Discussing moral goods and confronting research fetish: Review of Chirkov’s (2016) “Fundamentals of research on culture and psychology: Theory and methods”

Introduction

Chirkov’s (2016) “Fundamentals of research on culture and psychology: Theory and methods” provides a sophisticated argument for theoretical and methodological realism that meaningfully includes culture. The text is divided into three parts: (a) a discussion of background paradigmatic considerations dealing with disciplinary, theoretical, and philosophical presuppositions; (b) chapters devoted to the intricacy of planning research; and (c) topics surrounding the implementation of research projects. The book is unique in how it avoids a shallow approach to culture often seen in psychology (see Cresswell et al., 2011), but it also takes a complex realist approach not often seen in strong forms of cultural psychology (see Williams et al., 2014). The value of the book is that it represents an exceptionally ambitious work that breaks out of disciplinary silos. As such, many researchers would find points of disagreement with Chirkov, but such issues of contention potentially provoke invigorating discussion. The objective of our review is to demonstrate how the Chirkov provokes this discussion. We will do so by engaging two theorists: Charles Taylor (1989, 1999) and Slavoj Žižec (2008). Specifically, they illustrate how the book opens a space for a moral discussion of what constitutes “good” research and does so by taking aim at some deep (and problematic) ethical concerns that we see in academic work.

Paradigmatic considerations (“Part 1: Thinking and reflecting”)

A unique quality of Chirkov’s (2016) book is the attention he draws to the importance of knowing and exploring pervasive epistemological presuppositions. This position takes aim at a pervasive practice of scholars being unwilling and unable to articulate their own theoretical assumptions. He offers a brief historical overview outlining early roots, dominant theories, and common methodologies in multiple disciplines. Throughout, he emphasizes that myopic paradigmatic constraints are unproductive and so advocates authentic interdisciplinary reflection. An informal case-study illustration that weaves its way through the book is a discussion of the discipline of Cross-Cultural Psychology. He shows how this discipline can detrimentally suffer from exclusion of epistemologies that can miss the value of indigenous paradigms.

This general orientation to the importance of epistemological paradigms sets the stage for a discussion of theoretical perspectives on human psychology and culture, which transitions to a discussion of scientific inference. Chirkov (2016) compares physicalist perspectives, for example, to biological, sociocultural, and agentive-interpretive perspectives. The last perspective treats humans as rational interpretive agents that are mutually influenced by and influence culture, which is the position he advocates. It is in this context that he discusses the common division between inductive and deductive forms of inference. What he adds to the literature is a detailed discussion inferences that are capable and/or incapable of generating novel discoveries. For example, he illustrates how psychologists often take a mechanistic approach that implicitly assumes a set of properties/processes by which humans operate. These are set by uncritical acceptance of a paradigm and provide the conditions for empirical observation. The tacit acceptance of this approach runs the serious risk of trapping researchers in a body of knowledge incapable of authentic innovation. His consistent attack is leveled against positivism because of its inability to generate new knowledge due to its pretended dismissal of unobservable causal mechanisms and its reliance on statistical methodologies entailed in the mechanistic paradigm. Chirkov contrastingly argues that an agentic-interpretive paradigm allows for an “ampliative-inductive” mode of scientific research, which is an inductive mode of research where researcher simultaneously explore the life world of participants while critically examining theory and paradigms. Within this approach, he describes how abduction enables theoretical explanations for unexplained or surprising observations that simply don’t emerge in mechanistic work.

It is in this context that Chirkov (2016) argues for a sophisticated realist approach that addresses potential underlying structures and generative powers driving people’s meanings and actions. He takes an approach to culture that treats it as a series of propositions and theories that a researcher must articulate and so simple definitions of culture or the ostensive phenomena are too trite. Researchers ought to examine “cultural models” that are the dynamic underlying intersubjective practices that constitute a community’s life world. Looking at such models allows researchers to get at the “regulatory properties of sociocultural and psychological worlds” (p. 95). Realism, for him, is predicated on the Kantian idea that researchers must break past surface structures to see dynamic processes undergirding the phenomenal world.

Chirkov (2016) therein challenges both mainstream psychological researchers and alternative cultural psychologists. Mainstream psychologists could find the book aggravating in its unashamed attack on many current practices in psychological research. He illustrates, for example, how cross-cultural psychologists are really creating new definitions within a single paradigm and not developing any new knowledge. Instead of studying the sociocultural and psychological worlds entailed in the cultural models of those they study, such researchers are charged with merely re-presenting their own cultural model of mind over and over again. Chirkov could aggravate culturally oriented researchers with claims that such researchers miss reality. He charges them with bypassing meaningful comparative approaches through a kind of limited indigenous focus – a shallow laissez-faire relativism. In short, many could find the book provocative because it attempts to carve out a unique place. Is such provocation worth engaging? Our position is “yes” per the following.

Given Chirkov’s (2016) interest in paradigms, we turned to one of the world’s leading intellectuals who have tried to trace broad sociohistorical trends that constitute paradigms: Charles Taylor (1989, 1999). Taylor’s Sources of the Self attempts to outline how the radical enlightenment ethos is one that avoids moral sources in the pursuit of science. It is an intellectual heritage that attempts to do away with qualitative distinctions of worth in favor of disengaged empiricist efforts (see also Taylor, 1999). This heritage extends to the notion of self and any notion of the good that is entailed in it and so Taylor asks: What is the place of the good in a world determined mechanistically (1983, p. 459)? Elsewhere, he writes how people and their selves are irreducibly entwined with qualitative notions of the good (see Taylor, 1999). The frameworks of values and goods that people participate within as part of their communities are the ones that enable people to make sense of the world. We cannot do without such frameworks and so being a self is inseparable from existing in a space of moral issues. If we pretend that there can be a disengaged rational actor, we lose the qualities that make up the kind of self that one is. He points out that the place of the good is absolutely central because an implicit moral ontology lies beneath the disengaged view.

It is therein that Taylor (1983, 1999) offers up important ideas related to research and his claim that the forgoing necessitates different qualities of selfhood. Reducing human motivation to pleasure at the expense of goods leads to an elimination of the ability to discuss “higher” aspirations. Taylor’s proposal is that humans can try to develop the ability to see themselves as part of a bigger picture and so engage in tough questions about the self, which he casts in terms of making strong evaluations (see 1999). A weak evaluation involves a subject who is a simple weigher in the sense that she or he does not deeply consider moral aspects of action as it relates to what kind of person one is. It involves choices without deliberation of radical reflexivity. A strong evaluation involves someone who engages in evaluative contrasts ranging over desires and the kind of person one is. Such a person recognizes the moral quality of selfhood and considers alternatives in terms of their moral implications. A strong evaluation is a condition of articulacy that involves a deeper sense of the world, because it characterizes motivation at a greater depth through recognizing the wider implications of choices. One reflects on desires in terms of the kind of being we become by having them.

Chirkov (2016) does not explicitly take the position that self exists in a space of moral goods, but his efforts resonate with this idea and provoke a discussion of strong evaluations in research. His first section on the issue of paradigms in research is a tacit acknowledgment of Taylor’s position. Chirkov addresses frameworks that constitute moral spaces when he admits that paradigms are deeply pervasive and shape what we think we know ontologically. He therein notes that background presuppositions are absolutely important to consider and that such suppositions are not trite. His discussion of epistemological paradigms illuminates how the frameworks that constitute research cannot be ignored through a pretense toward disengaged objectivity. These are the kinds of backgrounds that constitute what is morally good in the science of psychology. We see this as entwined with selfhood because of the way that scientists emotionally cling to the importance of such values is, paradoxically, an example of how the good is part of the self. We argue that Chirkov advocates for a kind of research that is about a morally good self. The efforts in Chirkov’s book are not just about the technical execution of research: they are about making strong evaluations part of research activity.

“Part 2: Planning research”

Via the forgoing, Chirkov (2016) attempts to redress a badly needed emphasis on thinking through epistemological questions related to culture and psychology before starting with a research problem. His book leads readers to a place where they first philosophically contextualize their work and then develop research problems and questions. Integral to the process of planning research is that researchers need to believe in the authentic communal significance of findings – in contrast to tokenist comments with spurious “real-life” applications that we often see made in grant applications. Authentic engagement with practical problems entails issues of significance to academics and non-academics alike. He would likely provoke the ire of some readers with the claim that formulating problems is to focus on practical problems as opposed to constructed discourses best suited to researchers cloistered within their academic communities.

Such challenge to abstract and isolated academic discourses means that researchers cannot presuppose the meaning of concepts, which means that formulating research thereby involves articulating clearly defined concepts with great care. Chirkov’s position is that scientists need tools like concepts, frameworks, and theories, because these tools enable researchers to break up subject matter into reasonable units. Readers are, however, warned against nominalist approaches in which concepts are simply convenient categorization tools, and naïve realist approaches in which overly simplistic and pragmatically trite concepts taken to unproblematically reflect objects of the real world. Through this attempt to circumvent vague and ambiguous conceptual discussion, Chirkov shows how theoretical constructs are simultaneously products of and tools for scientific discovery and understanding. In a unique move relative to much research in Culture and Psychology, he takes the position that concepts can articulate properties of the world that are independent of the practice of naming. His position is that such concepts are ideas expressed in word and they can potentially represent properties of the real world, but determining such representations is a complex activity. He thereby takes a position where language is good when it reflects reality and this is a likely to be provocative to cultural psychologists who argue that language constitutes language as we know it.

Chirkov (2016) then focuses on research strategies – high-level plans for solving a research problem – and this discussion is less controversial. He distinguishes strategies from designs, which are the more detailed logistic aspects of conducting a research project. Chirkov makes several important distinctions, including nomothetic and idiographic strategies, etic (outsider) and emic (insider) approaches, and variable- and case-based approaches. Such distinctions are used to advocate an approach that avoids the common practice of naively dissecting subject matter “into a set of acontextual and impersonal variables, traits or dimensions …” (p. 181). Such discussions are situated in an emphasis on the importance of proper sampling and illustrative critiques cross-cultural researchers using non-probability sampling methods.

Chirkov’s (2016) challenge to what he sees as irresponsible tokenism will challenge, if not offend, several researchers. That is, he attacks variable-based design and predictive models that have pretense to include culture but only do so as an abstracted predictive variable may compound this sentiment. Conversely, his treatment of language and concepts may frustrate readers from a strong cultural approach. Those steeped in the hermeneutic tradition like Taylor would find themselves at odds with Chirkov’s referential-designative view on language. Regardless, what prompts us to advocate that readers should engage his book is he sets the stage for researchers to consider what Taylor (1999) refers to as “imports.”

Articulating what Taylor (1999) means by imports first requires a brief discussion of how Taylor approaches emotion and experience. Emotions are often thought to be related to certain objects as subjectivist responses to such an object, but Taylor extends this idea by arguing that emotions are not something that people lay over reality as subjective projections (see Cromby, 2015). The world, in its manifest experiential quality, is non-reductively emotional. The result is that Taylor takes a position that a reductive account of emotions is insufficient because it bypasses the way that humans experience the world. Our experience of the world entails emotion integrated with it and so the world is ontologically laden with experiential richness. He shows how a reductive account breaks down when we consider how it is hard to objectify things in a way that disentangles them from the world. The discussion of emotion therein highlights how it is entangled with the experience of the world and it is not subjective due to its intersubjective quality.

By elevating the role of emotions to a level that integrates them constitutionally with experience, Taylor (1999) sets a background for the notion of “import.” He argues that experiencing a given emotion involves experiencing a situation as having a certain import. That is, an import is an experience that something matters and has significance to us in a way that extends beyond our own subjectivist proclivities. Something has import when it cannot be viewed with indifference, and so it is not a manner of subjectivist control. An import thereby involves communally constituted emotions of the world that gives gravitas to the meaning of a situation or object. It is thereby an articulation of what is important in a situation and the sense of importance extends beyond individuality to what we really think is the case. Taylor is attempting to discuss how an import defines the way that our situation is of relevance to the desires or aspirations that are experientially entangled with the world.

Taylor’s (1999) descriptions of imports are grounded in his earlier discussion of self and moral goods. The kind of self that people enact is a matter of imports insofar as the qualitative distinctions of worth that ground self amount to the imports people struggle with. These qualitative distinctions of worth give reason for our moral and ethical beliefs and imports are therein entwined with self. This claim brings us back to the notion that a perfect detachable consciousness is an illusion that cannot be sustained. A typical objectivist account would encourage the abandonment of the notion of strong evaluation and qualitative contrast inherent in the experience of import. The enactment of self involves tensions because people can experience competing imports that are not entirely resonant. That is, learning about different kinds of life runs the risk of being presented with imports that challenge and displace others. Such activities, writes Taylor, show how colliding imports can challenge what one takes to be real. When Taylor writes about reflexivity, he does so in a way that is very radical because taking a first person stance means grasping the experiential imports of others. Profound epiphany can happen at the cross-roads of imports.

Chirkov (2016) does not write using the language of self, moral goods, and imports, but his section on planning researchers stimulates discussion about such phenomena. He provides a vision for high quality research that grapples with imports by doing careful theoretical work that addresses culture and the lifeworlds of other. That is, his discussion of culture espouses care that needs to be taken to articulate concepts and deal with practical problems provokes discussion about imports. The emphasis on practical problems is about the imports that people engage over the course of life. Chirkov’s emphasis on the careful articulation of concepts through ethnography and amplitative-induction is about grasping the imports of others. As such, he offers an approach to research that is about grasping the imports of others as an act of moral selfhood and this is precisely what makes his book generative.

Conducting research (“Part 3: Practical aspects of doing research”)

Chirkov’s (2016) efforts set the stage for a discussion of the importance of comparative case-based approaches, in which detailed and thick (cf. Geertz, 1973) cultural descriptions are used to examine psychological phenomena. He helps readers to do this by outlining many different comparative case-based approaches and illustrating their advantages by way of contrast to variable-based approaches common in cross-cultural psychology. The purpose of this discussion is to help readers avoid ecological and individual fallacies: inferring about an individual from ecological levels of analysis or vice versa. This leads to a discussion of the challenges of measurement across cultures where Chirkov argues that careful and contextually situated translation is crucial.

He claims that ethnography – i.e. studying people within their own cultural contexts – is not simply another methodology, but a theoretical perspective that rests on ampliative-abductive inference. Enfolded into this presentation are comments on the careful selection of samples, access to sociocultural contexts through trusted members of the society, approaches to interviewing participants simultaneously as informants and respondents, best-practice methods for recording observations, and the complexities of non-statistically dependent data interpretation. This discussion leads to an attempt to address a rich conceptualization of research ethics. His main premise is that there are often tensions among the moral landscapes of researchers and participants being studied. He argues that the ethical standards guiding any cultural research project must be tailored to the moral beliefs of the culture. This approach exposes readers to various ethical complexities that arise when a researcher is an outsider, an insider, or moving from outsider to insider. Additionally, he discusses potential harm due to researcher ethnocentrism and challenging issues surrounding the sharing and distribution of knowledge.

Obviously, Chirkov’s (2016) approach would provoke researchers who are dependent on statistical hypothesis testing and impoverished ethics merely reflective of the bureaucracy of ethical review boards. He points out how it is more than an ethical review board process at stake and implies how research is about the kind of behavior one embodies in the work one does. The area where we found fault with Chirkov was where he does not go far enough in his discussion of ethics. Authors in post-colonial theory argue that research is entailed with epistemological claims and sub-altern forms of knowledge can be suppressed/oppressed (see Hook, 2007). The discussion of ethics in the book does not really grapple with problems of power and ideology, which leads to serious issues of intercultural oppression being occluded. Post-colonial and feminist theorists may find that Chirkov’s realist approach does not adequately entwine ethics with the knowledge and power. Nevertheless, Chirkov does put readers on the right track for such discussion and assessing his book through the lens of Slavov Žižec (2008) highlights how.

Žižec (2008) shows an interest in discussing technologies and ethics, such as those in conduct of research and so we turn to him instead of Taylor. These activities, Žižec argues, are an expression of the Lacanian notion of “jouissance,” which generally denotes the experience of enjoyment or pleasure that compels action: “Someone can be happily married, with a good job and many friend, fully satisfied with his life, and yet absolutely hooked on some specific formulation (“sinthom”) of jouissance, ready to put everything at risk rather than renounce that (drugs, tobacco, drink, a particular sexual perversion)” (p. 61). Jouissance is so compelling that its ontological quality manifests in the way that it is experienced as part of the very placement of the subject where just “being there” involves jouissance.

Interestingly, Žižec (2008) outlines how dogmatic technocracies enable the renunciation of jouissance in a way that brings paradoxically it about. A dogmatic approach is sustained by the potential for deviance. As such, there is joy in the act of instilling a pure law of some sort while also therein defining the exciting potential for deviance. When we fantasize about something like deviating from a dogma of some sort, we are left with a sense of potential to other-than-what the dogma would prescribe. Pure dogma never exists because it entails its obscene alter but fantasy seemingly enables a moment of closure where we can act as if dogma is consistent and free of its obscene alter. Fantasy is therein the actual act of instilling law in terms of supposedly pure dogma of some sort. We can feel as if we have embraced a dogmatic view willingly because of the illusion of choice that fantasy provides, when we are in fact pretending to embrace what is already actually imposed. We can continue to fantasize about deviance or excessive obedience and continually postpone admitting our subjugation to a dogmatic regime and experience jouissance.

This sets a background by which we can explore the notion of fantasy and, ultimately, how it relates to research and ethics as addressed by Chirkov (2016). In a general way, he tacitly unmasks how such jouissance enters into everyday life research practice in the way that he consistently refers to the importance of having an inquisitive mind that gets excited with research. It can also be seen in his discussion of the care that needs to be taken in the conduct of inter-cultural work. A discussion of the dynamics of fantasy is provoked when he acknowledges how researchers may struggle to give voice to their thoughts when peers and communities whose positivist dogma defines research practices that differ from their own as obscenities. Where Žižec discusses how a sadomasochistic pervert stays in control at all time, Chikov illuminates a parallel academic manifestation of a psychological scientist vainly pursuing the objectivity of hard science, irrespective of the personhood of this under study. He shows how a researcher can fantasize about an experiment having reached a pure state of experimental control where no extraneous variables prohibit the scientific determination of causality. Fantasy about the unassailable strength of research methods enables a researcher to avoid the contestability of her knowledge and the threat that research may be oppressive to other. What the book does, then, is show how fantasizing about breaking from a dogma is also a way of breaking from the myth that research is consistent and without contradiction. This fantasy is what Chirkov confronts and so he potentially generates a discussion about confronting power entailed in dogmatic epistemological regimes. His book is a generative in the way that it enables discussion about resisting dogmatic technocracies and the fantasy of pure psychological science.

Consider, furthermore, how Žižec (2008) discusses the notion of fetish in a way that helps us further grasp what is happening in research. Fetish involves some sort of fixation upon an object that continually captures our attention and this is really what happens in research where we focus on objects of study. What is challenging is that we need to fixate on an object in the dynamic flow of life if we are going to closely look at it. It is for this reason that Žižec argues that we must freeze something to see it and this freezing is the creation of an object of fetish. To create an object of fetish, we need to reify something and wrench it from its context by exaggerating and delimitating the contours of the object. What is especially pertinent about the fetish is that we tend to treat it as a neutral gaze that exempts itself. Through the notion of fetish, Žižec (2008) highlights how research that purports to objective value-neutral control is not so innocent as it would seem. He points out that the gaze of an innocent and naïve observer is non-existent since creating an object involves an act on the part of the one doing the looking.

This propensity is the object of Chirkov’s (2016) attack. He provokes a discussion about how researchers create their objects of fetish in the process of developing their work. We make this claim because he shows how bad research can involve seeing an object as distinct from its background. He therein tacitly creates space for a discussion about the fetishistic notion that decontextualizing an object entails tearing it from its milieu. Consider how Chirkov critiques researchers using the presuppositions and research methods to develop operational definitions that are often deeply impoverished relative to whatever phenomena a researcher is interested in. He provokes readers to consider how, if we were to admit to ourselves that we constitute the object of our fetish, then it would not seem real. The result is that he illuminates how we avoid looking carefully at the production of our research objects, so that we can sustain the presupposed decontextualized reality and avoid radical reflexivity that challenges epistemological regimes of power. Chirkov attempts to reveal the production process that is usually hidden and turns into an obsession about method. While he may bypass a direct discussion of ethics and power, he does provide generative grounds in line with jouissance, fantasy, and fetish and these notions open the door to a reflexive discussion about a researcher’s own role and problematic power dynamics in research praxis.

Conclusion

Chirkov (2016) provides readers with a book that functions like a textbook due to its breadth and ambitious coverage. It bypasses pretence to objective descriptive or encyclopedic polemic that one often sees in textbooks and it does so by arguing for a specific perspective: “a problem-oriented, realist, and case-based research is the most productive way to conduct such studies and to advance knowledge in this area” (p. 299). The book stands between what readers expect from traditional textbooks and the polemic of an argumentative account. It makes strong claims that open him up to critique from psychologists who do variable-based positivist work and from cultural psychologists how would be potentially bothered by the approach to language and larger issues of epistemology and power. The most important quality of the book is not its problems but rather the valuable discussions that it prompts. It opens up important points about the dynamics of research and the fetishes that psychological researchers can enable ethical atrocities. It also prompts readers to engage in strong evaluations and notions of selfhood into context of moral goods and imports.