" or an "objectivist" epistemology; however, it is the objectivist view of knowledge that most drives modernist notions of research.

Objectivism states that knowledge of the world accumulates in objective constructs that have ever-increasing accuracy, through scientific discovery, scientific debate, and continued testing against reality. Objectiv- ism would also hold that knowledge, once verified, and as objective, is separate from the knower, and is of and about the real world. It is thus transferable to another setting, where it would be equally valid for and usable by another knower. Naive realism states simply that the world is there, and we can know it directly. Thus "validity" is what we make of it, with nothing hidden.

Objectivism has important implications for modern notions of research, dissemination, and use. For example, residues of the Enlightenment belief in scientific inquiry as serving to improve the lot of humanity fuel concerns for dissemination, to use better knowledge to help others live and work more effectively. Also, because of positivism's claims to being objective and value-free, there are few grounds to critique the primacy or universality of scientific knowledge, its straightforward dissemination, its epistemic foundations, or the values that underlie it. The strongest critique of research use possible from an objectivist view is simply that it doesn't work well enough because it underestimates the complexities of settings and people attempting to disseminate and use knowledge.

Until recently, the strongest counterview to either naive realism or objectivism has been that of interpretivism. Interpretivism states that "reality" does not exist apart from our perceptions of it; it is entirely dependent upon the social and cognitive construction of meaning of groups and individuals. As such, no interpretation is more valuable or valid than any other. Yet groups do make validity claims; they have interests and they exert power over other groups. They argue for one interpretation over another, one value system over another. Not the least of these groups is the scientific community, and the research community within it. How can those engaged in research that itself claims to be a part of a value-free and objective enterprise critique these claims to the value of any group's knowledge base?

So if we are to formulate a critical theory of research use, we cannot found it on a purely objectivist view of the world, for there is no critique of values or interests possible from a vantage point claiming to be objective and neutral. Nor can it be founded upon a naive realist view, for


similar reasons: after all, how can a universal understanding be manipu- lated for power or gain? Nor can it develop from a purely interpretivist view. Here again, but for different reasons, there is no ground on which to explore the relative merit of evidence or the interests underlying it, other than the relative merit of the methodology in use. While there is disagreement about this last position from interpretivist critical theorists (see Lincoln, in Maxwell & Lincoln, 1990), an alternate epistemology that better supports a critical theory does exist.

I propose that we build a critical theory of research use on a critical realist perspective. 1 Critical realism, as opposed to relativism, argues first that there is a reality. But because of the nature of both perception and cognition, we can neither perceive nor understand reality directly. We assemble constructs of it that are approximate, but that forcibly distort phenomena, by putting artificial boundaries around them, by simplify- ing them, by misunderstanding them, and this by the mere process of approximation. Those distortions lead, paradoxically, to conceptual systems that are coherent, orderly, and meaningful to us; they literally constitute our knowledge of the world. The creation, maintenance, acquisi- tion, transmission, and use of these constructs constitute what we know of as "culture."

Culture, then, as a social construction, forms a distorted view of reality, consistent with and influenced by, but also reciprocally influencing, its members' views. This social mediation becomes ideology, and is used, consciously or not, to further the aims of the culture, whether we consider them just or unjust (e.g., the supremacy of the individual over the state; or, conversely, the supremacy of the state over the individual). Thus, a critical realism is the only epistemology with the possibility of a critique of the use of cultural knowledge and ritual activity for the maintenance or increase of power and influence.

Critical theory has emerged in the social sciences as a framework for the critique of knowledge constructs deriving from a critical realist view of knowledge, ideology, and culture. As Giarelli (1992) states: "Critical theory i s . . . an effort to join empirical investigations, the task of interpretations, and a critique of this reality . . . . to improve human existence by viewing knowledge for its emancipatory or repressive potential" (3--4). Its early proponents were Neo-Marxist, of the "Frankfort School" (Jay, 1973). Their work was furthered by Jurgen Habermas (1971), who posited three areas of human concern, thus knowledge: the technical, the practical, and the emancipatory. These correspond to the different episte- mologies previously discussed, the positivist, the interpretivist, and the critical realist (Bredo & Feinberg, 1982).

Poststructuralists, mistrusting modernist notions of "theory" as objec- tively derived from evidence and independent of values, would argue that this typology is itself too categorical, itself a victim of cognitive distortion (Bernstein, 1978; Foucault, 1984; McLaren, 1992). As Bredo and Feinberg (1982) state, "Just as the consistent relativist must hold his own

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theory relatively, so the consistent critical theorist must hold his own theory critically" (287). Habermas's categories, reinterpreted from a poststructuralist position, must be considered neither ideal types toward which an imperfect world must tend (the Platonic view), nor real categories of objects in the world (the Aristotelian view). They are heuristics, to be held tentatively and ambivalently. Building on Foucault (1971), an active ambivalence about one's choice of categories and thus theories must be at the base of any critical theory of research use.

There is a dilemma here. If knowledge is embedded in cultures with ideologies and value systems and rituals, it can be tested only against those ideologies and through those rituals. Thus the critique is self-referential. This is, more generally, the problem of the critique of scientific knowledge by the scientific community. While it is clear that scientific knowledge is created through more than a process of direct inquiry into the nature of the world, a process that involves such rituals as peer review and debate, those systems of review are themselves created within a given scientific paradigm, a scientific culture. Thus to critique a given group's constructs, one must take a vantage point from outside that group. However, being outside one group does not mean being outside of all groups. Hence, a critique coming from outside one group is still subject to the ideologies and rituals of the group that formulates the critique.

In other words, no one speaks or sees in unconstructed ways; no one is value-free. Quoting Bredo & Feinberg (1982), "For the critical theorist knowledge and value are fundamentally interrelated, since knowledge is constituted by interests. The researcher is never just a passive observer telling us how the world is; he or she is a participant in the very act of maintaining and reconstructing the social life world" (275-276). As Lather has written (1988), " . . . critical theorists hold that there is no end to ideology, no part of culture where ideology does not permeate. This most certainly includes the university and the production of social knowledge" (6). What to do? Lather (1988) argues that the solution comes through being openly ideological, acknowledging the ideology of critique, and through being open to mutual, reciprocal critique. Might this address Foucault's (Rabinow, 1984) concern about modernist knowledge, that " . . . there is a very tenuous 'analytic' link between a philosophical conception and the concrete political attitude of someone who is appeal- ing to it; the 'best' theories do not constitute a very effective protection against disastrous political choices. . . " (374)?

We can see that current thought on critical theory has moved beyond its own modernist beginnings, with its premise of a single, ideologically "pure" critique of systematic distortions of reality that serve the purposes of power and influence. Modernist critical theory held that there could be a univocal critique of the uses of ideology to enable or deny social justice, an "emancipatory discourse," that frees us of the constraints of ideology and that is "communicatively competent," in that it involves nonideological communication (Habermas, 1970). Such a discourse, it was


assumed, could transcend both the distortions of the technical and the practical, and would expose the uses of those distortions for the increase of power and influence. Through that expose, a new knowledge base could be created that would emancipate social actors from the constraints of distorted knowledge, rituals, and ideologies.

Postmodern critical theory adds the view that all perspectives, thus critiques, are ideologically influenced. A postmodern view of critical theory would hold that the critique of knowledge, as "the yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself" (Derrida, 1978: 293), must include multiple voices, be contextualized in its various cultures and their ideologies, be conflictual, negotiated, ambivalent, tentative, emergent, and continual (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). It must "hold its own theory critically" at an ongoing center of inquiry, and that inquiry must be open to the participation of all interests. A postmodern critical theory attempts to reconnect with "modernist ideals of freedom, justice, and equality" while decentering knowledge and theory by denying its "certainty, foundationalism, and epistemological essentialism" (Fendler & Popkewitz, 1993, citing Giroux, 1992). Such a critical theory, and hence the knowledge it created, would remain in disequilibrium.

A Critical Theory of Research Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Use

As we have seen, a critical theory of research use is fundamentally at odds with the traditional, modernist views of knowledge and its use, including the view of its objectivity and universality, the linear perspective of dissemination and use, and the absence of a process for the critique of its own ideology. Quoting Sirotnik (1991): "The idea of producing knowledge in one place and then installing it for use in another is an alien concept in this epistemological tradition. Regardless of where and how knowledge is generated, critical-dialectical methods demand that it be 're-known' in the context of values-based, human activity--a concept of critical knowing in action or a 'critical phenomenology,' if you will" (8).

Such a perspective on the use of research knowledge depends on the following propositions: 1) all knowledge is an artifact of culture, deeply intertwined with and enacted in cultural rituals, and strongly influenced by belief systems and ideologies that bound and define, and to a certain extent result in the enactment of, the particular culture; 2) knowledge systems, and structures, are not separable from the knower, that is, there is no objective, value-free knowledge (a corollary of the first proposi- tion); and, 3) the production of knowledge is deeply values-driven, and serves to promote certain ideas and the groups that are identified with them while discounting others. This has implications for social justice and equity, depending upon the value systems within the culture producing that knowledge.

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Fundamental to this view of knowledge is the abandonment of the scientific as being the way of discovering actual, existent categories of things in the world through the use of rational processes, and clarifying those through testing and further discovery, toward the creation of dear, boundable, separate, and universal bodies of knowledge. The critical realist, and subsequent critical theorist, position taken above denies the universality of that construct, as well as the universality of that knowledge, and instead sees it as being only one of many systems of making sense out of the world, and itself embedded in a culture.

This critique intersects with the classic analysis of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1970), wherein the research process is embedded in a research community with its own rituals, artifacts, and belief systems. Kuhn argued that the scientific "discovery" process is embedded in a community whose validating criteria are self-referential, paradigmatic.

Finally, a postmodern critical theory of research use might take as its operating principle an advancement of knowing through inquiry-in-action rather than through either the more traditional didacticism and transmission, or the Marxist/modernist dialectic. Doing so flees such a theory from being advocated as essentialist and categorical, the aspects of theory that make it problematic for poststructuralists, while remaining grounded in a critical realist epistemology: categories and theories, necessary to perception and cognition, can be reframed as hypotheses or heuristics. Doing so also frees this theory from problems associated with a single voice: inquiry-in-action is a participatory process.

Research and Research Knowledge

A critical theory of research might take into consideration, and thus question, three aspects of the culture of social science research. They are: 1) the artifacts of the research community, in the form of its knowledge, its methodological constructs, and its products, which incorporate claims of objective universality and claims to the ownership of "better knowledge" than other people have; 2) its rituals, in the form of its methods and procedures; and, 3) its ideology, including notions about the value of research knowledge versus other kinds of knowledge, about who profits from its production, and about where research knowledge comes from and who owns it. Such a theory might also look at the language of the research community, its communication styles, and its beliefs about the effective use of its products.

Thus not only is research knowledge contextualized by the research community, and thus by issues of ideology, power, and influence; research methods themselves can be seen as cultural ritual, embedded in " . . . ideologically resonant assumptions about what the social world is, who the [researcher] is, and what the nature of the relation between them is" (Gouldner, 1982: 344). Research itself can be seen as having a set of categories for dealing with social experience: research methods as ways


of either "discovering" or "creating" new knowledge, views of what constitutes valid knowledge, and views of its usefulness and "benefit" outside the research community, where other cultural categories hold sway.

It is also pertinent to point out that such views are developed in a social community that imposes certain values about experience (e.g., positivism) that may not be open to critique nor even visible to researchers, or to their supposed audiences. That system of categories, including con- ventional research methodology, again constitutes the ideology of the research community's culture. Lather (1988):" . . . both ideology and methodology [are] concerned with the creation of consensus, of shared meaning within a particular community; each focuses on how to go about constructing and supporting explanations; each is prescriptive in terms of establishing a reliable foundation for our understanding of social reality; each is concerned with validation; each is enforced. Methods, then, are inescapably political 'as they define, control, evaluate, manipulate, and report.'" In moving beyond traditional methodology, then, a critical theory of research takes these additional concerns as objects of its inquiry.

While increasing numbers of educational and social researchers now embrace an interpretivist view--that they are operating in and studying cultures involved in meaning-making activities---many still harbor largely unexamined positivist ideas about the social need for a research community, about unilateral control over research design and conduct, and about behaviorist images of the dissemination process. Many still view dissemination, for example, as a linear pipeline from "knowledge produc- ers" to "knowledge users," an instrumental process whereby generalizable findings will be used directly by practitioners to change their own behaviors and improve a given social situation.

Even researchers embracing constructivist notions of knowledge use still often think of exporting the knowledge that they produce rather than creating knowledge in a collaborative process. Until recently, there has been little critical examination of "dissemination" other than the feminist critique of academic knowledge as privileged, hegemonic, and blind to its own ideology (Giroux, 1992; Haraway, 1989; Lather, 1988). For those reasons, let us to turn to a critical examination of dissemination.

Dissemination Processes

At the heart of this paper lies an implicit question: Is dissemination of research knowledge possible at all? Have we been able to transfer knowledge across cultural groups? If not, what is it that we have been about for so long? No one would argue that we haven't used an hegemonic model of dissemination through some sort of ideologically mediated cultural transmission of knowledge. Internationally, the "scientific" explanation has largely replaced the "religious," while the humanist and democratic explanations have begun to replace the autocratic, monarchical, and fas-

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cist. The "economic" may have recently replaced both the scientific and the democratic, by assimilating scientific and democratic language and activity into capitalist value systems. Yet one could argue that these are examples more of a substitution of one belief system for another rather than a wholesale cultural shift away from belief into systematic inquiry. It could also be argued that such hegemonic activity seems to occur through the assimilation of similar cultural structures and rituals into a new ideology, giving new names and uses to old cultural ritual and artifacts, more than through the process of dissemination and use of new knowledge (e.g, Maxwell & Lincoln, 1990; Brannen, 1992).

Two diverse examples of hegemonic possession and dissemination of knowledge are agricultural science and educational theory. Agricultural scientists generate agricultural knowledge from research that is then disseminated to farmers, replacing farmers' folk knowledge as the single legitimate explanation and thus the sole predictor of future agricultural productivity. Similarly, educational researchers legitimate findings that originated in the classroom through their research in those classrooms. The result is educational theory, and is owned by the researchers who "discovered" it. It is then disseminated to teachers in the form of general- ized prescriptions for improved practice from research. This leaves out what teachers know as only "craft knowledge," a distinction that con- vinces some teachers that their own knowledge base is illegitimate because it is local, particular, anecdotal, mutable, and contingent. Conversely, research findings are legitimate in being generalizable, theoretical, and objective. However, this distinction runs head on into the very problem it seeks to overcome.

In effect, the problem of traditional dissemination is here. If its knowledge base meets scientific criteria, if it is generalizable, objective, and theoretical, it is necessarily disembodied from its cognitive and social matrix, and no longer constitutes valid knowledge, at least by the critical theorist definition recently stated. Knowledge, as a cultural artifact, is knowledge only so long as it circulates actively in thoughts, voices, and actions, so long as it is being created, tested, debated, and used to create new knowledge. It is knowledge only so long as it is an active part of cognitive and social processes, as embedded in social structures, rituals, and ideologies. Once it leaves that culture, where it was born and nur- tured, it is no longer an organic construction of interconnected, meaningful, and usable ideas; it becomes inert, discrete, segmented. It becomes bits of information. The paradox of dissemination is that research knowledge, with its claims to objectivity and generalizability, is also only knowledge so long as it is embedded in the culture that created it, in this case, the culture of social science researchers. So knowledge that claims to be "generalizable" is particular, particular to researchers. It is intrinsically meaningless in other contexts, to people who did not do the research or are not researchers. A critical theory argues that knowledge is not disseminable per se.


But information is disseminable. A dissemination process that assumes it is disseminating knowledge through simple transmission of facts, a view derived from positivism, may in fact be disseminating only information. It will result in assumptions about the ability of the "user" to understand the material. It may be confusion about this distinction between knowledge and information that accounts for the view, held both by some communities of research and education, that schools are places where the only disseminable knowledge is simplified research or research translated exclusively into practical terms, such as "how-to" manuals, teacher's guides, or clearly specified practices.

Schools, or "knowledge users," that have heard these statements may come to see their own job as the transfer of information, with no internal mechanism for knowledge creation, dissemination, and use by teachers or students. Eventually, they may become places that cannot even main- rain the structures for creating knowledge from outside information to be used in local problem solving. In this way, an epistemic misunderstanding of knowledge and its dissemination results in increased knowledge poverty in schools, visible as a lack of owned knowledge, a lack of rituals for knowledge production, and a lack of ideologies for "being knowledgeable. "z

The apparent failure of users to "understand," and resulting lack of rituals and ideologies for being knowledgeable, together conspire to support dissemination as a transfer of ways of doing things. Such dissemination easily becomes a way for one group to exert control over another. This use of ideology to control a way of doing things is not the same thing as the dissemination of knowledge, but through confusions about the nature of knowledge, and without a critical methodology for its critique, researchers might easily come to think of it as the dissemination of knowledge.

But what if we were to construct a critical theory of dissemination, that incorporated both the technical and practical aspects, and framed them with a critical inquiry into both? Huberman (1989) began this promising work by suggesting the need to frame the use of research knowledge through two simultaneous lenses, the positivist and the interpretivist. Holding these together in our mind' s eye, contingently, reflectively, we could see how questions that each tradition can ask might benefit the enterprise. What is missing is a critical perspective to challenge their appropriateness, the worthwhileness of each, the ideologies of each, their unspoken issues of power and influence, and their implicit notions of value. What is the role of the transfer of information and technologies? What kinds of meaning-making is going on in the transfer of ideas from one community to another? Why is this transfer being attempted? Whose purposes does it serve? Are we using technology in ways that manipulate meaning? Have we matched carefully the technological solutions to the culture of the setting? Which values have been upheld? Which challenged? Why?

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But at least we might begin here. An image of dissemination that is framed through triangulating positivism and interpretivism might look like Huberman's "sustained interaction" (see this issue). However, refrained from a critical perspective, "sustained interaction" could be characterized more darkly. Instead of a powerful new image of effective dissemination resulting from intersubjective understandings achieved between researchers and users, we might see researchers attempting to maximize the use of research findings by coopting interpretivist methods, building linking structures that act like temporary communities of inquiry, and as such creating shared rituals, ideologies, and patterns of knowledge creation and use across the traditional boundaries of "research" and "user" communities. Those communities could be manipu- lated by researchers or linking groups to infuse research findings into the process, thus creating knowledge transfer without a corollary examination of the values or interests behind the enterprise.

It is possible to build a constructivist approach to knowledge creation that does not violate critical theory principles. One such approach involves convening groups in which individual interests are made visible and their existing assumptions about a particular issue are challenged. Once the process begins, the researcher-as-facilitator helps participants to raise questions about the ideas being discussed, which serve as a starting point for an inquiry into those ideas. Throughout the process, the researcher/facilitator may serve as a linker, helping participants to ask what knowledge they have and what information they need to bring to bear on their inquiry, then bringing more information to the table from the research community and elsewhere, thus insuring transmission through the social construction of meaning. Next, a local "testing ground" is provided for the ideas being developed, which results in the genera- tion of a new round of questions, presumably at a higher level of sophis- tication (Schneier, 1991). This model differs from the original action research settings created by Kurt Lewin (1947) over forty years ago, and from Huberman's sustained interaction, only in its beliefs about the locus of knowledge creation and agency, in its method for addressing those explicitly, and thus in its critical epistemology.

A simpler model of this sort is the linkage of traditional research, development, dissemination, and use processes, characterized by problem-solving strategies in the settings where research is to be used. Users engage in a rationalized problem-solving process that results in their choosing from practices being disseminated through the R, D & U appa- ratus (Havelock, 1969; Louis, et al., 1981). This approach, however, lacks both an interpretivist and a critical perspective. It is a purely technical solution to information transfer.

Some qualitative and ethnographic researchers go further now to argue that beyond rethinking traditional notions of how to disseminate information and help create knowledge, there is the need to rethink the whole business of research design and conduct. Traditional views that


hold that research must be unilaterally designed and controlled by the researcher are inadequate because they do not take seriously enough the social construction of research and use that happens across research and use communities (Cox, 1994; Fetterman, 1993; Maxwell, 1993; Watkins, 1989). Phrases like "controlling designs to insure valid results," "negoti- ating entry," "maintaining field relations," and "preparing recipients of research or evaluation findings for their use" are simply antagonistic to the building of a shared sense of the purposes, practices, meanings, and uses of research. To do that requires research or evaluation to be conducted collaboratively by these crossgroup, temporary communities of inquiry. The knowledge created may then be more congruent with the rituals and ideologies of the potential "user." Or, it may be better situated, both in terms of understanding and trust, to challenge those rituals and ideologies when that is necessary. This construction most closely approximates Habermas's (1979) ideal speech situation, where a critical discourse becomes possible through creating a group setting across traditional boundaries that over time builds trust, develops the skills of communication, and uncovers and redesigns dysfunctional theories of action, making examination of ideology as it constrains change possible (Argyris et al., 1985; Miller, 1990).

Some would go further still, and argue that it is the job of members of the research community to infuse research culture, not just findings, directly into settings that traditionally have been seen as only "use" settings, by teaching and facilitating those people in developing the skills needed to do their own research (Cox, 1994; Watkins, 1992). Others would argue that the "rituals," values, and ideologies (including, as argued ear- lier, methods, and canons of generalizability and validity) of traditional research do not fit with the knowledge needs or cultures of those settings (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). Thus, members of those settings must develop and legitimate their own practices of knowledge creation. Doing so might lead to an accommodation of the two communities, and thus to less of an imbalance of power, and less hegemony. However, when this possibility is raised, many researchers balk. One must ask why. The traditional answers, having to do with concerns over expertise, legitimacy, bias, and generalizability, are unacceptable from either an interpretivist or a critical theory vantage point.

One possible explanation is that while research communities want the contents of their research to be used by others, and want others to value the traditional research process and its products, some do not want to give up control over the conduct of social science research and the ownership of findings that traditionally have defined their power (and their tenure) largely through expertise, cooptation of others' knowledge, and mystification. For similar reasons, researchers may not want to have "users" become researchers. From a critical theory perspective, we must not forget to ask these questions about the power or influence researchers gain from maintaining their difference.

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At least these questions need to be raised: Is it a form of privilege to think that knowledge produced by researchers should be considered more valuable than that of others, and as such disseminated to those others? Is this a form of colonialism? Even if we judge it not to be, is it ultimately self-defeating to protect those rituals that result in research use being confined predominantly to the research community? These are strong statements and questions, and may irritate members of the social scientific research community. Yet a critical theory of research use calls for raising them, if for no other reason than that these pronotmcements can be heard in settings where researchers would like to see their work used more.

While this perspective challenges the traditional, positivist notion of the direct transmission of research from "active" creators to "passive" recipients, it leaves unchallenged the values that lie behind the desire of researchers to influence the beliefs and practices of other groups. Even more controversial, then, is the question of whether there ought to be distinct research communities. McLaren (1992) hints at this view when he states: "It is also essential that ethnographic researchers act with the oppressed, not over them or on behalf of them. Critical ethnography must be organic to and not administered upon the plight of struggling peoples" (89, italics in original). And while McLaren is talking about traditionally oppressed people and not generally about educators, others have argued that teachers, and ultimately students as well, have been oppressed by those outside of schools whose knowledge is considered superior to theirs. From a critical theorist perspective the task of researchers should be to work with potential users to free both communities of the ideological constraints that enable them to remain separate and hierarchically related. In this line of thought, all communities should be "learning communities," constantly inquiring into their own practices, and inquiring collaboratively, reflexively, with other communities, to uncover and make problematic the ideologies that constrain learning and change, that enable some to command power and influence over others, and that distort communication to meet the aims of dominance.

While the most radical arguments in the critical theorist perspective would dissolve the distinction between researchers and users, and would thus argue for the examination of research, dissemination, and use in an integral and indissoluble critique, there may still be situations where a critique of dissemination alone is legitimate. Although a certain hesi- tancy exists in this school of thought about such a fragmented and categorical approach, we might still frame the outlines of a critical theory of dissemination. Minimally, such a theory would require potential "researchers," "disseminators," or "users," to ask certain questions of their enterprise, and to ask them jointly with all potential stakeholders in that enterprise.

Some of those questions might be:


1) What is the nature of the information that this dissemination effort hopes to convey? What theories are embedded in it? What does it imply for action? What does it mean to potential users? What values and ideologies underlie it?

2) Under what circumstances was it developed? By whom? For what intended purposes? Using what methods? With what epistemic assumptions (the nature of knowledge, of knowers, and of values, etc.)? Where? How were its conclusions reached? Who was involved in the process of developing the design, conducting the study, data analysis, interpreting findings, and writing about them? What interests did they represent? Whose voices were absent? Why? What do those absent voices say?

3) What potential use is this information, or the way it was developed, to those to whom it is being disseminated? What good might it bring? What potential harm could it cause? What effect might it have on existing knowledge, on rituals of meaning-making, on ideologies? How appropriate is the information or the process by which it was created to the culture of the potential users? Why would they want this information as opposed to any other information, or no information, or their own information? Why might they not want it? Who will use it? For what purposes? What are their interests? What interpretations might they make of it? What actions might be based on those interpretations? What effect might these interpretations and actions have on others in the setting, particularly on people of lesser power or authority?

4) How will this information be disseminated? What kinds of settings are appropriate for this effort? What rituals of meaning-making will be developed? By whom? For what purposes? To aid which groups and at the expense of which groups within the setting? How will a mutual examination of these questions be designed and conducted by all stakeholders? How will the effective use of this information be supported? How will a determination be made if this information is being appropriately used? By whose criteria and by whose voices will this determination be made? How will they be included?

The list could go on, d e p e n d i n g u p o n the needs of the stakeholders. Since we have asked the critical theorist to hold his or her o w n theory critically, and stated that mul t ip le voices should be inc luded in this critical self-examination, these quest ions and their explorat ion are al lowed to emerge as the process itself emerges. The critique is as ongoing as the disseminat ion process it hopes to critique.

A pragmat is t m ay well quest ion whe the r practi t ioners w o u l d wan t to be involved in asking these questions. Don ' t practi t ioners wan t a good cookbook if they have to cook three meals a day, the pragmat is t asks? A cookbook is acceptable, the critical theorist w o u l d argue, if it is one written by the users in dialogue wi th people who collect recipes, or at least is one where it is possible to critique the beliefs about wha t constitutes a good recipe, or good food. A cookbook is not a good heuristic, the critical theorist w o u l d argue, if it seeks to elevate recipe knowledge to universal and determinist ic status, s tandardize cooks, and provides no oppor tu- nity for cooks to examine their o w n notions.

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Research Use Settings

A salient characteristic of potential research use settings is the orientation toward action. Whereas it might be argued that research communities have at best a vague sense of the potential for actions resulting from their work, or of the processes by which research findings get translated into action imperatives; a primary concern of most other settings is an urge, a need, or a will to act, and a desire, either retrospectively or inter- actively, to make sense out of those actions. Hence, any theory of research use must address the interconnections between knowing and act- ing. Various traditions frame those interconnections differently.

In the positivist tradition, a whole science has developed around the study of research use. I say "science" deliberately for the following reasons. A critical theorist interpretation might be that those studying research use should be concerned with gaining an interpretive and deep understanding of user settings as cultures with certain ways of making sense of outside information, and of gaining a critical understanding of their own ideologies and the constraints those create for social justice. A critical theory of research use would also suggest that what typically has happened is, rather, that a technical solution has been sought for what was perceived to be primarily a problem of behavior change. That is, the work has been viewed as a problem of implementing research findings in settings such as schools through changes in professional practice. From this perspective the latter approach to knowledge use looks like a technology. As such, technical concerns have arisen to understand the political and bureaucratic processes by which research gets incorporated into decision making (Weiss, 1975) and to ensure wider use through various stances toward potential "clients" (Patten, 1986).

By contrast with technical views of research use, interpretivists have focused micro-analytically on understanding the rituals of internal knowledge creation and interpretation of seemingly bounded cultures such as classrooms and schools (Green, 1983), or of the community of inquirers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Henry & Kemmis, 1986; Oja & Smulyan, 1989). This focus has excluded looking closely at how school cultures interpret and incorporate research and information from outside (although see Huberman, 1983, for a beginning). From a critical standpoint, it has also excluded an examination of the ideological constraints to the use of knowledge to transform those settings and their cultures. In effect, interpretivists have been criticized as focusing too narrowly on the mi- crocosmic classroom or school culture to the exclusion of a framing inquiry into the macrocosmic political and structural influences on those cultures (Wilcox, 1982). 3

There are numerous writers who frame analysis of education from critical and postmodern perspectives (see Giroux, 1992, for an overview), but few have touched on the relation between the critical issues they address and research use. So our work is to build on both the technical


and interpretive traditions, but then to incorporate images from critical theory and postmodernism, and from cultural anthropology and the organizational change literature, to gain a better understanding of settings where research might be used.

I must warn readers that no single theory can give us the clear picture of research use we need. Holding up any theory as the single, unified, complete explanation of research-use settings would be inconsistent with postmodernism; yet pretending to have no theory at all, as postmodernism might wish, is inconsistent with the epistemology of critical realism, which underlies postmodern critical theory. For those concerned with the relation between knowledge and action, it does not suffice to say that all aspects of knowledge are culturally mediated. We want to know: how? In what ways? With what implications for action?

A postmodern critical theory of research-use settings must address these questions, by articulating a conceptual frame that "triangulates" among issues related to knowledge construction, power and action, and ethics and ideology. At the same time, such a theory must acknowledge contextual factors affecting these issues, such as organizational and cultural structures, processes, and belief systems that influence the ways in which knowledge is constructed and its interaction with organizational actions. Finally such a theory must look critically at itself as an exemplar of situated theory, tightly connected to its own ideology and loosely connected to any implications for action (Foucault, 1984).

Knowledge, as we have argued, is cognitively and socially constructed; it is not disseminable per se. Thus it will need to be reconstructed in any use setting. How it gets constructed from either outside or inside research information is going to be dependent upon what kind of ritual activity, or sense-making processes, the structure and ideology of the setting allow. Actions, or future rituals/processes, based on those constructions are going to be strongly influenced by the dynamics of the setting, its urge to explain and predict based on existing explanatory systems, its urge to act in accordance with existing systems of action, its existing sense-making efforts, and its existing knowledge constructs that might relate, in some way that makes sense to the users, to the new information coming in. The setting's stance both toward knowledge and toward action is also going to be influenced by dynamics of power and control, dominance and submission, and resistance. And those issues will play out within a set of constantly negotiated values and ethical arguments, explicit and tacit, among actors situated within and without the setting. Thus we will need theories of knowledge as an artifact of organization, theories of power and agency, and theories of the instrumental use of ideology to understand research use.

For the most part, our concern with research-use centers on highly ritualized patterns of interaction, embedded in social systems, in organizations. For that reason we need to explore some of the dynamics specific to organizations, rather than more general social settings. One such ori-

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enting theory can be found in the work of Karl Weick (1979), who provides powerful images of the interlocking nature of organizational action and sense-making.

Weick describes the ways that an organization's constructs of the environment within which the organization acts (enactment) combine with constructs of that organization's regular actions (retention) to create very stable systems, each reinforcing the other. Such a view of organizing seriously undermines the belief that an organization can "adapt" to a changing environment, hence to new knowledge, because the organization creates the view of the environment to which it is supposed to adapt. At any rate, some heuristic such as Weick's, that examines organizational dynamics, similar to the anthropological view of culture as a "system" of interlocking artifacts, rituals, and beliefs that enable meaning-making, will be essential to a postmodern critical theory of research-use settings.

At the same time, our proposit ions about knowledge and its embeddedness should suggest the need to articulate the differing charac- teristics of different organizational settings. Those will surely influence how and what knowledge is perceived, created, used, and valued. For example, work by Mintzberg (1979) may help by providing heuristic "types" of different organizational structures and processes. Mintzberg's organizational theory, derived in part from Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), categorizes organizations into five different types based on their ways of differentiating people's work and coordinating the overall work across the differentiated jobs. While acknowledging the postmodern distaste for categories and theories, we will still find some version of typologies such as these a useful heuristic for an articulated view of knowledge use, since each describes different ways that information is conceived of, created, and valued; is related to power and authority; moves through the system; controls processes, actions, and individual agency; and informs decision making.

Organizational theory has been, for the most part, thin in its understanding of culture, often relegating it to a position as one variable to consider in designing organizational change strategies. Rather, culture could be considered the overarching concept--organizations are cultures, and as such terms like "organizational structures" may be considered the same as cultural artifacts; "group and intergroup processes" may be ritual activity; and "organizational vision, values, norms, etc." may be cultural ideologies. Our critical analysis of organization-as-research use communities, then, might make these substitutions, and see if they work.

Finally, referring back to Habermas's categories of human concern may give us additional tools to look at organizations' differing dispositions toward kinds of knowledge and knowledge-use strategies. Habermas's categories, the technical, practical, and emancipatory, correspond well to the epistemic categories used so far in this discussion, the objectivist, relativist, and critical realist.

They also correspond well to the three types of research, the positivist,


interpretivist, and critical. Finally, they allow us to examine culture as it is expressed in cultural artifacts, rituals, and ideologies.

Thus, a postmodern critical theory of research use settings will go beyond Huberman's "two lenses," to view research use through three lenses, the technical, interpretive, and critical. Combining these lenses with an understanding of organizational dynamics and structures framed as cultural attributes will give us a more articulated view of the ways that issues of knowledge, power, and ethics express themselves in the interplay among research use, understanding, and action. Overarching must remain the self-reflexive ambivalence of the postmodern critical voice toward categorization, typologies, and theory in general, combined with a concern for identifying the ideologies influencing this theory itself.

As with our discussions of research and dissemination, this theory will advance through an inquiry framed by its categories, rather than through a set of propositions. Thus, the following might be central questions for the enactment of this theory:

1) What are the technical, interpretive, and critical dispositions of this setting? 2) What are its organizational dynamics and structural types? What are its

structures (artifacts), processes (rituals), and belief systems (ideologies) for knowledge and information creation and use? What are its stances (technical, interpretive, and critical) toward information and knowledge?

3) What are its issues of knowledge, power, and ethics in relation to research use? Whose interests are being served/not being served? Whose voices are heard/not heard? For what purposes?

4) How do all the above play out in relation to each other? 5) What are the implications of the above for research use? What are the

implications for actions and understandings based on that research use? 6) What do the frames of this theory allow us to see, understand, and act on?

What do they constrain us from seeing?

Conclusions

Why is a postmodern critical theory of research use necessary? Such a theory can help us move beyond unproblematized views of knowledge creation and use, of the relation between theory and practice, of the t ransmiss ion of k n o w l e d g e and skills, and of these processes as "dehistor icized, . . . atheoretical," (Giroux, 1992: 2) and as existing outside of issues of power and ethics. It can help address conceptual confusions resulting from problems in the practice of research dissemination that had previously been examined solely from an instrumental perspective, and from conceptual critiques of the field coming from cognitive psychology and interpretivist traditions. It can help situate dialogue about and critique of the field within a broader theoretical and pragmatic discourse, enabling a richer and deeper refraining. Finally, such a theory might offer a way to move forward, a critical praxis, through an inquiry-

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in-action that might enhance the process of research use while building new theoretical insights at the same time.

Notes

1. Joe Maxwell (Maxwell & Lincoln, 1990), for instance, argues that critical realism is the only epistemic foundation that can explain the instrumental role of ideology in cultural change.

2. I recently observed a teacher in a national curriculum development project with considerable funding and time complain about having to do secondary research as a part of her work. "It is the job of the project director to get this information for us !" she said. "If I had thought I was going to have to go looking for articles, I never would have joined this project." Many schools act like this today.

3. The work of Janet Miller (1990) stands in contrast as an example of bridging interpretive communities, groups of teachers researching their own practice, into emancipatory research in those same communities. See also recent work by Michelle Fine on creating charter schools and inquiring schools in urban settings in Philadelphia and NYC; and more recent work by Cochran-Smith & Lytle that examines the difficulties of a reflexive critique of teacher research and its relation to other research.

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A postmodern critical theory of research use

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