Toward Methodological Precision: Linking Qualitative Meta-theories and Methods to Environmental Justice Research Design

Introduction

In environmental justice (EJ) studies, various qualitative research methods have been used for nearly one and a half decades. However, the majority of the studies do not explain what epistemological perspective enables the framing of the research questions nor do they discuss in rich detail how a specific data analytic method is used to examine the research questions. This leaves EJ scholars uninformed about appropriate ways of linking meta-theories and analytic methods to their research questions. This article addresses this gap by elucidating how the epistemologies of critical realism and social constructionism and forms of discourse analysis can be deployed to analyze environmental inequality formation in hazardous workplaces. The epistemologies of critical realism and social constructionism philosophically support environmental justice studies. Through a critical realist lens, an EJ scholar is able to conceive workplace EJ conflict as being fabricated through the interaction of agency and structure; whereas, a social constructionist framework helps explain how EJ conflicts are socially constructed by multiple actors. The two meta-theories provide insight into different aspects of a specific EJ conflict. Each meta-theoretical lens therefore determines the kind of research questions and data collection and analysis methods that should be deployed in attaining in-depth understanding of a particular dimension of the problem.

By the mid-1990s, it had become evident to EJ researchers that colored and poor communities in the United States were disproportionately burdened with hazardous waste. Instead of searching for evidence of distributive injustice using quantitative techniques, EJ scholars ¹ engaged seriously in theorizing the causes of environmental inequality advocating the use of qualitative research methods. For instance, Pellow ² used historical and ethnographic methods to examine how workplace EJ struggles were shaped by multiple stakeholders in Chicago's waste recycling industry. However, Pellow does not explain in-depth what meta-theories inform his choice of research questions and analytic method and leaves upon the reader to build connections between them. Drawing on Pellow's work, this article uses a hypothetical electronic recycling workplace as a topic of EJ inquiry; and links it to epistemologies, research questions, data collection, and analysis methods. To that end, this article first describes the basic tenets of critical realism and social constructionism followed by a discussion about how environmental inequality can be conceived from both meta-theoretical perspectives. Finally, it demonstrates how constructivist and critical discourse analysis can enable analysis of the topic. By drawing connections between meta-theory, research questions, data collection, and analysis methods, the article accentuates the need for achieving methodological rigor in future environmental justice scholarship.

Critical Realism and Social Constructionism

The philosophy of critical realism has its origin in the works of Roy Bhaskar ³ and is based on the premise that reality remains independent of one's awareness of it ⁴ and is constructed in discourse. ⁵ Critical realists are concerned with a stratified ontology that consists of the actual, the empirical, and the real. ⁶ The real constitutes structures, the actual is socially defined, and the empirical is constituted by the researcher from studying the actual and the real. ⁷ The purpose of a critical realist is to understand how social phenomena are caused ⁸ by being critical of structures that generate them. ⁹ Social objects or entities have causal powers to generate events and consist of “organizations, people, relationships, attitudes, [and] resources” and generally possess structure. ¹⁰ Structure consists of “a set of internally related objects or practices” and is embedded within larger structures. ¹¹ Structure includes discourses, conventions, norms, and resources such as “capital, technology, skill, and expertise.” ¹² Both individual agents and structure have the causal power to generate events. ¹³ Social practice consists of relations and conditions that generate “any kind of knowledge” which makes social practice partly linguistic. ¹⁴ Social practices draw elements from structure and mediate or reorganize structure. ¹⁵ The agency of actors can transform the discourses, genres, and styles of social practices and structures. ¹⁶ Critical realism is thus concerned with understanding how events are caused by the exercise of causal powers of agency and structure. ¹⁷

In contrast to critical realists, social constructionists such as Denzin and Gergen are concerned with understanding how social actors construct meaning of events which occurs through shared understanding and practices. ¹⁸ A distinction between extreme and mild constructionism exists. ¹⁹ Mild constructionists examine “how social reality is socially constructed” ²⁰ and distinguish between the socially constructed world and the material world, whereas radical or extreme constructionists do not distinguish between the material and the social world and consider material objects to be constructed in discourse. ²¹ Overall, social constructionism is an important means of analyzing how “categories of knowledge are used and reproduced by different groups in society.” ²² Extreme constructionism has been criticized by critical realists for not considering the existence of issues such as environmental problems as real. ²³ However, critical realist views concur with mild versions of social constructionism ²⁴ to the extent that mild constructionists are not skeptical about the presence of external reality. ²⁵ Most studies of environmental problems have been undertaken from a mild perspective in which the reality of environmental issues is acknowledged. ²⁶ For instance, Capek, ²⁷ from a mild constructionist framework, analyzes how an “environmental justice frame” is produced by local and national environmental justice groups. That said, based on the premises of critical realism and social constructionism, I next explain the kind of research questions that can be posed to understand aspects of workplace EJ conflicts from a critical realist and social constructionist perspective respectively.

Workplace EJ Struggles from a Critical Realist Perspective

Critical realism provides philosophical justification for environmental justice research. From a critical realist perspective, the process of environmental inequality formation in the workplace can be conceived as being shaped by the interplay of agency and structure. In these workplaces, both workers and managers are objects or entities having causal powers to reproduce workers' exposure to toxics. The structure of the workplace consists of entities such as people, resources (capital, technology, and skill), discourses, relations, genres, and styles which are internally related, affect one another, and are embedded within larger structures.

Following Easton, ²⁸ the properties of the workplace emerge from necessary (e.g., worker/manager) and contingent (e.g., worker/environmental activists) causal relationships between individual actors, combinations of which constitute events or series of events. Both the agency of the actors and the structure has causal power to transform the workplace and thereby change the form of the EJ conflict. The individual actors are embedded within the workplace structure, ²⁹ which in turn is embedded within underlying structures consisting of socio-spatial relationships at different levels (intra-firm, inter-firm and extra-firm, i.e., with the state and environmental activists), discourses, genres, styles, and material action and objects. Exposure of workers to toxic hazards constitutes the actual that is produced by the interplay of agency and structure in the real. The broader socio-spatial structural relations will be reflected in the daily practices of the workplace. ³⁰ Since the agency of the workers constitutes an important dimension of EJ conflicts, ³¹ the ways by which the workers exercise agency will shape EJ conflict significantly. The workers might exercise agency to transform the internal workplace discourses by drawing from external discourses of other actors, for instance, the environmental activists and labor unions that might improve or deteriorate their relationships with their managers. In addition, the new discourses might bring about changes in the non-discursive elements of the workplace structure. To capture the tensions between agency and structure, critical realists seek to find what actors actually do. ³² To understand how the agency of workers shapes workplace EJ conflicts, it is important to ask what workers do:

1. What strategies do the workers employ to draw on external discourses within existing discourses of the workplace?

I elaborate in further detail how critical discourse analysis can assist in answering these research questions and help to unravel the tensions between changes in agency and structure (as discussed below) (also see Table 1), prior to which, I explain how workplace EJ struggles can be conceived through a social constructionist viewpoint.

Workplace EJ Struggles from a Social Constructionist Framework

To understand EJ struggles in an electronic recycling workplace from a mild social constructionist lens, the defining question to ask is the following: How are EJ struggles in the workplace socially constructed by multiple actors? EJ conflict in the workplace is socially constructed by the state, industry, workers, and environmental activists. A social constructionist will be interested to know what these stakeholders mean by environmental inequality or how the problem of workers' exposure to toxic hazard is discursively constructed by multiple actors.

Following Pellow, ³³ global forces such as transnational networks between electronic industries and states on the one hand and alliances between transnational and local social movements on the other influences the construction of local discourses of workplace environmental inequality. It follows that meanings or perceptions of environmental inequality will be shaped considerably by these external forces. Power differential exists with respect to competing policy discourse and public discourse of air pollution. ³⁴ In the workplace, a power difference will also be reflected in the conflicting discourses of environmental inequality of multiple actors. It is important to examine which discourses become dominant, how they are sustained, and how dominant discourses constrain or enable the strategies of the actors. The course of the EJ struggle in the workplace will be shaped accordingly (see Table 1). The research questions that follow are these:

1. How are EJ struggles in the workplace socially constructed by multiple actors?

These research questions can be analyzed using constructivist discourse analysis or critical discourse analysis or a combination of both. I now turn to a discussion on how forms of discourse analysis can enable analysis of research questions that arise from both epistemological stances.

Linking Forms of Discourse Analysis to Critical Realist and Social Constructionist Research Questions

The term discourse refers to a specific “way of representing certain…aspects of the…world,” and it includes linguistic and semiotic (e.g., visual images) aspects of events, structures, and practices. ³⁵ Discourse analysis refers to textual analysis of “written text, spoken interaction, the multimedia texts of television and the internet, etc.” ³⁶ A discourse analyst seeks to understand how language constructs and shapes social reality within its larger social context. ³⁷ Discourse analysis ranges from being “constructivist” that focuses particularly on the process of the construction of specific social reality to studies that are “critical,” which emphasize the relations of power and privilege. ³⁸

Fairclough ³⁹ argues that critical discourse analysis can be used to understand how events are caused and advocates for its use in a critical realist framework. From a critical realist perspective, organizations exist in discourses (that emerge through interaction between social groups) and non-discursive elements (genres, styles, and material action), which are constituted through discourses. ⁴⁰ Social practices mediate between agency and structure and consist of “orders of discourse” which include “a particular combination of different discourses [comparatively stable discourses], different genres [particular ways of acting] and different styles [particular ways of being], which are articulated together in a distinctive way.” ⁴¹ A critical discourse analyst examines the linkage between discourses and other social and material (non-discursive) elements and relations between discourses of events, structures, and social practices to understand how changes in discourse enforce changes in other social and material elements. ⁴² The analyst should proceed from an understanding of the concrete (individuals) to the abstract (structures) and back to the concrete or in other words, from analysis of situated events and texts to analysis of stable and durable discourses of practices and structures, which precondition social events and are as well transformed by them. ⁴³ Fairclough ⁴⁴ argues that through a critical discourse analysis from a critical realist framework it is possible to distinguish between agency and structure and establish the relationship between the two. Therefore, in critical discourse analysis the researcher is concerned with a) how change in the events and structure are related to one another ⁴⁵ and b) how change in discourse, brought about through social interaction, does/does not bring about change in orders of discourse and non-discursive elements. ⁴⁶

Similar to organizations that evolve continuously as a process, ⁴⁷ production of environmental inequality is a process ⁴⁸ that emerges through the tension between agency and structure. Del Casino et al. ⁴⁹ argues that organizational activities are central to geographic units of analysis. Hazardous workplace EJ struggles, as a unit of analysis, are the result of organizational activities of the workplace, state, environmental organizations, and industry. EJ conflicts are framed by individual actors discursively through interactions and by structures that constrain individual actions. Structures are in turn transformed by the agency of actors. Both agency and structure have causal power to shape the nature of workplace EJ struggles. In the workplace, change in social relations will take place through changes in discourse. Discourse of social events (text) draws from different orders of discourse and its change can transform non-discursive elements. ⁵⁰ The process of EJ conflict will be shaped by change in discourse and changes in the workplace structure depending on how successfully strategies are deployed by actors. Successful strategies will produce new discourses that will modify other social (ways of organizing, managing, behaving, forming habits, and believing) and material (work space conditions) elements of the structure. ⁵¹ The ways by which workers exercise their causal powers to transform the nature of EJ struggles can be examined by drawing on Fairclough's ⁵² concepts of “emergence,” “hegemony,” and “operationalization.”

Emergence involves the process by which external discourses are incorporated within existing discourses and can be understood by analyzing a series of interrelated “text” produced over a considerable period of time. ⁵³ In the workplace, the workers will undertake strategies to draw from external discourses such as environmental activist and labor union discourses into the prevailing workplace discourses. The process of hegemony involves incorporation of new discourses in a group's strategies. ⁵⁴ In the workplace, the success of the workers' strategies will depend on how well the workers formulate their discourses in the face of competing discourses; represent their conditions in the discourse; and their ability to transform existing discourses. The concept of operationalization refers to how strategies bring about change in the prevailing conditions in which new discourses transform orders of discourse by invoking change in the ways of organizing, acting, managing, and arranging material objects. ⁵⁵ In the workplace, operationalization will imply how new discourses change the manner in which workers and managers interact, behave, and operate. It can change the working conditions materially (e.g., redesigning work spaces, and incorporating new worker's safety measures).

From a social constructionist standpoint, EJ studies have been understood from varying combinations of discourse analysis. Discourse analysis of environmental problems is suited to a mild social constructionist framework ⁵⁶ since it examines how text is organized “to produce specific meanings and effects.” ⁵⁷ Discourse analysis examines not only “what the social world means to the subjects …; [but]…how and why the social world comes to have the meaning that it does.” ⁵⁸ Additionally, in environmental justice studies, critical discourse analysis is used to examine how, for instance, in the setting of a hazardous waste facility, actors have tried to maintain their views and influence outcomes ⁵⁹ and how the U.S. press makes claims in constructing environmental problems. ⁶⁰ Svarstad et al. ⁶¹ examines major biodiversity discourses from social constructionist and critical discourse analytic lenses. Critical discourse analysis in a social constructionist framework will examine how certain discourses are privileged and ways in which they are sustained. The issue of workplace EJ conflict can be conceived from both constructivist and critical discourse analytic approach.

Constructivist discourse analysis will explain how the problem of environmental inequality in the workplace is defined by multiple stakeholders including the workers, managers, state, environmental activists, and labor unions. The multiple discourses of environmental inequality will be shaped by the local context and other external forces. The external societal forces will include transnational alliances between the state and the transnational electronic industry on one side and transnational and local social movements on the other. Consequently, it will examine how local discourses of workers and employers, are shaped by extra-local forces.

Additionally, a critical discourse analysis will analyze power relations and ask how some discourses of environmental inequality get privileged (e.g., discourses of the industry and the state) over others (e.g., discourses of the workers and environmental organizations), what strategies are used by actors to reproduce power difference among competing discourses, and how that influences the nature of EJ conflict in the workplace.

Discussion

From both perspectives, discourse analysis will be different and similar providing understandings of different aspects of Pellow's ⁶² multi-stakeholder approach. Critical discourse analysis is primarily suited to a critical realist framework whereas both constructivist and critical discourse analysis can be used in a social constructionist lens. From a critical realist standpoint, critical discourse analysis helps to unravel the ways in which workers exercise agency and to explain how the new discourses can/cannot enable change in the workplace structure. Change in workplace structure depends on what new discourses the workers draw on; resistance or embeddedness of existing durable discourses of workplace structure; and ability of new discourses to modify existing discourses and to change orders of discourse and material elements that constitute workplace structure. Environmental justice struggles in the workplace will be shaped significantly based on how well the workers negotiate among these factors. The agency of the workers might remain only at the level of discourse, it might change the immediate structure of the workplace, or it might have a broader impact on the transformation of the underlying structures.

On the other hand, from a social constructionist lens, constructivist discourse analysis will explain how multiple stakeholders produce discourses of workplace environmental inequality and will shed light on how multiple meanings of environmental inequality contest one another. It will help the analyst to understand how discourses produced by local and extra-local forces shape workplace inequality. Additionally, critical discourse analysis of the same project will reveal how certain discourses obtain dominance that privilege, some over the others. Critical discourse analysis from a critical realist framework focuses on the relation between discursive and non-discursive elements, whereas in a social constructionist perspective, discourse analysis does not seek to understand the relationship between discourses and extra-discursive elements. However, from both perspectives, discourse analysis will be similar with respect to their focus on examining how external discourses influence the prevailing local discourses of the workplace. Critical discourse analysis will be similar in terms of their focus on understanding how unequal power relations are produced by actors discursively that influences the nature of workplace EJ conflict.

Methods of data collection will be similar; including but not restricted to semi-structured interviews and archival data. However, the content will differ depending on the type of questions asked. In both critical realist and social constructionist framework, semi-structured interviews with the local and extra-local actors will constitute part of the data. Archival data produced through interaction and communication between them will supplement interview data.

Discourse analysis from both epistemological stances will include analysis of small data sets. The analysis will begin with selection of themes that are pertinent to the research questions. ⁶³ Next, variations and gaps within the text ⁶⁴ will be analyzed to explore alternative accounts and ways in which they are countered. Simultaneously, emphasis and clues in the textual detail will be examined; finally a persuasive argument based on the critical interpretation of the data ⁶⁵ will be presented.

Conclusion

This article exemplifies how the study of environmental inequality formation in hazardous workplaces can be conceptualized from the meta-theories of critical realism and social constructionism. It then links these meta-theories to the research questions and explains how forms of discourse analysis serve as a powerful analytic tool in examining workplace EJ conflicts from the two epistemologies. Future EJ studies should take qualitative methodologies seriously in order to develop a clear and coherent research design and therefore should explain in rich detail what epistemological stance inform their research questions and how method(s) of data collection and analysis helps to address their research paradigm.