The following section considers the realist and constructivist ontological lens from which to apply a conceptual framework to study power issues within collaboration. It subsequently justifies the application of critical realism to underpin the research design.88
The Realist View of Power
According to Fairclough, the ontological claim of realism is that “there is a real world, including a real social world, which exists independently of our knowledge about it."89
Accordingly, a realist epistemology would claim the NMCC actors' collaborative actions are a result of the public sector and organisational structures they occupy. Consequently, the actors’ causal powers to collaborate derive from these structures and not because of the NMCC actors’ own abilities to shape their collaborative interaction. This analysis contends that a realist approach to power limits the ability of this research to consider the agency of actors, which in this context is their causal power to shape their collaborative practices that are not “reducible to the causal powers of structures and practices.”90 The realist view considers the NMCC actors as powerless subjects that allow external factors to influence their interaction within the NMCC. As such, the resultant conceptual framework would not account for Murphy and Dixon‘s call for an exploration of how actors form, sustain and resist power relationships against their own organisations’ identities.91 Additionally, it would not provide public servants engaged in collaboration with an analytical framework that facilitates their awareness of the dynamics of power through which they construct their collaborative interactions.
The Constructivist Claim
Constructivists explain power as “agential and intersubjective (including non-intentional and impersonal power).”92 Accordingly, the physical world an actor occupies is socially
88
Norman Fairclough, “Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism”
Organizational Studies 26, no.6 (2005): 916, doi:10.1177/01170840605054610.
89 Fairclough, “Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism,” 922. 90
Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, 22.
91 Murphy and Dixon, “Discourse, Identity, and Power in International Non-profit Collaborations,” 170. 92
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constructed and it follows that the relationships between actors are of their own making. Constructivism’s epistemological claim is that an actor’s language constructs his or her own roles and identities, and that of others. Guzzini explains this language is “intersubjective,”93 that its actors share a similar community of practice and subscribe to similar language. In the context of the case study, the NMCC actors subscribe to the language of the New Zealand public sector. The application of constructivist ontology would give this research recourse to apply Foucault’s theory of what power does, in that power can “structure the possible field of action in others.”94 The subsequent relationships of power between the collaborating NMCC actors is negotiated either deliberately or unconsciously within their thought community of practice within the public sector, irrespective of the public sector and organisational structures they occupy. In reference to Foucault, Reed contends there is “nothing ‘outside’ of discourse but more discourse,”95 he remarks:
“power…is not, as Foucault asserts, impossible to possess and control: power can be and is generated and controlled by agents and structures as they struggle to impose their interests and/or logics on others at the level of everyday interaction and institutionalized politics.”96
This study agrees with Reed’s contention in that constructivism denies an opportunity to examine the role of institutions because it fails to recognise that actors anchor within “pre- existing structuresof material, social, and discursive relations.”97 Therefore, my research posits for a theoretical foundation that considers the NMCC actors’ agency to construct the NMCC inter-agency collaboration whilst considering the constraints or enablers associated with their organisational and public sector context.
Critical Realism and Fairclough
The ontological claim of my thesis is the NMCC actors’ relationships shape their
collaborative practice and the public sector institutions in which their collaboration takes
93 Ibid., 498. 94
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 (Vol 3), ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1994), 341.
95 Mike Reed, “Organizational Analysis as Discourse Analysis: A Critique,” in Discourse and Organization, eds.
David Grant, Tom W. Keenoy, and Cliff Oswick (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1998), 210.
96 Reed, “Organizational Analysis as Discourse Analysis: A Critique,” 212. 97
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place. Additionally, the NMCC actors’ relationships are also shaped through the same practices and institutions. Scholars advocate that critical realism can explicate what power does to actors and how actors use power within a particular context.98 For this study, I use Fairclough’s explanation of critical realism that draws from the work of Bhaskar.99
Fairclough explains that critical realism acknowledges a real world independent of an actor’s construction of it, in this case, the New Zealand public sector. However, unlike realism, critical realism claims the social world is “dependent on human action for its existence – it is socially constructed.”100 This is how the NMCC actors construct their knowledge of inter- agency collaboration within the public sector, and the identities and roles of the NMCC actors are dependent on their social reality according to the “concrete events of social life.”101 These concrete events refer to the 1980s and later 2000s whole-of-government public sector reforms that shape the NMCC actors’ organisations and the wider public sector as a whole. The reforms and the public sector also materialise through the NMCC actors’ social practice. Fairclough explains social practices “are associated with particular areas of social life,”102 for example, the practice of inter-agency collaboration. He stresses social practice “articulate[s] discourse (therefore language) together with other non-discoursal social elements.”103 For example, the NMCC (F) text explains the ways in which the NMCC actors use language within the social relations of the public sector, which involves the structuring and use of processes the actors must employ to collaborate.
The following section considers how the pertinent research approaches to collaboration provide best fit with the ontological foundations of this research. From the discussions, this research considers the conceptual framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA) that enables the analysis to address the research problem.
98 Guzzini, “The Concept of Power: a Constructivist Analysis,” 435; Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending,
“The International’ as Governmentality,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no.3 (2007): 689, http://www.mil.sagepub.com/content/35/3/677.full.pdf; Samuel J. Barkin, “Realist Constructivism,”
International Studies Review 5, no.3 (2003): 337, doi:10/1046/j.1079-1760.2003.00503002.x.
99
Fairclough, “Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism,” 937.
100 Ibid., 922. 101
Ibid., 923.
102 Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, 25. 103
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