Trudie Cain

Pluralisms in Qualitative Research: From Multiple Methods to Integrated Methods

Pluralism offers promising ways forward for qualitative research, invoking the use of multiple methods to investigate complex social questions. Drawing on two different research projects, we reflexively demonstrate, discuss, and illustrate our processes of working pluralistically. In various ways, we argue that multiple methods function smoothly if they are closely aligned with the broad assumptions underpinning the research, resulting in their fusion into an integrated research process. The incorporation of multiple methods encourages creativity and innovation, extends the scope and depth of data, demands time, forces reflexivity, deepens and intensifies relationships between researchers and participants, and raises issues for analysis and interpretation. Although a pluralistic approach to research is demanding, substantial benefits can be obtained through working this way.

Embodied leadership: The aesthetics of gesture

This paper proposes that leadership is an embodied process which occurs among those who are in community together. This implies that the dualities between the leader and the follower morph into a set of relationships where bodies move and gesture to one another by inviting and responding to each other in open co-creative spaces. To work through our ideas, we offer an exemplar of Richard Strauss’s song Morgen! as it is rendered in performance. We locate our study within the theory of relational leadership and suggest that effective leadership draws on the abilities of organisational members to offer and respond to gestures as they occur moment-by-moment.

Bamboo Networks: Chinese Business Owners and Co-Ethnic Networks in Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract As part of a larger research project examining the settlement of immigrant business owners in Auckland, New Zealand, this research examines the nature of the connections that these Chinese business owners have with their employees, suppliers and customers. The results suggest a significant reliance on networks that involve co-ethnics, especially for the China-born but even for those Chinese business owners who were New Zealand-born. Overall, the research indicates the key role that relational embeddedness plays in the establishment and development of migrant businesses.

Collective Reflexivity: Researchers in Play

The Albany Memory Work Collective emerged from discussions amongst the members of the Albany Discourse and Narrative Group, a group of postgraduate scholars and staff who meet regularly to discuss research issues. The authors of this paper were a sub-group of this larger group. Our intent was to explore memory work as a methodology, to use the method as a means of exploring the varieties and complexities of our relationships with participants in our research, and perchance to write a paper for publication from the exercise. Although a memory work project on this topic was initiated, and our written memories were a starting place, our attentions moved more directly onto discussions of the nature of the researcher-participant relationship and what this implied for our practices and understandings as researchers. In attempting to adequately represent this process and the ideas and insights that arose from it, we took up the concept of the play as a form of (re)presentation. This would allow us to do things you cannot do and say things you cannot say in a regular academic paper. The outcome is presented here. This product is meant for educational purposes only, and any resemblance of characters in the play to real people, living or dead, and especially to the authors, is unintentional and purely coincidental. We are grateful to Niamh Stephenson and Sue Kippax whose chapter on memory work started all this, to Wendy Stainton Rogers for suggestions on an earlier draft, and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Jack S. Hatcher is a meta-researcher ghost haunting Chez Leggatt-Cook, Joanna Sheridan, Helen Madden, Trudie Cain, Ros Munro, Siu-Chun Tse, Hyunok Jeon, and Kerry Chamberlain in the School of Psychology at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand.