Contradiction

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

For many years, case study research derived its understanding and use of contradiction from the positivist models of science. Something cannot be “true” and at the same time “not true.” At a theoretical level, a contradiction arises when two ideas are mutually impossible. Writers in the Marxist tradition, which was built on the Hegelian ideas of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, argued that contradictions could not exist in reality because reality, once you have established the truth of the matter, does not contradict itself. Only our evaluations of reality can contradict each other. Marxist theorists argued that the job of theorists was to understand the “true” situation and analyze it so that the potentially revolutionary class could see the contradictory situation that surrounded it and move to resolve it. This is a version of the positivist understanding of absolute truth, that is, there is one reality and one truth and it is the work of the researcher to discover that reality.

Many case study researchers have worked with the assumption that the elements of their case must be consistent with each other. If one element of the case appears to contradict the evidence of another, then the researcher sees it as his or her obligation to find out which one is “true.” These contradictions, which must be hunted down and either eliminated or explained, can be between cases or within cases. If it is a multiple or comparative case study, then the researcher must distinguish between difference and contradiction. For example, a study of immigrant adaptation might find that migrants have different experiences, which can be accounted for in differences in the social, economic, or cultural context of both the sending and receiving nation. If, however, the study shows that ethnic similarity is correlated with speed of assimilation, but then finds that ethnically similar women have a much harder time than ethnically dissimilar women, the researcher must explore this apparent contradiction. The contradiction thus becomes the focus for continuing analysis.

Researchers tend to find contradiction within a case much more troubling, especially within a case of one person. If the subject of the study says one thing at one point, and then what appears to be the opposite at another, the researcher has either been inclined to dismiss one statement as “not true” based on his or her understanding of the context or has noted that the subject holds contradictory views and tries to account for those differences, again, according to context. However, long before the “postmodern turn” in sociology, some researchers, especially those involved with working across classes or ethnic groups, noted that “consistency” and “rationality” were not general imperatives but associated with middle-class white educated strata. What was called “hegemonic ideology” in the 1970s (associated with a Gramscian perspective) and is now more often referred to a “dominant discourse”(associated primarily with Foucault's work) had different impacts at different levels of society. Marxist scholars, such as Braverman and Beynon, pointed to the “contradictions” between the version of capital-labor relations as put forward by the management and the media, and the “working-class consciousness” based on workers' experience.

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