Epistemological and Ontological Assumptions

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69 3.1.1. Interpretivism

Based on the philosophical positions outlined above, I adopted an interpretivist approach to my fieldwork and analysis. There are a variety of definitions of interpretivism, but all of them emerge from a position that takes human interpretation as the starting point for developing knowledge about the social world (Prasad, 2005, p. 13). While interpretive traditions uniformly subscribe to the belief that our worlds are socially created, they also maintain that these

constructions are possible only because of our ability to attach meanings to events, objects, and interactions. Those who know about the Patagonia brand of clothing, for example, are likely to identify the wearer of a Patagonia jacket as someone who is concerned about the environment and social responsibility and likes the outdoors. In this way objects and actions are not only identified as constituting a particular phenomenon on their own but are also seen to stand for something else. According to Prasad (2005, p. 14), it is this inherent human capacity for meaningful social construction that interpretivists term as being subjective because it departs from the idea of a fixed external reality. Particularly important to interpretivists is a commitment to Weber’s notion of verstehen, whereby understanding meaning and intentionality is prioritized over causal explication. As a result, the preferred subject matter of interpretive research is the everyday lifeworld of individuals, and it is the researcher’s role to describe and explain people’s behaviour through an investigation of how they experience, sustain, and talk about these socially constructed everyday realities. In my fieldwork and analysis this has led to many questions and conversations about the meaning of sustainability and the meaning of fashion, as well as to discussions about disciplinary traditions and how these play out in everyday life.

The social dimension of reality construction is what characterizes interpretive traditions. As Prasad (2005, p. 14) writes: “even while we are individually engaged in acts of sense making, these acts are significantly mediated by the cognitive schema and language that we obtain from our wider societies.” The goal of social constructionism—or, in Bourdieu’s terminology, constructivist structuralism (Bourdieu, 1989; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992)—is to explore how social constructions come about. Bourdieu distinguishes his use of structuralism from that of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, arguing that there exist objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems such as language and myths—objective structures that can guide and constrain practices and actions of agents. By constructivism Bourdieu (1989) means that there is a twofold social genesis: habitus and fields. So while agents do have an active apprehension of the world and do

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construct their vision of the world, this construction is carried out under structural constraints.

According to Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 127): “Social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents.”

Actor Network Theory (ANT) represents the second wave of social constructivism and includes in its analysis non-human actors such as technical artefacts, spec sheets and textiles, stating that these can play an active role in construction. That being said, Latour (2005a) only describes himself as a social constructionist on condition that the word ‘social’ is not misunderstood as some sort of macro phenomenon which is already there instead of being created at micro level.

It is possible, writes Latour (2005a, p. 5): “to remain faithful to the original institutions of the social sciences by redefining sociology not as the ‘science of the social’, but as the tracing of associations. [...] social does not designate a thing among other things, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social.”

To sum up, an interpretivist-constructivist perspective is based on the idea that qualitative research should be concerned with a commitment to dialogue and the revealing of multiple realities, as opposed to seeking one objective reality. And since reality is socially constructed, this also means that the researcher is not a neutral player but takes on an active role in

construction (Yanow, Ybema, and van Hulst, 2012). Rather than locating the meanings and narratives to be known either in the subjects or the researchers, the process of knowing is

intersubjective and social, involving both agents in the co-construction of knowledge. Following this line of thought, I assumed when I entered the field that my previous knowledge of the field would be insufficient for developing a fixed research design due to the complex, multiple and unpredictable nature of what is perceived as reality. This further means that although this thesis aims to examine what design thinking is in practice, in line with Johansson-Sköldberg et al.

(2013) I do not believe there to be a unique meaning of ‘design thinking’. Instead of seeking such a meaning, therefore, I look for where and in what ways the concept is used in different situations, i.e. in practice, and for what meaning is given to the concept. My fieldwork and analysis have thus been journeys of ongoing change in response to my fieldwork and in response to discussions with friends and colleagues and in conversation with my theoretical frameworks.

This journey has taught me not only about the field of textiles and fashion but also about myself.

71 3.1.2. Ethnography

Ethnography, which has been a major inspiration in my research, is one of many traditions within interpretivism. Building on my introduction to the ethnographic study of InnoTex

(Chapter 1), in this section I shall briefly introduce the understanding of ethnography applied in this thesis, before I turn to a presentation of the specific methods used in my fieldwork.

In my research I largely adapted Van Maanen’s (1988) view of ethnography as a method that involves extensive fieldwork of various types, including participant observation, formal and informal interviewing, collecting documents, recording and filming. This view of ethnography also includes the study of material artefacts in order to gain an understanding of what they mean to people.

I conducted six months of fieldwork with my primary case organization, InnoTex, from June through November 2013. During these months I was based at the InnoTex studio, observing and taking part in everyday activities in the hope of developing an understanding of the everyday practices, perspectives and tacitly known rules of the members of the group. Van Maanen (1988) notes that ethnographic fieldwork traditionally requires prolonged observation over time.

Some scholars, however, and especially those engaged in organizational studies and business anthropology, have questioned both the need for longevity of fieldwork and the forms of field sites (Faubion and Marcus, 2009; Garsten and Nyquist, 2013), proposing instead that these requirements be left more open-ended. The six months I spent in the field and my participation in additional workshops and meetings were arguably not sufficiently extensive according to the traditional anthropological sense of fieldwork; however, these six months do qualify as more than what Yanow, Ybema and van Hulst (2012, p. 332) would describe as merely “flying in and out of the field for a brief, tourist-like visit”. It was my fieldwork with InnoTex, for example, that brought to light the impacts that REF 2014 and internal changes in the structure of the university were having on the everyday work of InnoTex—material that I would not have thought to ask in a survey or isolated interview.