On serendipity: The happy discovery of unsought knowledge

Abstract

We may be loath to acknowledge it, but no matter how hard we try, our research designs are not always under our complete control. Some researchers, notably those who conduct laboratory experiments, may take extraordinary measures to control the environmental factors so that they do not influence the key variables under study. But even here, things can go awry. As Lee and Dennis (2012) report in their hermeneutic reinterpretation of the controlled laboratory experiment that was originally reported in Dennis, Hilmer, and Taylor (1998), situational factors unknown to Dennis and his colleagues caused many of the 1998 study s hypotheses to be rejected, in defiance of theoretical explanation. Some methods are less amenable to control, ethnography for instance, where the researcher may abjure any attempt to engage in more than the most rudimentary forms of control. As Descola (1996) reported in his seminal tome “Les Lances du Crépuscule” when ready to set off for the field, his research advisor, the structural anthropologist Lévi‐Strauss, suggested that he set aside all his carefully prepared plans and instruments and instead “follow the lie of the land,” adapting his lines of enquiry to the infinite variety of circumstances as they emerged. While most interpretive researchers would not go this far, the idea that they need to be open to “whatever happens” in the world of their research subjects is a very familiar one. For this reason, they have to expect the unexpected. When research is written up for submission, authors of all epistemological persuasions may more or less frequently slip in some of their unexpected, unintended, unanticipated findings. These are often intriguing, lying at the margins of the research design, yet appreciated for their significance. In this vein, Segerdahl, Fields, and Savage‐Rumbaugh (2005) explain how research can proceed by accidental discovery, shaping entirely new theoretical conjectures and investigatory possibilities. My own experience conforms to this pattern, since an investigation into knowledge sharing among hotel employees in China led to the identification of the (unexpected and unsought) finding that these same employees were actively working around corporate IT policy, developing their own feral systems to do so (Davison & Ou, 2018). It is in this space that I find inspiration for this editorial, specifically the notion of serendipity, defined by van Andel (1994) as the “art of making an unsought finding” and by the OED as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.” I agree with van Andel that serendipity is an art rather than a science: We need to attune our senses to these unexpected phenomena and their affordances for our research, no matter whether they are stark or ethereal in form. In the research context, we need to go beyond mere recognition and develop the confidence to distinguish unexpected findings from their context and then consider how to theorize them. Merton s (1957) view of serendipity was that it involved the “observation of a surprising fact followed by a correct abduction”, i.e., the devising of an explanatory hypothesis or theory. However, not all researchers are equipped with the necessary vision to observe, or for that matter to theorize, these scholarly surprises. As Clarke (2015) remarks, researchers may be blinkered, seeing the world in narrow ways that to a large extent exclude unfamiliar perspectives. I suggest that blinkered researchers are less likely to notice unsought findings, even if they occur, because they are insensitive to knowledge that lies beyond the pale of their world view. We must therefore open our eyes, literally and metaphorically, since,