The next sub-section of YR87 (p. 382, lines 30-42) is short but vital. It looks back to the elements that go to make up the deviant landowners and forward to a broadly suggested outcome of the research. It is also an example of the second kind of normative commitment. In the sub- section, YR87 undertook to:
1. determine the intentions of NIPF owners with regard to the production of timber or other wood products in the next 10 years,
2. identify the underlying factors which influence the owner’s in- tention to produce timber or other wood products in the next 10 years, and
3. suggest ways to change forest landowners’ intended behav- iour (p. 382).
These three steps link the concerns so far outlined in the text and cap- ture the future textual reality effect by suggesting that ways to alter landowners behaviour will be given (this seems like a banal point, but as will become evident it is an important one). There is an expected form to such statements marked by the idea of research objectives to
Chapter 5: Linking the epistemic and normative in a research rationality
which these largely conform. They also operate to define what will be broadly drawn out in the specific data collected. In other words, a social order has been defined in a way that leaves no loose ends, and the manner of its dismemberment (reduction) has been depicted with no conceptual space for failure or re-consideration (i.e., ways will be shown in which landowners can be changed). This step was possible because the text was not written up until after the research was com- pleted. Here, YR87 research objectives will be re-described along the lines of stating ‘how do landowners get to be defined (i.e., known) as
non-timber harvesters, a class deviant from the norm (of timber- harvesters)6?
In the text, the research objectives are clearly offered before the methods are outlined. In practice though, they were (arguably) in a broad form before the theory and method were sourced and then tensioned with the (selection and eventual requirements of the) theory and method. In this though, they were likely not fully determined until
after the research practice was actually concluded. The simple way of saying this is that the text is linear in its presentation of a social order as developed in practice, yet this was not the case in actual practice which is generally messy and contradictory (no matter how many rules are applied from the research strategy to contain that messiness). This tension cuts to the core of how actual practice is re-formed into a textual reality effect within this particular type of research. The reader may amongst a number of options:
• suspend or remain unaware of this knowledge of a tension;
• put trust in the type of research strategy/methodology (authority stems from the research type and the research practitioners written replication of their following of the types rule set); and/or,
• accept (likely implicitly) the research authors and/or communities context and legitimacy.
6
One way to juxtapose this re-description with YR87 objectives, especially if familiar- ity with the forestry milieu is held by the reader of this thesis, is to reverse the main question and consider how unusual it would be to read a research question from within the milieu that went something like this: ‘what are landowners intentions to- wards timber harvesting and how might their behaviour be changed in favour of not
When one or more of the above occurs for a reader, the reader is then in a position to accept the social reality deployed by the researchers.
This suspension of a tension or inculcation into the context by the reader is partly derived from the conventions of language itself (i.e., the text is identifiable as an English text and then as having a specific code which governs the transmission of meaning); and, further, the way conventions amongst the community of peers operate and are understood by the reader; the recognition by the reader of the authenticity of the use of language by a particular author and so on. In generalising this statement to readers within the forestry milieu, I base it on my own experience mixed with insights from a broad literature on how readers and writers understand (or not) text (see for instance: Franklin 1984; Schuster 1986; Broderick 1994; Porter 1995; Vaughan 1999; Crawford, Kelly and Brown 2000; Kelly, Chen and Prothero 2000; Marietta and Perlman 2000; Burman 2003). I’d certainly recognise that this issue of how the reader understands the text remains somewhat indistinct as described in this chapter, but it should also be noted that this thesis has been demarcated in such a way as to avoid undertaking an empirical study or research into readers of text generated from within the forestry milieu. Such tasks rather remain (in league with the aforementioned broad literature on readers and writers) as important issues for further research.
Finalising the argument, in such a manner, the social order of the textual reality effect pre-exists its telling (writing) and is entirely reflexive in the text (Lynch 1993). There is, again, nothing unusual about this, but the two points to draw out are that it is: (1) a vital step in obtaining epistemic authority; and, (2) that it occurs in a variety of differing ways. The way it has been achieved in YR87 is via remnant-positivism, which is highly intolerant of contextual ambiguity in the socio-material.