Sense-Making Home Page

Meetings, Conferences, Workshops

1996 Sense-Making Workshop

Workshop Abstracts

COPYRIGHT AND CITATION INFORMATION:
© Clark, Kathleen D., 1996. Cite as: Clark, Kathleen D. (1996). A communication-as-procedure methodological perspective: An ethnographic and sense-making study of a women's spirituality group. Paper presented at International Communication Association annual meeting, Chicago, Illinois, May 23. Available at: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/meet/m96clark.html

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
The essence of this project is to examine the intentional, emancipatory collective invention of a feminist group process. By participating and observing a small group identified by its members as a "women's spirituality group", I encountered the difficulty of realizing an emanicipatory vision by such a group. Many of the problems seemed centered in inadequate communicative procedures and ignorance or indifference or inability to both dismantle previous habitual communicative procedures and to create new ones adequate to realize the vision. This research uses both sense-making triangulation and communication-as-procedure in many different ways: metaphors that work intuitively, methodological theorizing in the constructing of an analytic template, interviewing method for data collection. The methodological concerns are intellectually practical in terms of data collection methods and analytic tools, and also in terms of the praxis of this emancipatory form which intends to pay attention to process.

THE REASON I TOOK THIS ROAD:
I had personally encountered the liberating power of a women's group and wanted to try and understand what was happening so that this practice could be offered as an emancipatory praxis to others. In terms of conducting the research I tried to keep it as inductive as possible for a long time in order to let this process reveal itself on its own terms. When the time came to analyze it, I sought an analytic which could accommodate this inductive deriving yet move it into the more typical conventions of a theory driven or hypothetical-deductive piece of research. Communication-as-procedure allowed both the freedom and the formality, as well as rather gracefully organizing and illuminating the patterns of rich and complex data.

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
Using a methodology which foregrounds the perspectives, intentions, words, feelings of the participants. It was very important to me not to preconceive, impose, rip off, or abuse the particular women I studied and to allow them to present themselves on their own terms, warts, shimmerings, and all. At the same time this methodological approach seems to have produced fruitful research into this microcosm of all social structurings. The communication-as-procedure perspective which I have participated in developing reveals itself to work well! I feel I successfully adapted methodology and suggested an analytic which does bring to awareness and usefully make available to scrutiny the interplay between old habitual behaviors and attempts at reinvention.

What has been particularly important to me in this project has been the praxis of taking personal experience, intuitive hunches, and bringing them successfully together with academic practices to manifest a document potentially useful to others, both academics and practitioners.

WHAT HAS HINDERED ME:
It has been very hard to move from intuition and poetic apprehension into a pragmatic document which may concretely inform praxis.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH:
How to work inductively in a deductive, theory driven arena. I wanted to observe a phenomenon for quite awhile before using tools of science to understand it. How to let a phenomenon reveal itself on its own terms combined with how to acknowledge that as an intellectual my observing already constrains and informs how I perceive the phenomenon. How to acknowledge and credit what theorists have influenced, guided, and been useful to my observing without letting A Theory shape and determine the research project as seems inevitable in a theory driven discourse.

WHAT WOULD HELP ME NOW:
I want to make this research available to academic discourse through the conventional forms of research presentation. How to do that in a way that usefully introduces this material and perspective yet robustly preserves the unique inductive elements.

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this research is to examine an emancipatory praxis based on "the way women do things." In particular, its goal is to examine the praxis generated through the communicative process of a women's small group which follows the form of the feminist consciousness raising group. How does a feminist group, informed by a feminist consciousness of process, create and maintain a group in keeping with its vision? In particular, how is the group process egalitarian (all voices heard equally despite difference), pluralistic (all voices equally valued despite difference), and democratic (power invested in each voice and shared by all)? How do the communicative practices of feminist group process fail [falter, fall apart, come apart, lose integrity] to maintain its vision?

Theorizing grounded in the Sense-Making approach developed by Dervin and others suggests that attention to procedural invention and reinvention of communicative practices opens a window onto the dynamic iterations which create, maintain, reinvent, and discontinue social structurings. Of particular concern to this perspective is the difficulty and promise of bringing to awareness communicative procedure which has become habitual and thus invisible. They argue that ignorance of habitual communicative procedures is likely to sabotage efforts to change social structurings, and that bringing such habitual communicative procedures to awareness provides a necessary step in recreating process.

An extension of Sense-Making methodology, communication-as-procedure, is used to analyze feminist group process in two modalities: A model drawn from the literature and a naturally occurring women's group. Assessment of the model from the literature is used to derive a tentative analytic template for use in analyzing the communicative processes of the field data. The field data was collected from the naturally occurring group using ethnographic and sense-making methods: Participant observation of the group over six months of meetings, and in-depth sense-making interviews with each group member six months later.

The analysis suggests that the feminist group process involves egalitarian, pluralistic and democratic ideals which rest on assumptions about communication. Nonetheless, axiomatic elements of the process common to all small groups are obscured and not entirely constrained by the intentional communicative process of the feminist group so that these ideals are incompletely realized. As long as group members remain in ignorance of these axiomatic elements, the deeper processes remain invisible to them. Incomplete attention to significant difference means inadequate invention. This limits diversity and the potentially useful struggle which undergirds emancipatory ideals.