Performativity

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

On the one hand, research, as with other forms of social life, is a performance. The researcher as an active, conscious, prior, and performing self conducts or performs research. Performance is the engagement between individual(s) and audience(s). Individuals perform for audiences, who interpret their actions.

Research is akin to a theatrical performance, and just as theater can be indistinguishable from everyday life so too are the methods of case study research not always clearly delineated from the happenings of the everyday. For example, it is not always clear to the researcher when he or she is doing field work. In participant observation the researcher hangs out, talks with, listens to, and engages with others in the types of activities in which they normally participate every day. In addition, the researcher is simultaneously participant and observer, actor and spectator. This blurring of boundaries between the observed and the observer is resolved for, and by, researchers in their ontological and epistemological grounding in the research methodology that governs them. The researcher is expected to behave in prescribed ways (to know what to research and how to conduct research) to maintain the ethical integrity of the study, thus distinguishing them from participants who are not so governed.

As performance, improvisation of the research design occurs during the activity of research. Similar to a drama script, there are elements that cannot be known ahead of time and accounted for. Various aspects of research, such as the number of [Page 670]participants or the questions in the interview schedule, are adjusted and improvised fluidly and flexibly to fit the needs of the research design and/or the interactive performances between researcher and participants. Participants emerge in the performance as a participating audience that then engages, acts and observes in interaction with the researcher. A foundational ontology and epistemology establish researcher and participants as subjects prior to their performance.

Although research can be thought of as a performance, and case study as a particular type of performance, another view of performativity is that it is not a performance willed by the researcher as actor; instead, performance is the reiteration of norms that precede and exceed as well as constrain both researcher and participant and the process of case study research itself. The end product of the case study and the identity of researcher and participant are produced by (and are effects of) regulatory prescription. In the process of doing research, both researcher and participants are created.

The performance of research in this view is based on well-established norms or rules that prescribe how case study research is to be done. In doing case study research, from the design stage, to the development of instruments, to collecting and analyzing data, to the final product, the researcher cites and reiterates the prescribed ways of doing research. The repetition of norms echoes prior prescriptive actions, accumulates authority, and draws upon and covers over the conventions that mobilize it. The underlying actions and decisions that inform the “doing” of case study research, the norms that precede and exceed, remain implicit and taken for granted, and they are brought to conscious thought and made explicit by the researcher only when a challenge, such as something outside the usual, requires the researcher to think about the processes completed or previous case studies. Prescribed ways of doing a specific type of research, such as a case study, exist prior to researchers beginning their study and continue to exist long after the study is completed. Not only do norms precede and exceed, but they also constrain the researcher, requiring that the research be conducted in specific ways. It is this iterative performativity that gives case study research its rigor, reliability, and validity.

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