The sweet shop window: An allegory about the world as lived and the world as socially researched

This morning I decided the world of blogs was a better place for this way of telling a story than my (soon to be written and submitted) doctoral thesis. And so I cut it from there and pasted it here. 

The sweet shop window

I belong in the world where we use everyday reasoning to make sufficient sense of our lives to create adequate social order so we can interact and work together as some kind of society. I do not want to leave that world to join the academic world.

But my everyday reasoning is proving inadequate. I cannot make adequate sense of what I am observing and experiencing in relation to public involvement in policy making. I suspect that the academic world may have more adequate tools for making sense of my observations and experiences.

I stand outside the academic world, looking in like a child looking into an old-fashioned sweetie shop, at the array of theoretical approaches, lenses, perspectives and stances on offer from the academic world.

I enter the shop.

Once inside, I discover I am expected to choose just one jar. I am then expected to stand inside that jar, looking back out at my world through the lens of just that jar. I am expected to become expert at understanding that jar and its contents, and learn to ask questions of my world that are appropriate for sweets in that jar.

Do I want to be on the outside looking in? Or on the inside looking out?

If I am on the outside looking in, I cannot explore the jars.

If I am on the inside looking out, I can only see the outside world through a narrowly focused lens.

     But what if…

What if I ignore the convention, go inside the sweet shop, browed the jars, pick and mix those that look promising and then assemble and reassemble my selection until I find a pattern that makes adequate sense – at least to me – of my observations and experiences of public involvement in policymaking?

Implications of the sweet shop for research design

My purpose for being in the academic world has been to find and create academic tools that can help those in the world beyond academia and those in the academic world to value each other’s knowledges. My territory was public involvement in Welsh Government social care policymaking.

To be led by a set of clearly defined research questions would have meant adopting an academic map of the territory I wanted to explore. Instead, I wanted to embrace what I brought with me into academia as an older, deeply embedded, highly reflexive student. And for me, that meant enquiring how others inside and outside of academia have made sense of the territory as I explored and charted the territory for myself. By meandering and exploring the territory, I believe I have found a destination worth visiting. [Spoiler: you'll have to wait until I've actually written the thesis to know where that destination is!]

One caveat: what I have termed a destination is better considered a scenic resting point at which to break a journey or, in the language of Deleuze and Guattariz, an intermezzo (1987:12).

• Reference
• Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia.