"Individual words and sounds not contextualised within utterances make no sense (this of itself problematises the issue of what constitutes a linguistic datum), and utterances make sense only within discourse practices (Fairclough, 1989, 1995). Ultimately, the relationship of signifier (the word) to signified (the concept) and referent (the 'thing') remains unverifiable, so the mathematical laws derived from, and applied to, the study of the physical world that govern positivist research cannot safely be held to apply to utterances (Culler, 1976). In the light of this confusion about the validity of utterances as data, and the problems in construing sets of utterances, or locating sets of meanings, as phenomena, qualitative data may more fruitfully be thought of as phenomenographic or perspectival fragments: pieces of expressed or described experience... One can generalise from patterns contructed [sic] out of phenomenographic fragments, but such generalisations can relate only to practices in discursive space and not to anything 'real' that operates according to the laws of space and time."
This is from the gripping paper 'School as Imagined Community in Discursive Space: a perspective on the school effectiveness debate'
Last week’s solution: Well done Tachycardia Plod, who understood that Stefan Maier was actually saying "Analytic analysis is the best kind of analysis, and is far superior to non-analytic analysis, which essentially involves dressing up like Patrick Henry and dancing around a sweaty cardigan until the answer pops into your head."
Post new comment