Who Says? Authority,Voice,and Authorship in Narratives of Planning Research

Ethical Justification

The most frequently articulated of the three justifications involves the necessity of extending the ethics of research to the authorial phase of the work. As already noted, feminist and postcolonial theorists in particular have dissected the power imbalance that exists between research subject and researcher (Attili 2009; Spivak 1988) and this inequality persists in the construction of the research narrative. When researchers speak for and about their informants, an overshadowing takes place that eclipses the voice and agency of the subject. The informant’s stories are merely source material, providing data as a means for the researcher’s ends. In the writing phase, the “real work” of scholarship, informant voices dim and the author’s voice commands the spotlight.

Janet Malcolm’s (1990) book-length meditation on the fraught relationship between journalists and their sources offers useful parallel insights on the complicated ways in which social scientists work with their “data” in the authorial phase of research. Malcolm’s book chronicles the case in which Jeff MacDonald, a convicted murderer, successfully sued journalist Joe McGinniss for defaming his character in McGinniss’s book, Fatal Vision. On the face of it, the charge that a book could tarnish the reputation of a convicted murderer seems absurd but Malcolm understands the story as a kind of revenge fantasy for the emotional violence done by journalists to their sources in the name of crafting a successful narrative.

As Malcolm observes, “the journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy” (1990, 143). The moral vacuum at the heart of the journalistic process lies in the deception practiced by the journalist who cultivates the subject as a source of information but abruptly terminates collaboration in the writing of the story:

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist . . . never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. (Malcolm 1990, 3)

The reporter or researcher getting the story and the person back at his or her desk writing the story (what Geertz calls being “There” and being “Here”) are functionally two different people. The objective of the former is to generate trust and rapport with the subject so as to gather the best data for the story. The latter is faced with a different task: creating a compelling narrative containing effective characters who populate a readable story. For the source, it is the relationship with the writer that matters and the writing is expected to follow the contours of that relationships. For the journalist, the relationship to the subject is a means to an end: a compelling story that does credit to the writer. The imbalance of power between researcher and subject, the researcher’s parasitic need for the subject’s “data,” and the resulting narrative bearing the sole authorship of the writer: these same moral pitfalls plague both the journalist and the social scientist and prompt a reconsideration of the authorial process.

Pragmatic Justification

Such reconsideration is not only ethically necessary but also pragmatically possible. The pragmatic justification rests on the recognition that the rules of narrative production are constantly being rewritten. This is Foucault’s core assertion when he states that “given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence” (Foucault 1984, 119). Consequently, since the authorial process is already constantly in flux, it can be revised in ways that extend the collaboration between researcher and subject to the phase of narrative construction.

In the same vein, Derrida defends textual deconstruction as a means to disrupt the political authority of the canon in order to produce a deeper understanding of writing as an act (Olson 1990). We would do well, Derrida advises, to “deconstruct” not only written texts but the institution of composition and the very notion of “composition” itself. He suggests that we continually question and destabilize the authority of models of composition and that we seek to “invent each time new forms according to the situation” (Olson 1990, 3). Shared authority in the construction of narratives can be seen as another way of destabilizing the contours of composition, with its attendant political and pragmatic ramifications.

Substantive Justification

The third—substantive—justification for reexamining the authorial process is straightforward: collaborative authorship makes better texts. The widely recognized principle that difference is a resource that enriches democratic deliberation applies with equal force to discursive practice, the collection of data, and the writing of planning narratives (Sandercock 2003; Young 2000). Multivocal authorship achieves what cultural critic Susan Sontag claimed to be “the aim of all commentary on art . . . to make works of art—and by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us” (Sontag 1966, 14).

Sontag’s strategy is to focus on form in art rather than searching a work of art for its inner meaning. This entails using a “descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary” that guards against the “arrogance of interpretation” (1966, 12). But form, whether in art or in narrative, is a substantive rather than simply a stylistic matter. A redistribution of power and voice in the text affects not only its mode of speaking but also its substantive content. As Martha Nussbaum explains:

form and style are not incidental features. A view of life is told. The telling itself—the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s sense of life—all of this expresses a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations and connections. (Nussbaum 1990, 5)

The substantive argument for shared authority in the writing of texts is that it makes for better and stronger narratives. The composition of the text—the “Here”—is as substantively important as is the process of data collection out “There”.

Empathetic Evocation

Empathetic evocation involves the use of redolent description to summon the situated experience of the subject for the reader. An example of empathetic evocation in the construction of urban narrative is AbdouMaliq Simone’s For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (2004). His book centers on four case studies of emerging urbanism: Pikine, a suburb near Dakar, Senegal; Winterveld, a neighborhood in Pretoria, South Africa; the city of Douala, Cameroon; and among African workers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Simone’s stated goal is “to make common cause with the daily efforts of urban African residents” (2004, 16), and his empathetic reporting is based on intensive firsthand experience gained over fifteen years in various roles, from activist to professor to researcher and fellow Muslim, in these and other cities.

With clarity of vision and sensitive attention to detail, Simone provides evocative insights into the practices of daily life in each of these places. He explains early on the difficulty of doing traditional, systematic research in African cities, where the only constant is change and the structures and systems supporting life are fragile, volatile, and ephemeral. In a context of instability and impermanence, the research process similarly must be provisional and pragmatic and the themes of informality, invisibility, spectrality, and movement around which Simone frames his narrative were chosen to reflect the conditions he observed.

An excerpt from Simone’s text illustrates his attention to detail in evoking the conditions and complexities of everyday life:

One rainy morning in July 2001, I saw scores of people in their best clothes carefully navigating their way in and out of one of the few well-constructed homes in the section of the Zone known as CCM-Oyok, a dense and rambling quarter built along a series of ravines. The porch of the house was crowded with families. . . . The home with all of the traffic was that of a local healer and clearly the center of community life. . . . Immediately in front of the “clinic” was the main water tap for the area, set in (an) 8 ft. x 8 ft. x 3 ft. basin intended to prevent runoff from either frequent use or leakage. But in this weather, diverted streams branching out across the ravine flooded the basin with dirty water, in which the tap was submerged. The fresh water could only be obtained by dipping a bucket into the dirty water—a problem that could easily have been resolved by fixing a rubber extension to the nozzle so as to elevate the flow. The relationship between the crowds at the local healer and the compromised water tap, on the surface, seemed obvious. Although the quarter was rife with many other difficulties, at least here it appeared as if a simple solution was possible. (Simone 2004, 103-4)

Simone goes on to describe the complex relationships between the healer and the townspeople and the roundabout way they found for addressing the water problem.

Through the practice of empathetic evocation, Simone successfully puts the reader in the scene and connects the reader to the place and moment portrayed in the narrative. Nonetheless, the roles and subjectivities of the people involved in the story remain obscured and the voices of participants do not (or only rarely) appear in the case study descriptions. While Simone may have employed a nontraditional social science research methodology, relying on his immersion in the case to collect and validate his observations, the resulting text closely hews to the format of a traditional research narrative. Although the book opens with profuse praise and effusive appreciation for the subjects’ contributions to Simone’s knowledge gained over fifteen years in African cities, subsequent chapters do not delve into those relationships or allow us direct access to the voices that the author might have heard.

Selective Deployment

Providing somewhat greater scope for the subject’s perspective and perhaps the most popular strategy employed in reports of qualitative research is the selective deployment of informant narratives. In this method, the author marshals selective excerpts from informant interviews to illustrate or support the author’s claims. While the subject’s words appear on the page, they are enlisted on behalf of the author’s point of view and it is the author’s voice that sounds throughout the text.

A particular version of selective deployment, Geraldine Pratt’s Working Feminism (2004), is a book with dual objectives. On one level, it is a case study of women domestic workers in Vancouver, Canada, that examines the working lives of Filipina nannies and their struggles to maintain their personal and work identities under conditions that are ripe for abuse and exploitation. The book’s second objective is to test feminist geographical theory against the materiality of the case study. Pratt’s textual strategy is to alternate empirical chapters describing the circumstances and experiences of the women and their employers with chapters devoted to theory development expressed at a very high level of abstraction. In the author’s words, Working Feminism “is a series of dialogues between highly abstracted theoretical and less abstracted empirical analyses. Ideally, it is also a means to other dialogues outside the text” (Pratt 2004, 9).

In her empirical chapters, Pratt uses the relatively conventional tactic of inserting quotes from focus group participants as sort of “proof texts” around the point she seeks to make. In the passage below, Pratt mobilizes quotes obtained during an interview with employers of Rosa, a Filipina nanny, to restate and substantiate her observations:

It is sometimes unclear . . . as to whether a domestic worker is an employee or “a family member” . . . and whether work beyond eight hours is done by choice or coercion. It is interesting to listen to one set of employers explain why their Filipina nanny works 12-13 hours a day for 8 hours’ worth of minimum wage.

This short passage displays many of the ingredients that lead to persisting violations of labour codes: Rosa’s labour in the evening is interpreted as a gift (“she’s extremely good to us”); Rosa’s affection for their son is seen as compensation in itself; Rosa’s self-exploitation is interpreted as a cultural trait (“they’re very hard working”). But Gary remains somewhat troubled by Rosa’s long hours of work. (He wonders whether she likes to work or feels compelled to do so and repeatedly states: “I don’t know.”) Gary and Susan are not “bad” people, but this is really beside the point. (Pratt 2004, 99-100)

This selection demonstrates the appropriation of the interview subject’s voice to buttress the author’s observations and judgments. Pratt’s textual strategy is to narrate through and around the quotes, explaining what each interviewee’s statement means and how it fits the story she seeks to tell. The quoted words are extracted from their narrative context in the focus groups and inserted into the author’s narrative, following in a subordinate or illustrative manner the author’s statements of fact or interpretation.

At a further extreme, in the chapters devoted to theoretical explication, Pratt’s is the only voice to be heard. For example:

Discourses of sexuality involved a literal respatialisation of sexual practices: legitimate sexuality was consigned to the parental bedroom and illegitimate sexuality to the asylum and prison, where it could be controlled and contained. Psychoanalysis created a new, safe space for sexuality “between couch and discourse.” (2004, 21)

In the explication of social theory, there is no room for the voice of the subject. Pratt (2004, 8) admits that her case study participants evinced a lack of interest in the abstract framing devices she uses to elucidate their stories.

Following the alternating theoretical and empirical chapters in Working Feminism, Pratt uses her final chapter as a space for reflection, shifting focus entirely to the author as the subject of the narrative. [“I find it important to work away at the puzzle of my reactions . . . ” (2004, 184)]. By making the author the subject, it is the part of the book that most completely bridges Pratt’s two worlds of theory and the case while further widening the gap between the world of the author and that of the Filipina nannies with whose lives she wishes to engage.

Dialogic Collaboration

Distinct from the practices of empathetic evocation or selective deployment is dialogic collaboration, in which the narrative emerges as a conversational exchange between author and subject. A master of dialogic collaboration was Joseph Mitchell who, as staff writer at the New Yorker magazine for more than fifty years, chronicled the life of the city’s marginal figures: the “bums” and night-shift workers and assorted denizens of the lower classes. Up in the Old Hotel (Mitchell [1938] 2008) is a collection of Mitchell’s writings produced throughout his career, previously published in four books of essays including Joe Gould’s Secret, Mitchell’s last published work.

Mitchell rendered the experience of urban life in New York of the 1940s and 1950s through the characters he encountered on his forays around the city. In Mitchell’s hands, their stories are incredible and indelible, full of enigmatic twists, unlikely encounters, and stretches of the imagination. He achieves credibility through extremely detailed descriptions of sights, smells, and sounds, from architectural details to clothes and hairstyles, and by allowing his subjects’ voices to suffuse the narrative and speak for and about themselves.

Mitchell’s best-known work is his profile of the gadfly Joe Gould, a New York character who claimed to have authored an oral history (“An Oral History of Our Time”) that Gould insisted was the longest book ever written. As Mitchell explains in the opening sentence of Joe Gould’s Secret, “Joe Gould was an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years” (Mitchell [1938] 2008, 623). After conversing with Gould for decades, Mitchell comes to understand that the Oral History exists only in Gould’s imagination but Mitchell nonetheless agrees to perpetuate the myth of its existence until after Gould’s death.

Mitchell’s descriptions of Gould are painstakingly observed:

We took a booth, and the waitress brought Gould’s coffee. It was in a thick white mug, diner style, and it was so hot it was steaming. Even so, tipping the mug slightly toward him without taking it off the table, he bent down and immediately began drinking it with little, cautious, quick, birdlike sips and gulps interspersed with little whimpering sounds indicating pleasure and relief, and almost at once color returned to his face and his eyes became brighter and his twitch disappeared. (2008, 636)

But almost immediately, Gould’s voice becomes prominent in the narrative:

“I suppose you’re puzzled about me,” he said. His tone of voice was condescending; he had got some of his confidence back. “If so,” he continued, “the feeling is mutual, for I’m puzzled about myself, and have been since childhood. I seem to be a changeling or a throwback or a mutation of some sort in a highly respectable New England family. Let me give you a few biographical facts. My full name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, and I was named for my grandfather, who was a doctor.” (2008, 636-37)

And on Gould goes, narrating his own story nearly continuously for the next ten pages of the text. Often, the story proceeds through a back-and-forth dialogue in which Mitchell and Gould share the textual space as well as the burden of moving the narrative forward:

A throbbing quality had come into Gould’s voice.

“Since that fateful morning,” he continued, squaring his shoulders and dilating his nostrils and lifting his chin, as if in heroic defiance, “the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.”

It was obvious that this was a set speech and that he had it down pat and that he had spoken it many times through the years and that he relished speaking it, and it made me obscurely uncomfortable.

“Just now, when you told the waitress that you were an authority on the language of the sea gull,” I said, changing the subject, “did you mean it?”

Gould’s face lit up. (2008, 645)

Uninterpreted Transcription

At the furthest (author-evacuated) end of the authorial spectrum is what we are calling uninterpreted transcription, closely akin to Geertz’s category of “text positivism.” In this mode, the author gathers stories from the subject and then presents them unaltered in the text. Of course, there is no way to present truly unfiltered transcription. The researcher always makes choices about whom to interview, when to start and stop the tape recorder, what to include in the manuscript. But using the honest broker approach, the researcher attempts to interfere as little as possible, presenting the subject’s narrative as clearly and directly as possible given the constraints imposed by the exigencies of text production.

Studs Terkel’s Working ([1974] 2004) is perhaps the most widely known example of uninterpreted transcription. It is the third of his studies of American life presented through the narratives of everyday people, following Hard Times ([1970] 2000) and Division Street ([1967] 2006). Terkel used essentially the same method to gather material for Working as for the two books that preceded it and, like AbdouMaliq Simone, he states that his method is preferable to a more conventional or systematic “research” method.

Terkel makes no attempt to seek out a random sample for his interviews. He states, “I had a general idea of the kind of people I wanted to see; who, in reflecting on their personal condition, would touch on the circumstances of their fellows” ([1974] 2004, xx). With this peripatetic mode of sample selection, the conventional academic interview technique was insufficient: “I realized quite early in this adventure that interviews, conventionally conducted, were meaningless. . . . The question-and-answer technique may be of some value in determining favored detergents, toothpaste and deodorants, but not in the discovery of men and women. . . . The talk was idiomatic rather than academic. In short, it was conversation” ([1974] 2004, xx-xxi).

Terkel speaks explicitly to the ethics of his research: “I was no more than a wayfaring stranger, taking much and giving little. . . . I was the beneficiary of others’ generosity. My tape recorder, as ubiquitous as the carpenter’s tool chest or the doctor’s black satchel, carried away valuables beyond price” ([1974] 2004, xviii). Terkel is not interested in the appearance of objectivity. He makes no effort to hide his feelings about the menial nature of the work performed by most of his informants, beginning the book with an invocation that links work with violence and struggle. But Terkel passes on the various stories of work, of fulfillment and despair alike, without further comment.

The nearly 600 pages in Working present the first-person narratives of more than 130 individuals describing their experience of work. Here are the words of a stone mason:

I think a laborer feels that he’s the low man. Not so much that he works with his hands, it’s that he’s at the bottom of the scale. He always wants to get up to a skilled trade. Of course he’d make more money. The main thing is the common laborer—even the word common laborer—just sounds so common, he’s at the bottom. Many that works with his hands takes pride in his work. ([1974] 2004, xlvi)

Terkel presents these stories as whole unto themselves, uninterrupted by his observations or interpretations. The stories speak for themselves. Each narrative is introduced with a brief capsule description of the person and the setting: “He is a washroom attendant at the Palmer House . . . He has been at this for fifteen years” (106); “He is a widower and has five grandchildren. He lives with his two unmarried sisters” (110); “She has been a waitress in the same restaurant for twenty-three years” (293). And yet, while the words in the text are those of the individuals narrating their stories, Working is undeniably Terkel’s work, in which he tells his story about work and workers through their words and it is Terkel’s name that appears as author on the cover of the book.

Avoiding Abstraction and Interpretation

A negative strategy, negative in the sense that it names a practice to avoid, concerns the often-critiqued but near-universal leap to interpretation and abstraction that is a hallmark of the social sciences. In contrast to prevailing practice, avoiding the leap to interpretation and abstraction and remaining close to the case holds open a greater space for the subject’s voice to appear on the page.

The validation of knowledge on the basis of its interpretive power beyond “mere” description underlies both the commonly accepted method of social research and the professional reward structures (e.g., publication, research funding, career promotion) within which most research occurs. Description of the case, in this approach, entails reporting the data collected in the field, while interpretation of what the data “really mean” and abstraction from the particulars of the case represent the added value provided by the analyst (Flyvbjerg 2006).

But critiques of the leap to abstraction are equally longstanding, ranging from Nietzsche’s “renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of interpretation)” (Nietzsche [1913] 2003, 110) to Susan Sontag’s brief Against Interpretation (1966) to Timothy Mitchell’s assertion that “the theory lies in the complexity of the cases” (2002, 8) and Bruno Latour’s concern with “how to let the actors have some room to express themselves” (2005, 142). To take the interpretive leap is to leave behind the voice of the subject and to privilege the interpreter’s voice as dominant in the narrative. As demonstrated by Geraldine Pratt’s (2004) alternating chapters on theory and materiality, subjects rarely, if ever, speak in abstract terms. A solution, as Latour insists, is that “if your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description. . . . Don’t try to shift from description to explanation: simply go on with description” (Latour 2005, 147, 150). What differentiates Latourian description from a mere journalistic recounting of events is that the former employs a genealogical method in which the relationships among actors are more important (and more difficult to discern) than the actors in isolation. As compared to the researcher’s impulse to distanced—and therefore monologic—interpretation, description in this mode stands a better chance of enrichment through collaborative authorship when both researcher and subjects speak from variously situated perspectives within the relation being described.

Contextualization

A possible (and thus positive) move toward collaborative authorship is the narrative strategy of contextualization. Enabled precisely by the researcher’s position outside the case, researcher and subject adopt a division of labor that encompasses complementary perspectives of inside and outside, the local and the global, in describing the case. Cahill et al note the “responsibility to locate our research in a social, structural, and geographical context. . . . We need to draw connections between personal, on-the-ground experiences and their broader geopolitical significance” (Cahill, Sultana, and Pain 2007, 312). In this strategy, the subject speaks for himself or herself and the researcher’s responsibility is to situate or contextualize the subject’s narrative in a broader descriptive framework. By contextualizing the subject’s practical knowledge, the researcher’s external perspective and the subject’s experiential vantage point can be complementary and collaborative rather than contradictory and exclusive.

The strategy of contextualization unites researcher and subject within a single descriptive narrative advancing along complementary planes. Contextualization, from this perspective, avoids the tendency to reduce the researcher–subject relation to a neat dualism of the abstract versus concrete. Such a move would elevate the researcher to the rarified world of abstraction while relegating the subject to the messiness of the “real” and would actually undermine the possibility of constructive collaboration by separating researcher and subject into incommensurable ontological categories of the abstract and the empirical.

Transcending Distanced Objectivity

The doctrine of distanced objectivity, much critiqued by postpositivist theorists, stands in the way of enlisting the situated subjectivity of research subjects in the authorship of planning narratives (Latour 2005, 146; Rorty 1982, 196). In contrast to the axioms of rational planning, subjectivity can be appreciated as a resource and authorship can be conceptualized as a process for recognizing and adopting the distinctive perspectives of diverse collaborators. Understanding discourse as intersubjectively situated opens a space for researcher and subject to bring their perspectives into conversation within the narrative (Morris 2009).

Enrolling the distinct subjectivities of researcher and subject in the project of authorship entails relinquishing the stance of objectivity conventionally understood as the hallmark of good research practice. Contrary to the belief inherited from Enlightenment epistemology, in this view, objectivity does not entail the absence of bias or presuppositions but, rather, can be understood as the alignment of thought with a prevailing paradigmatic perspective (Kuhn 1962). By the same logic, subjectivity is not the assertion of a biased (i.e., personal) perspective but rather expresses a perspective at odds with the reigning paradigm (Rorty 1996, 1999). Collaborative authorship, from this perspective, transcends the necessity of aligning the multiple perspectives of researcher and subject into conformance with the requirements of a prevailing framework or paradigm.

Rethinking the Logic of Research

Just as the introduction of participatory planning theory prompted a disciplinary reconsideration of the methods of planning practice (e.g., to include mediation, facilitation, and communication skills in addition to physical plan-making), extending the collaborative ideal to the production of planning narratives may involve rethinking the goals and logic of research and the audience to which the narrative is directed. Before distinguishing between practices of speaking about, for, or with the subject is the virtue of reconsidering the will to speak at all, recognizing, after Nietzsche, that speaking is not necessarily the same as or the only means of knowledge production. ³ Listening, engaging, enabling, and conversing may comprise alternative practices of knowledge production in which the research “subject” is both the coproducer and the corecipient of knowledge. This alternative view sees research as a conversation with the subject, not an inquiry followed by a distinct reporting phase but as an end in itself, where knowledge is produced within the conversational process. For the researcher, this may involve more listening than speaking. It may involve an openness to how another’s perspective might inform one’s knowledge rather than informing others about what to know. Here knowledge is produced among participants in a conversation rather than reported to a distant audience, with the goal to expand the conversational circle rather than the size of the audience.

Adopting this strategy entails a more fundamental reconsideration of the purposes and premises of planning research. While there is ample potential for improving collaboration within the research process, for example by inviting subjects to review or edit the narrative products of analysis, it may be fruitful to consider the limitations on collaboration that the analytic model imposes by only speaking about the subject. The difference between analysis and conversation is what Richard Rorty has in mind in proposing that

we do not think that when we say something we must necessarily be expressing a view about a subject. We might just be saying something—participating in a conversation rather than contributing to an inquiry. Perhaps saying things is not always saying how things are. Perhaps saying that is itself not a case of saying how things are. (1979, 371)

The narrative shift from representation to conversation suggested by Rorty, a shift in the author’s relation to the text, both produces and rests upon a reconsideration of the researcher’s relation to the subject. As Rorty explains,

To see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately. (1979, 378)

Clifford Geertz concludes his deconstruction of ethnographic narrative by identifying as the “next necessary thing . . . to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another” (1988, 147). Those quite different people to whom he refers are the researcher and the research subject engaged through conversation in the coproduction of knowledge for and with each other. It is perhaps in this sense that Rorty suggests that “we should think of language as a tool for breaking down people’s distrust of one another rather than as one for representing how things really are” (1996, 335). Rethinking the process of planning action and research as a conversation between researcher and subject rather than an inquiry by the researcher about the subject would inevitably produce different kinds of planning narratives and a reconsideration of what it means to be a planner.