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Inquiring into the Real: A Realist
Phenomenological Approach
John M. Budd
Heather Hill
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Brooke Shannon
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267
[Library Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 267– 284]
! 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0024-2519/2010/8003-0005$10.00
INQUIRING INTO THE REAL: A REALIST PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH
John M. Budd,
1
Heather Hill,
2
and Brooke Shannon
3
The need for postpositivist or antipositivist methods in the social sciences, including
library and information science, is well documented. A promising alternative syn-
thesizes critical realism and phenomenology. This method embraces ontological
reality in all things, including human and social action. The ontology underlying
the realist phenomenological approach recognizes, following Bhaskar, intransitive
and transitive objects of knowledge (mind-independent reality and individual and
social perceptions of that reality). The synthesis encompasses some particular el-
ements, including perceptions of parts and wholes, the reconciliation of presence
and absence, and the essential character of intentionality. Withholding judgment
(exercising a particular kind of skepticism) enables inquirers to delve into the
historicity and background of action. Potential uses of the method are manifold;
some specifics are examined here.
The literatures of almost all of the social sciences include authoritative
pronouncements that positivism has long since met its demise as a method.
Library and information science (LIS), too, includes its share of claims.
Even positivism’s adherents have admitted to its failures. In spite of the
obituaries, there is some reason to believe that a positivistic spirit remains
in the social sciences. No one speaks any longer of methodological monism
and the reconciliation of synthesis and analysis, but applications betray a
false realism in inquiry. In fact, “reification” would be another word for
the instances of the positivistic method. In a recent work, Stephen T. Ziliak
and Deidre N. McCloskey [1] carefully examine the application of statistical
1. School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, University of Missouri, 303
Townsend, Columbia, MO 65211; Telephone 573-882-3258; Fax 573-884-4944; E-mail
buddj@missouri.edu; corresponding author.
2. Assistant professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western On-
tario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7; E-mail hhill6@uwo.ca.
3. School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, University of Missouri, 303
Townsend, Columbia, MO 65211; E-mail bms5yc@mail.mizzou.edu.
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268 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY
analyses in studies conducted in the field of economics. Their examination
is informed by their entirely correct conjecture that statistical significance
has, to a considerable extent, become a surrogate for reasoning. Statistical
significance, frequently reported as t-, F-, or Z-values, do not signal the
substance of relationships between things or the strengths or causal links
of these relationships. Ziliak and McCloskey write, “What, a scientist should
ask, are the social or personal human purposes activated by [a] belief?
What does the belief lead to?” [1, p. 11]. The questions deserve attention
in LIS.
An article in the library literature illustrates what Ziliak and McCloskey
are speaking of. Frank R. Allen and Mark Dickie employ statistical signif-
icance to design a formula for academic library funding. They state, “The
purpose of this study is to illustrate a model in which funding of an aca-
demic library depends on institutional characteristics” [2, p. 173]. Their
intent is to model a funding strategy based on factors external to the library.
On the face of it, the notion appears to have potential relevance in higher
education fiscal affairs. The variables—number of undergraduate students,
number of graduate students, number of PhDs awarded, number of doc-
toral fields, and number of faculty—should be considered in any general
funding model. There are some factors that those variables cannot account
for, though, such as the research intensity of the faculty, teaching expec-
tations of faculty (which affect research intensity), research funding at-
tracted, and specifics of the institution’s mission (translated into opera-
tional imperatives and priorities). In short, the authors do not examine
institutional and individual intentionalities that can affect the need for
resources. The authors also quantify such variables as governance (private
p 1 and public p 0), which is in no way legitimate. The governance
variables are included in the regression analyses. The authors also trans-
form the data to a logarithmic scale, admitting that “the impact on cost
of adding the 90th Ph.D. program is probably less than the impact on cost
of adding the 20th” [2, p. 173]. The rationale for the presumption is not
stated, but cost is not simply a matter of order (which things comes first).
It depends on the nature of the program itself. (In other words, it is
problematic to assume that all doctoral programs are the same—in objects
of study, resources required, potential for the recruitment of students, and
other things.) They present actual and model expenditure means graph-
ically, so that little year-to-year difference is apparent. If that is indeed the
finding of this study, it seems that the modeling effort yields no benefit.
That said, Allen and Dickie also present data for individual members of
the Association of Research Libraries. Here the variance is enormous; the
University of California, Berkeley, spent about 119 percent more than the
model predicted, while Boston University spent 38 percent less than pre-
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A REALIST PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH 269
dicted. It is not simply that this analysis has no utility; it demonstrates the
need for a different way of inquiring into problems in our field.
In another vein, quite a bit of inquiry in LIS does reject the positivistic
bent. It tends to rely more on what could be called a hermeneutic construct.
Studies in this realm are very difficult to categorize and assess, because
uses of hermeneutic or interpretive methods vary greatly in conception
and use. On the one hand, Ian Cornelius claims, “Hermeneutics denies
the existence of objective facts in the humanities and the social sciences
and claims that in gaining understanding of our situation, of one another,
and of ‘foreign’ societies, we are constantly in dialogue and our position
becomes transformed by the process of understanding” [3, pp. 18–19]. On
the other hand, some hermeneutical studies attempt to identify intersub-
jective conceptions that can reach some ontological common ground. Cor-
nelius’s idea denies ontology and, in so doing, creates serious problems
for epistemology. Sometimes explicit, sometimes naive, the antiontology
stance is indicative of the neopragmatism articulated by Richard Rorty and
others. Not all advocates of a hermeneutic element in LIS inquiry take
extreme positions. Joacim Hansson, for one, urges that “the creation of
meaning through interpretation of social action and relations can be seen
as one of the main prerogatives of contemporary scientific research” [4,
p. 111].
Library and information science needs ways to seek and find meaningful
and substantive answers to questions that matter. The following is an at-
tempt to forge such a path. As is true of almost all useful methods, there
are theoretical and practical sides to method. A different way to inquire
is proposed here. It is grounded in realism and in a recognition of on-
tological necessity. It does not eschew interpretation, though this realist
phenomenological approach is amenable to quantitative and qualitative
(writ large) analyses, because the method underlying the approach in-
cludes a set of conceptual imperatives that guide the inquiry itself. The
details of these imperatives, drawn from two foundations, are presented
here.
Foundation 1
The first foundation of the proposed approach is critical realism, as artic-
ulated by Roy Bhaskar in a number of works. Bhaskar developed his ideas
over many years; this foundation draws from the totality of his work to
conceive of the first part of a viable method. One basic tenet of Bhaskar’s
critical realism is that “the world is constituted by the objects of actual
(and, sometimes, possible) experiences” [5, p. 6]. A very attractive part of
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270 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY
Bhaskar’s thought is his understanding of human and social action as
“open.” He rejects the Humean tradition of asserting laws that operate in
closed systems. “This has the consequence that neither the experimental
establishment nor the practical application of our knowledge in open sys-
tems can be situated. Once we allow for open systems then laws can only
be universal if they are interpreted in a non-empirical (trans-factual) way”
[5, p. 14]. The rejection of the closed-system requirement necessitates
rejection of simplistic empiricism that adheres to narrow definitions of
facts. Examination of the ways people ask questions, seek for information,
and evaluate what they have found requires the kind of openness Bhaskar
advocates.
The openness carries implications for inquiry and method. Human ac-
tion—people seeking and evaluating information, people seeking knowl-
edge, work within scholarly disciplines, interactions in organizations—can-
not be restrictively examined according to superficial characteristics. The
action itself has cognitive, intellective, linguistic, communicative, and other
elements. The openness, however, does not render human action and the
elements that constitute it less real. That is, there is an ontology of cog-
nition, communication, and so forth. The reality of human action cannot
be reduced to stimuli and responses, solely physical reactions, or uncon-
scious behavior. Seeking information, for example, is the instantiation of
complex self, other (that is, other persons), or externally influenced fac-
tors. A teacher’s assignment is real and has effects on what students do.
What students do, though, is also affected by what they already know,
including the difficult to assess “known-unknown.” The decisions and
choices made by the students are not necessarily subject to a firm set of
laws, and there is an explicable reason for resistance to formulation. As
Bhaskar writes, “Human action is characterized by the striking phenom-
enon of intentionality. This seems to depend upon the feature that persons
are material things with a degree of neurophysiological complexity which
enables them not just, like other higher-order animals, to initiate changes
in a purposeful way, to monitor and control their performances, but to
monitor the monitoring of these performances and to be capable of a
commentary upon them” [6, p. 35].
Intentionality does not signify license. A person acting intentionally has
considerable freedom but also acts according to some constraints. The
rules of grammar constrain speech, but they by no means determine it.
Likewise, rules of logic constrain formal inquiry, but the application of the
rules can only occur in certain circumstances. An argument is a formal
structure, but that structure does not determine the premise that a par-
ticular individual will posit at a given time. One of the forces at work at
all times in human and social action is history. Histor y, in this sense, can
be big or little (i.e., it can entail events that affect epochs and nations or
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