Chapter 2

This chapter represents a piece of work fundamental to my academic life, which during many years has included a close cooperation and friendship with my colleague Elisabeth Gulbrandsen and still do. I am most grateful to Elisabeth for letting me include this text in the book. What we have written here has been an important, mutual understanding for our efforts of trying transformations in our respectively daily academic and research policy contexts.

Authority in Transformation

… the declining authority of the West to determine how the rest of the world shall live requires a rethinking of the past, present and future of Western sciences and their technologies no less than of other important Western institutions and practices. (Sandra Harding 1993)

Introduction

The following comes out of an interdisciplinary discussion through which we want to spell out some challenges to ourselves as researchers and feminists adequate to our Nordic contexts. It is not a presentation of already done, neatly wrapped up research. As part and parcel of neatly wrapped up research often comes an effect of “othering”, of (dis)placing both problems and challenges with others. A certain understanding of self (however brittle) is also induced or effected while wrapping up is on the agenda. As we peer under the veil to discover or reveal hidden meaning, provide expertise or counter-expertise, we easily slide into understanding our role as “helping the suffering people out there”. As researchers we are part of the solution: “… developing at home that voice of entitlement, the voice of control, that accompanies the conquest of empires far from home” (Traweek 1992, p 461)²⁵.

We argue that it is high time we make a shift. A shift that may seem simple, but as our own “trying transformations” tell us; it is certainly not easy²⁶. Time is ripe for us as partakers in the modern research complexes, to develop a readiness to think and feel ourselves as part of the problem, and learn how to use our implicatedness as resources for transformatory projects. This shift represents our “headline” challenge. This chapter aim to expand on this challenge by spelling out some of the motivations for and implications of the shift, as well as pointing to conditions for carrying it through.

Context

From the very beginning, the new gender research²⁷ holds a science critique programme²⁸. What motivated the researchers were lacks and biases in established research. In spite of continuous struggles to transform, we have not found discussions of feminist research as a movement for transformation of science in Nordic feminist literature. We miss discussions of how we work in order to induce change in the knowledge producing apparatuses we so intimately inhabit. Mostly it is substantial results of research that are presented, when the status is settled. To employ a familiar metaphor, we are given new maps, and few, if any, references to the construction of the maps are included. A narrow understanding of knowledge production as impelled solely by science’s own internal logic is implicitly conveyed. A similarly naive understanding of how transformation or change is effected is supported.

This emphasis on developing knowledge about transformation of science we find as relevant in a Nordic context as in an international context. The Nordic circumstances put this clearly on the agenda as the stated ambitions to change or transform the sciences are high in Nordic feminist research. An often employed term is “revolution”. But are the means to accomplish such revolutionary transformations correspondingly developed? One example from the Centre for Women’s Research at the University of Oslo may indicate existed reflections on transformation. Results of the first centre-initiated research project (Taksdal, Widerberg, 1992) represented a relatively huge commitment, including a research course for all social science disciplines. We read the book as a central text for discussing the new gender research in Norway. Summing up the project and the course, the editors (head of research and her assistant) state:

We cannot imagine that it will be possible to discuss ’kjønn’ [in Norwegian there is just one word ’kjønn’, not conveying the sex/gender distinction] in the same old way after the publication of this book, and we see before us the revolution in the understandings of disciplines that has to follow in its wake. That is, when we think logically and intellectually. Our academic experiences tell us, nevertheless, that the resistance to the development of knowledge regarding understandings of ’kjønn’ is not located at the intellectual level, but at the emotional. It is about ’kjønn’…. (Taksdal and Widerberg, 1992: 282; our translation)

The ambition is revolutionary, and the writers admit not having a clue about how to bring that revolution forward, after the breakdown of the belief in the force of the “best” arguments. Hindrances are located at the “emotional level”, and as such they are out of reach, even though this is admitted as a repeated experience. The dreaded “othering process” is also at work while naming “gender researchers” as the ones who “think logically and intellectually”. From this no transformatory competence can be recognised.

The centres for gender research in the Nordic countries are small and vulnerable with a correspondingly strong need for legitimacy. What renders legitimacy to the products of feminist research in a non-feminist world, are not always what is helpful for developing transformatory projects. Such projects require that we open up for scrutiny and discussion of problems and challenges that often are cleansed out of texts in order for them to pass as authoritative. If we do not keep our justificatory struggles separate from the transformatory ones, the impact may be a naive thinking about transformation and/or a slide into conventional science that “means a treachery against the great, long range, feminist science projects” (Kaul 1993, p 154). Accounts of “feminist research as professional academic work” (Steinfeld 1993, p 25) and warnings against “galloping amateurs in feminist research”²⁹ give added force to such slides, when issued by persons in power. A transformative competence must include continuous explications and problematizations of criteria for evaluating research, and not to give the impression that we all know and agree about them.

We assume that feminist researchers in the Nordic countries have special prerequisites for developing transformative competences. As we have had women in power positions for so long, it becomes increasingly harder to assume that once women enter positions, change or transformation automatically happens. In the Nordic countries we have hold the world record in women representatives in our national assemblies. In spite of this high representation alternative politics is hard to discern even in sectors that are said to be of special relevance to women like child care, care of the elderly, medical care and other welfare issues (Skjeie 1991). Accordingly, we expect a high recognition of the need to expand on, discuss and complicate our transformatory struggles in science and society. All our different “trying transformations” will provide us with ample material.

What we maintain and will spell out as best as we can in the following, are the need and the challenge for feminist research to broaden its understanding of processes of knowledge and learning as an additional prerequisite for the unfolding and evolving of our transformatory competence.

Crisis? What crisis?

Why can’t we be satisfied with substantial reports and new maps like “Forståelser av kjønn” (Taksdal, Widerberg, 1992)? Why is it so important to us to try and mobilise for development of transformative competence? That has to do with our assessment of the situation we are in, or better, have brought ourselves into. We also find it necessary to consider whether a developed transformative competence can turn out to be what renders legitimacy and accordingly authority to feminist research in the longer run.

The global environmental and developmental crises make heavy demands on the modern research complex’s capacity for renewal and adjustment. Enhanced understanding of resistance against and possibilities for transformation, is coming up as a competence much sought for. Norway may again serve as an example. A relatively strong commitment, included monetary support, to research guided by an environmental awareness goes together with being the land not only of the midnight sun but also of the Brundtland report³⁰. After several decades of recognition of environmental and developmental crises, in grass root movements and on political arenas as well as in the research complex, after relatively heavy funding of research on these problems and of research programs for alternative futures, Norwegian research and research politics is marked by distress and frustration. Strong voices maintain that the research transforming movement that is needed to meet these challenges has proved too difficult to set in motion. Interdisciplinary research was early singled out as one of the most crucial challenges. More than twenty years after the Brundtland report one of the participants at a summing up conference on research and research policies in environment and development in Norway, characterised these efforts as amounting to pouring “the same old wine on bottles with new labels”³¹. What hinders our realising such sensible ambitions?

His-story only - or new alliances?

At times it seems to us that we are trudging in fine programs from the 60s and 70s with little or no transformatory power. We have come to fear that this impotence is inherited by the relatively new field of “science studies” as well as by Nordic feminist research. Nordic feminist research share transformatory or revolutionary ambitions with the science critique programs often presented as its forerunners, with critical theory and critical hermeneutics (Iversen 1982). A claim possible to connect to such traditions is that there are intimate connections between knowledge producing processes and social and cultural interests. The ideal was formulated as a “critical theory”. A theory was critical in proportion to its ability to specify its own (pre)conditions. What could be struggled for, was a relative objectivity, an objectivity that could specify its own borders, which also indicated a theory’s possibilities, even if this point seldom was underwritten in the discussions in the 60s and 70s. The same explicit ambition to recognise research developing in contexts, and that different historical, cultural and social relations saturate the product of research, motivates Sandra Harding’s work with “strong objectivity” (Harding 1991), Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988) as well as Rosi Braidotti’s struggle to develop what she conceptualises as “critical feminist theory/epistemology” (Braidotti 1991).

In spite of such fine ambitions and ideals existing in Norway for more than 50 years³², the consequences of the understanding are never drawn in so much as the researcher explicitly reflects his point of departure or his role in the research process into the product. The proliferation of statements like “I am a white, heterosexual, middle class feminist …..” in prefaces and talks, has made us suspect a certain inheritance of this impotence in feminist research. We read such statements as a symptom that a critical challenge still has to be met: How do we work in order to move from the claim that “science is in society and society is in science” to be able to say something about how this moulds the product?

Continuities between the critical programmes of the 50s, 60s and 70s and the relatively new field of “science studies” can easily be traced. (Børmark 1984, Elzinga 1988, Lundstøl 1977). Science studies have produced heaps of historical, sociological, anthropological and science policy texts motivated by an understanding of science as a context dependent process. This work has localised science in social/historical/cultural relations, but have to a much lesser degree - if at all - managed to develop grips on “internal workings” conventionally understood. To become aware of how “society (works) in science” seems to represent a greater challenge than to trace how “science (works) in society”.

In 1985 Evelyn Keller summed up this situation: “Yet, while our sensitivity to the influence of social and political forces has certainly grown, our understanding of their actual impact on the production of scientific theory has not” (Keller 1985, p 5). The lack of mediations between the relatively new external perspectives and older, more internally based analyses has grave consequences regarding our possibility to develop a transformative competence as researchers. As a result of this lack, we cannot but regard science’s products as being impelled solely by science own internal logic. In the everyday life of doing research, we are left without possibilities to understand how macro powers are at play, we are left without the possibility to consciously act and transform research in a direction of our own choice.

In a Nordic context, concessions are made that the ambitions from the 60s and 70s have as yet to be realised. (Gregersen, Køppe 1985, Håkanson 1988, Kjørup 1985, Rosenbeck 1992, Lundgren 1993). A bit of work has to be done before processes of knowledge and learning can be more consciously mediated. In this situation we - as researchers - are left with judging only the consequences of what we partake in creating modern science and technology. We have not developed the means to act and transform while we are “at it”, while we are producing science and technical solutions. The chances are high that we will only be prepared to act in a chosen direction, when it is too late. Challenges from the global environmental and developmental crises, cannot be adequately met, before such mediations are realised.

Implicatedness as resource

If the diagnosis we have hinted at above, are accepted, this impotence becomes an acute problem. Challenges arising from indications that the ecological and poverty crises are intimately linked to our Western ways of living are addressed at the self-understanding of the actors in the modern research complex. As participants in this complex we can no longer see ourselves only as deliverers of solutions, as helpers. We must also see ourselves as part of the problem, and we must learn how to employ our implicatedness as resources for our transformatory projects.

As researchers we not only observe, unveil, analyse and solve problems “out there”. Our knowledge-producing activities are a (re)productive force whose effect is not contained by the walls of the ivory towers - if they ever were. As researchers we do not have a standpoint outside a civilisation in crises. We are implicated in it. Our knowledge-constructions are efficient. They produce “reality”. They produce chances of life and death and distribute the chances unequally. This fundamental tenet of all research are - as Evelyn Keller puts it: “nowhere more dramatically in evidence than in the successes of nuclear physics and molecular biology, that is, in the production of technologies of life and death” (Keller 1992, p 9).

The softer disciplines, social sciences and the humanities usually shrink at the thought of being implicated in such instrumental activities as indicated above. We agree with Samuel Weber that “The future of the humanities may well depend on the capacity of … society to admit and accept the fictionality of what it assumes to be real, as well as the reality of its fictions” (as cited in the introduction to Diprose & Ferrell, 1991). The social sciences are presented with a similar understanding of their productive/ instrumental role in Dorothy Smith’s writings. We return to this point.

Impacts of our knowledge constructions are independent of whether our results are judged to be true or false, valid or not. Following this realisation we can trace a shift in focus from what in the anglo-american philosophy of science is called “context of justification” to an interest in developing more complex and integrated understandings of knowledge processes in the late modern research complex. In order to handle the political and ethical implications and responsibilities involved in knowledge production, we need understandings and concepts of knowledge that help us become aware of these dimensions, suffice it no longer just to claim our scientific products as “true” or “valid”. Jane Flax formulates the necessary shift in the following way: “I would like to move the terms of the discussion away from the relations between knowledge and truth to those between knowledge, desire, fantasy, and power of various kinds” (Flax 1992, p 457). We read this move or shift as expanding on what we presented as our “headline challenge” at the beginning of this chapter. We like to underwrite that this is not a call for any old or new liberal individualism. But we think Wendy Hollway has made a point by stating: “Science as we know it could only become dominant because it was preferred” (Hollway 1989, p 122). Struggles to become aware of and change such preferences will be a central part of research transformatory projects.

The Science Question in Feminism - once more

It is not difficult to gathered support for such a move in international feminist discussions. Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism (TSQIF) was an important text convincing us of the need to put our knowledge constructions and ourselves at risk, it convinced us that feminism first and foremost was a movement for winding up privileges, privileges of knowledge as well as other privileges. What distinguishes feminist criticisms of science from other critiques and struggles against racism, colonialism, capitalism and homophobia, from the counter culture movement of the 60s as well as the contemporary ecology movement, is according to Harding that

the feminist criticisms appear to touch especially raw nerves……. Perhaps most disturbingly, they challenge our sense of personal identity at its most prerational level, at the core. They challenge the desirability of the gendered aspects of our personalities and the expression of gender in social practices, which for most men and women have provided deeply satisfying parts of self-identity. (Harding, 1986, p. 16/17)

This characterisation of feminist criticisms was reformulated as a challenge to feminists in a text that followed and expanded on the last chapter of TSQIF: “I want to talk here about some challenges for theorizing itself at this moment in history, and, in particular for feminist theorizings. Each has to do with how to use our theories actively to transform ourselves and our social relations, while we and our theories - the agents and visions of reconstruction - are themselves under transformation. (Harding, 1987a, p 285)

We find Harding’s texts brilliantly arguing for and pointing to a reflexive turn where feminists’ labour of change includes ourselves. But how do we deal with such a challenge in everyday research? From what was received in the first round of reading TSQIF, we suspect that we lacked both the readiness and the means to meet her challenge, as well as giving in to pressures towards legitimacy by reading Harding’s text as a guide to different ways to ground feminist research³³.

Harding understands the epistemologies she identifies as strategies for legitimating research. They are produced in and for a “context of justification”. She also explicitly characterises them as transitional: “Gender-sensitive revisions of modernist epistemologies have provided the main justificatory resources for feminism ….. Thus I propose that we think of feminist epistemologies as still transitional meditations upon the substance of feminist claims and practices” (Harding, 1986, p 141). This point is also underwritten in Feminism & Methodology (Harding, 1987b, p 186). But there is also something about these epistemologies that can be of use for feminism’s transformatory projects, Harding contends. In TSQIF she describes the conflicts and the contradictions in and between them (Harding, 1986, p 24), because this makes it possible for us to “formulate new questions about science” (p 29). She points to such contradictions and conflicts as resources for our future oriented, transformatory struggles.

We want to follow Harding and maintain that “reflexivity” is a critical ingredient in a transformative competence. A claim for reflexivity also links up very nicely with Flax’s move. Reflexivity is on the agenda in science studies, as well as in Haraway’s and Braidotti’s struggle for respectively “situated knowledges” and “critical feminist theory/epistemology”. Harding’s own Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Harding 1991) can be read as one extended argument for the necessity of reflexivity. This centrality of reflexivity is due to the researcher’s obvious role as mediator between “society and science”. In spite of this entire struggle, we argue that the claim for reflexivity has as yet to be adequately met.

The reflexive turn that we extract from Harding’s recommended strategy, requests an open process. The pressures toward legitimacy and grounding, seem to demand closure. TSQIF can be read as a warning not to mix up the work for legitimacy with our future oriented, transformatory work. More often than not, the claim for reflexivity has proved its impotence by being directed at “others”. We have also noted that the claim for reflexivity has deteriorated to a project of grounding one’s own knowledge claims. Considering the strong influence of Marxist theory in critical traditions in Nordic countries, this is a very easy slide. To position oneself in relation to marginalised or victimised groups, has been interpreted as legitimating one’s knowledge claims.

Rosemary Hennessy is among those, who contend that standpoint epistemology can be developed beyond projects for grounding knowledge claims. She concludes her discussion of the possibilities in standpoint epistemology by stating: “Once the feminist standpoint is formulated as this sort of dis-identifying collective subject of critique, the emphasis in its claims for authority can shift from the grounds for knowledges - women’s lives or experience - to consideration of the effects of knowledge as always invested ways of making sense of the world” (Hennessy, 1993). We find an interesting parallel to Hennessy’s discussion in a text from the “other side”, the natural sciences, in Evelyn Keller’s Secrets of Life Secrets of Death. Keller pursues here her “mediation-project” from 1985 by adding a focusing of how science works as well as what science works at. It is not enough to contend that it works.

Aino Saarinen describes a move from “different views on reality” to “different views on science” in Feminist Research - an Intellectual Adventure? (Saarinen, 1992). We like to connect this move to the one Harding projects as she takes the discussion from “the woman question in science” to “the science question in feminism”. If we accept that there are different legitimate understandings of science, it seems to us that we must be prepared to include more of the construction of the map in the map, as any self-evident common grounding for knowledge production has broken down. The claim for reflexivity is given added weight by such a multicultural challenge. This is a challenge that cannot be held at arm’s length, or (dis)placed with others. Not only everybody else’s (or particular others’) science, objectivity and rationality is up for deconstruction, investigation and eventual reconstruction.

Reflexivity and authority

During graduate studies and postdoc work we learn to pass as researchers with authority in the academic world. Internalising the rules and norms that constitute the chosen discipline, also implies the assimilation of a complex of tacit or informal knowledges. As Gerholm and Gerholm put it: “… the things you learn by acquiring a discipline are by no means only knowledge of a certain kind and technical skill but also a “cultural framework” that may come to define a big part of ones life” (Gerholm, Gerholm 1992 p 14).

One important aspect of informal knowledge is the notion of authority or lack of authority in a text. The ability to recognise such authority is hard to make explicit and thus difficult to achieve. “Very few scientists can answer questions about why certain texts give an impression of “competence” while other texts don’t.” (Gerholm, Gerholm 1992 p 25). Gerholm and Gerholm describe this ability as a feeling for how authority is created in a text or a lecture, for what counts as an argument, for the common attitude towards the surrounding world and for the personal style accepted by colleagues.

In order to exemplify how we learn to achieve authority, we will use an example from the discipline of particle physics in US given by Traweek’s text. (Traweek, 1988)

Renewal of physics takes place by training novices. Particularly important in this process is “the informal annotations of everyday experience called common sense” (p 74). What constitutes common sense seems to be strongly regulated, as this research culture select only a very narrow, overwhelmingly male group of researchers. Concerning authority inside the discipline one important aspect is whose interpretation of physics is not to be challenged. This is mediated through the textbooks and constitutes a kind of context markers in the discipline. Traweek contends that alternative interpretations at the same level of analysis do not exist. The student is taught analogical thinking, not induction or deduction. The sublime messages are “that science is the product of individual great men, that this product is independent of all social or political contexts, that all knowledge is dependent upon or derivative from physics, and that the boundaries of particle physics are rigidly defined” (Traweek, 1988, p 78). Another explicit message to the students is the stated fact that there are only a dozen major research laboratories in the world serving as the places with real authority and which determine the agenda in particle physics.

To be recognised as a serious physicist committed to the work, you have to develop a certain style. The Americans have focused on competition. This is a delicate act of balance in relation to the elders, the supervisors, who are giving tacit and explicit instructions. These intricate factors of achieving authority as a researcher stands in bright contrast to the physicist’s own conception of belonging to an elite, whose membership is based on scientific merits exclusively.

Traweek gives voice to an experimentalist with a certain distance to the experiences of being a successful postdoc. This experimentalist maintains that to be successful you have to be a relatively immature person. “… a mature person would have too much difficulty accepting the training without question and limiting doubts to a prescribed sphere. He felt that this precondition kept most women and minorities from doing well; their social experience had taught them to doubt authority only too thoroughly” (p 92). Our transformatory ambitions press us beyond this “doubting” stand and to questions about how we can become aware of and convert our implicatedness in the problems and crisis into resources for transformatory projects.

Legitimacy in and through texts

Texts are written, read and deeply constructive. As Dorothy Smith puts it “People scattered and unknown to one another are coordinated in an orientation to the same texts” (Smith 1990, p 168). Public textual discourse creates new forms of relations, social as well as political and economic. Discourse is here understood as an ongoing intertextual process (or an ongoing “conversation”) mediated by texts among speakers and listeners separated from one another in time and space. (Smith 1990, p 161)

In Texts, Facts and Femininity Dorothy Smith discusses the concept of discourse, in which we find the textual character of the ruling apparatus. If we recognise our established science communities as “the ruling apparatus” it deepens our understanding to look at “facts”, produced in this apparatus as something arising in processes mediated by texts. Knowledge as facts, as have been discussed with the examples in physics given by Traweek³⁴, is sanctioned by the ruling apparatus after fulfilling both explicit and implicit conditions. As Smith puts it: “The notion of ‘fact’ …. indicates a recurrent orderliness of movement from locally ordered observations to the textually mediated discourse … “ (Smith 1990, p 215). She advances the notion by stating that “facts” arise in processes mediated by textual forms.

The mediated texts in the science communities constitute the discourse, in which the scientific discussion and development take place. Dorothy Smith emphasises the discourse to be an active social process, which leads us to the assumption that processes of producing facts are far more intricate than we have learnt in our academic education (especially if we are natural scientists or engineers). A more complex understanding of these processes is needed for dealing with transformation and legitimacy inside as well as outside the scientific institutions.

Helga Novotny stresses that knowledge are to be accepted or taken for granted not because of claims on higher scientific authority, but more because of negotiations. This point is grounded in a desire of knowledge that is open for and sensitive to many contact surfaces, where contemporary knowledge, in very heterogeneous contexts, is born. She also finds that these contact surfaces have one thing in common. They are messy. Instead of being distinctively separated, they are overlapping. Instead of clear answers we get contradictions. Everywhere we have to make choices just to face a demand for a new choice around the corner. The world seems transformed to a labyrinth. (Nowotny, 1994) This is certainly evident in fast growing research areas like the converging biotechnology, information and communication technology and nanotechnology although the labyrinth conception is repressed at the expense of a more controllable and straight one.