Abstract
This article discusses the philosophical foundations of phenomenology and their relevance for research. A return to the foundations is warranted because of the popularity of phenomenology as a methodological choice in Human Resource Development (HRD). At the same time, there is concern that the groundbreaking philosophical premises of phenomenology are being lost in favor of functionalist misapplications of the method. Phenomenology offers a powerful critique of positivism and provides a way of inquiring into central qualities of human beings and of being human in this world. It focuses on core dimensions of lived experience beneath the surface of everyday life and proposes an approach to deeper understanding and insight. As a research method, phenomenology is grounded in profound and complex philosophical thought. Researchers adopting phenomenology are well advised to move beyond method-focused textbooks and engage with the movement’s primary literature, especially the writing of its founders, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
Research methods in the social and human sciences are not neutral or instrumental procedures for gathering and analyzing information. Rather, methods reflect and are inextricably linked to theoretical presuppositions about ontologies and epistemologies, to assumptions about the nature of the reality of the phenomenon of interest and to assumptions about ways to generate knowledge in a trustworthy manner. In the process of doing research, scholars move in historically determined traditions, fusing method and philosophy (Gadamer, 2004). Researchers and, by extension, academic fields of study, serve as caretakers of scholarly traditions, upholding their rules and conventions, reflecting upon their value and use in practice, and developing them further based on theoretical and practical considerations.
Phenomenology exemplifies the intimate connection between underlying assumptions and ways of conducting research; it is, as has often been said, a method and a philosophy (Freeman, 2021; Gibson & Hanes, 2003; Gill, 2014). As a prominent approach within the overall framework of qualitative research theories and methodologies, phenomenology “has played an indelible role for qualitative inquiry” (Freeman, 2021, p. 276). It represents a major intellectual tradition that continues to engage scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and applied fields. It is “radical, precisely because it situates life’s original dimensions beyond the realm of what is accessible to the natural sciences and even to objectivity as such”, write Davidson and Seyler (2019, p. ix).
The distinctiveness of the tradition, however, is sometimes lost in empirical research reports when phenomenological research is conflated with other forms of qualitative research (Freeman, 2021). In the leading Human Resource Development (HRD) journals, phenomenological research is published quite regularly, but discussions about its distinctiveness or an integration with analysis and conclusion sections are often absent. Phenomenology tends to be relegated to the methods section where coverage of the tradition is often limited to aspects of data collection and analysis techniques, such as interviewing, bracketing, and reduction. The rich and deep philosophical underpinnings of the approach seem to receive little attention in the analysis and concluding of practice-focused empirical research in our field.
This article seeks to recover the philosophical grounding of phenomenological research in HRD. Our field shares with similar organization focused academic areas a bias towards functionalist research. As Perriton (2022) observed in her call for an expansion of perspectives on HRD, “[t]he current historiography of HRD casts it as a field devoted to practice-based, problem-solving research connected to issues of productivity…. It self-identifies with social science as a hard discipline” (History of HRD, para 3, italics in the original). Belief in what Perriton (2022) calls HRD’s “origin story” (History of HRD, para 1) has resulted in a near-automatic adoption of positivistic methods and their characteristic silence about positivism’s historical provenance and philosophical underpinnings. In this understanding, the goal of research, then, is the solving of problems; the purpose of research is defined instrumentally as leadership of the profession by a major US-based academic association (Academy of Human Resource Development, 2022).
My interest in theorizing phenomenology in the context of HRD and the article’s relevance for a special issue on qualitative research is two-fold. First, academic fields advance not so much by refining existing methods but through expanding the theoretical understandings that bound a discipline (Clegg & Ross-Smith, 2003). Since its origins in the late 19th century to the present, the phenomenological movement has been intellectually generative to an utmost degree. Scholars writing in its tradition have articulated theoretical frameworks that offer access and inspire insight to central issues of human existence, not only at the abstract level of philosophy but also in the applied social and human science fields. Phenomenology presents a paradigm for theorizing and conceptualizing HRD as the field seeks “mov[e] the needle on qualitative approaches to studying HRD” (Grenier et al., 2022, p. 754), as it seeks to develop and flourish in manners theoretical and practical.
A second reason for this article is the frequent concern by scholars that empirical phenomenological studies in the social and human sciences have moved away from the core precepts of their philosophical roots. Van Manen (2017), for example, has questioned whether some of the many published studies and even certain methodologies are “really phenomenology” (p. 775) or fall into a generic qualitative category without requisite grounding in the tradition. Similar concerns were expressed by Hefferson and Gil-Rodriguez (2011) who wrote that the status of phenomenological research as the “’default’ option for many students at many levels [has led to] poorly constructed …projects” (p. 1, emphasis in the original) that have abandoned the philosophical precepts characteristic of this radical alternative to the normal science paradigm. Dowling (2007), in similar vein, bemoans the publication of studies that are labeled as phenomenological but fail to reflect core assumptions of the tradition.
These charges raise important questions of ownership, boundaries, evolution, identity, and labeling. A normative definition of what constitutes true phenomenological research in HRD makes little sense in the context of this article and would, in fact, artificially constrain the dynamic and open intellectual ethos of the movement. Instead, my goal is to outline the contours of phenomenology and trace its origins in the works of Husserl, and Heidegger, widely considered the founders of the phenomenological tradition (Conklin, 2007). As Gill (2014) explains, it is Husserl’s descriptive and Heidegger’s interpretive phenomenological intents that form the foundations of the various popular methodological texts for example, those of Sanders, Giorgi, van Manen, and Smith. The focus of this paper, then, is to theorize the roots of phenomenology in the context of our field and turn the attention of HRD scholars to its origins and its potential for innovation in HRD research and theory.
The outline is as follows: I will begin with a short description of my interest and perspective on the topic. Positionality statements are commonly expected elements of qualitative research reports, allowing the reader to gain insight into the author’s background and vantage points that give rise to the design and conduct of a given study (Holmes, 2020). Academic writing is always reflective of personal interests, histories, and commitments, whether such writing is theoretical or empirical, qualitative or quantitative. While the prevailing norms and biases in academic research exempt positivistic reports and theoretical or conceptual writing from revealing the author’s subjectivity, a “way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” (Poggie, 1965, p. 284); describing my interest in the topic will allow the reader to situate my perspectives in theorizing phenomenology in HRD.
The next section will attempt an outline of phenomenology as a philosophy and a method. Given the huge theoretical, historical, and conceptual terrain, this will, by necessity be cursory and almost certainly incomplete. The goal here is translational: to discuss core concepts and illustrate the unique contribution that phenomenology has to offer as a philosophy and a way of approaching research.
Following the overview, I will outline phenomenology as articulated by Husserl and Heidegger. It is upon their ground-breaking and far-reaching scholarship that subsequent generations of philosophers, social theorists, political scientists, and education scholars have based their work--elaborating, extending, and refining the original, but also debating, providing counter arguments, and moving to new frameworks. The focus on the founders reflects more than historical interest: returning to the roots lets us glean the core ideas of what makes phenomenology such a unique and powerful intellectual movement and to position subsequent elaborations and refinements. That section will conclude with a look at empirical phenomenological studies with respect to their grounding and presentation of the theoretical and conceptual roots of the method.
The conclusion of this article will focus on the movement’s role for our field and offer recommendations for research intended to sharpen the connection between philosophy and method and to broaden and deepen HRD thinking and doing.
Personal Orientation
Scholarly writing is always reflective of the author’s identity and commitment to underlying orientations towards the nature of reality and ways of coming to understand it. These, in turn, are imbedded in the socially constructed and historically determined manner of producing and representing knowledge. As Al-Amoudi and O’Mahoney (2016, pp. 15–16) observe, these personal and societal contexts “structure what research questions are worth asking [and] which methods can be trusted”. I locate the interest in phenomenology in my academic and practice-based context over the past decades.
My engagement with phenomenology goes back to the graduate school years and courses on qualitative research including Max van Manen’s (1990) text. I appreciated the powerful focus on the limitations of positivism for HRD practice. Useful as survey results, regression tables, and analyses of variance may be as a point of beginning of a conversation, they are never conclusive in their meaning nor sufficient to drive action and decisions. Like many of my fellow students, however, I also questioned the relevance of a focus on subjective experience and meaning in the hard-nosed world of business and management. What relevance, we asked ourselves, can the orientation towards radical subjectivity have in the context of a field that is trying to establish itself as a business partner and demonstrate its contributions in strategy making and strategy implementation in corporations large and small?
While most of my research in the early days of my academic tenure used large scale surveys in a quantitative manner, my all too brief introduction to phenomenology never quite left my mind, especially as I began to feel dissatisfied in my scholarship with a lack of deeper insight and connection to my own experience. I recognized the concern with core aspects of the self, usually unspoken but just under the surface, in advising meetings, class discussions, and hallway conversations with students and colleagues, and began to frame my understanding of HRD as aimed toward human flourishing as a basic human right (Kuchinke, 2011). My consulting projects around action research and organization development along Edgar Schein’s (1999) process consultation model felt very much in in line with what I remembered from my phenomenology class: trying to understand and move within the client’s world; acknowledging and articulating the meaning of events in the eyes of others; moving beyond the surface and trying to lay open the deeper assumptions of decisions and actions; and appreciating the personal hopes, dreams, struggles and disappointments of the managers and staff who were faced with internal turmoil and external turbulence. I also came face to face with my own lack of patience for ambiguity, uncertainty, and trust in the unfolding nature of individuals and organizations--Van Manen (2018) speaks about this in the context of phenomenological analysis that often contains elements of wonder and surprise. A sabbatical leave offered the opportunity to delve deeper into the literature, a daunting task and, for me, a humbling experience given the huge volume of literature, unfamiliar and difficult theoretical terrain, and often convoluted language that is not helped by the process of translating dense philosophical texts from the original. Reflecting on my research journey, my experience with guiding doctoral dissertations, and serving on editorial boards, I view the crux of the matter of choosing phenomenological research from among competing approaches as less one of method but lack of awareness of the precepts that undergird this approach.
As I engage more intently with phenomenology after retirement from full-time academic work, I find myself hopeful for its potential to provide a deeper and more insightful approach to addressing the many difficult tasks and situations faced by educators in workplace settings. At the same time, I feel, at times, overwhelmed with the sheer amount of literature, its conceptual and theoretical difficulty, and my-still- rudimentary understanding of its historical roots going back to pre-Socratic philosophy. I am encouraged to see conceptual development occurring in related fields, such as nursing, medical education, and even business management, and hope that similar inroads can occur in HRD to counter its legacy of positivistic biases towards research and knowledge validation.
Contours of Phenomenology
Phenomenology has been described as the “most important contribution to twentieth century continental philosophy” (Al-Amoudi & O’Mahoney, 2016, p. 19), and its impact is certainly not restricted by geography. Phenomenology harbors a wide array of concepts capable of tackling an immense variety of problems…it displays an impressive constellation of key figures…it attempts to engage critically with the recent theoretical challenges of science, art, religion, politics, and human existence [and] makes it presence felt all over the world, within and beyond the Western ‘tradition’. (De Santis et al., 2021, p. 2, emphases in the original)
Husserl and Heidegger count as the founders of phenomenology: Husserl was Franz Brentano’s student at the University of Vienna/Austria in the 1880s and Heidegger was Husserl’s assistant at the University of Freiburg/Germany in the 1920s (Seebohm, 2021). Their students, in turn, are among the most influential social thinkers of the mid- and late 20th century, some continuing, others extending, yet others developing critiques of the original approach. This group includes Hannah Arendt, Jan Potocka, Jean Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Edith Stein (Bakewell, 2016; Van Manen, 2014). Key philosophical texts began to appear in English translations in the mid-20th century as US and Canadian university departments established programs often led by emigrees from war-torn Europe. A network of professional associations was built and continues to the present, with ongoing scholarly interest in the original works of classic phenomenology and a “return of Husserl” in contemporary philosophy (Davidson, 2008, p. 1). “Philosophy in the United States”, as Crowell and Parker (2021, p. 798) observed in an analysis of the North American academic landscape, “is actually quite hospitable to phenomenology”, with major contributions to the philosophy of language, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and others. Researchers in applied fields, such as vocational education, adult education, HRD, counseling, health care, medicine, and psychology have adopted a phenomenological approach in their studies, certainly in European countries but also in substantial numbers in North America, and in Asian countries such as Korea and Malaysia.
Four “successively emerging tendencies [are] now discernable in the worldwide phenomenological movements”, according to the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (in Crowell & Parker, 2021, p. 790), two defined in terms of Husserl’s early and later writing, a third around criticisms of Husserl by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Satre, and the fourth incorporating hermeneutics by, among others, Gadamer and Ricoeur. Analytical phenomenology has been developed in the Anglo-American academic arena, while the French school of phenomenology has continued this intellectual tradition with vigor and visibility from the middle of the last century to this date. North American scholars, notably Van Manen (1990), Moustakas (1994), and Giorgi (2009) have published popular methods texts which have served as guides for a large number of empirical investigations in applied social and human science fields of study.
Shared Ground in Phenomenology
Common to the varieties and articulations within the tradition is, first, the central opposition to the precepts of positivism as the dominant approach to gaining an understanding of elemental aspects of being human and, second, the articulation of alternative approaches to theorizing and empirically investigating the meaning of existence in today’s world. As David Jardine (1990) memorably writes in an article titled Awakening from Descartes’ nightmare: “Phenomenology is…a way of disrupting Descartes’ visions of clarity and distinctiveness as paradigms of knowledge and as a return to inquiry to life as it is actually lived” (p. 211). “The basic premise of phenomenology”, writes Freeman (2021, p. 276) “is that we live in the world unaware of its effectives on our thinking and doing, and that the development of awareness requires that we turn this relationality”. In a public lecture on the origins of phenomenology, Michael Sugrue (2021) emphasizes its focus on interiority, that is on subjectivity, holistic human qualities, and the essential and shared characteristics of the meaning of human experience and human life. This is contrast to positivism with its emphasis on exteriority, that is on the quest for objectivity, observation, measurement, causal analysis, and mathematical expression of regularities and laws of human behavior.
Phenomenology has a central focus on ways of viewing the world and oneself, to paraphrase a recent article titled ‘how to think like a phenomenologist’ by the US philosopher Dale Hobbs (2022). Areas of interest to phenomenologists are as wide and varied as life itself. A recent handbook, edited by De Santis et al. (2021), for example, contains some thirty entries under the section heading issues and concepts, including articles on aesthetics, body, ethics, instinct, mathematics, and time. “Anything that presents itself to consciousness is potentially of interest to phenomenology…. [It] is the study of the lifeworld-the world as we immediately experience it”, as Van Manen (1990, p. 9) observes. Phenomenology is a major marker in the history of knowledge creation and knowledge validation, an answer to fundamental questions of the nature of reality-ontology-, of ways of gaining knowledge-epistemology-, and of the role of our conscious mind in the relationship between the two.
Phenomenology as Description of Life as it is Lived
At the same time, phenomenology is centrally focused on the description of practice and the process of exploring deeper levels of everyday living, and it is this focus on practice and experience that accounts for the attraction for HRD researchers and relevance for our field (Gibson & Hanes, 2003). It is the thoughtful and reflective process of coming to know aspects of meaning and experience and thus a scientific process, a “systematic, explicit, and intersubjective study of … our lived experience” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 11).
A phenomenological approach is direct, with focus on the experience as it presents itself, but moves beyond the level of everyday sense-making to explore the many meanings of the experience setting aside preconceived notions, inherited theories, or conventional interpretations. The purpose of the focus on lived experience, as Freeman (2021, p. 277) observes, is not instrumental but an invitation to reflect on the range of deeper meanings and, especially for Husserl, investigating the structure of awareness and universal elements of being human. Van Niselrooij and Visse (2019), for example, explore the meaning of professional responsibility for providing care in a hospital. They briefly describe the impasse that a nurse finds herself in when charged with an overload of patients and then call on the literature on care ethics and the philosophy of French phenomenologist Marion. The exploration of Marion’s thoughts on givenness allows insight into the nature of nursing care and the dynamics among personal ambition, organizational structure, and patient need. The principle of self-care emerges as an unexpected but important feature of professional work in this situation and in the wider health care field.
Husserl and Descriptive Phenomenology
A return to the original scholarship should start with Husserl, the principal founder of phenomenology. Born in 1859 in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire and educated at the universities of Berlin and Vienna, Husserl held academic positions at leading German universities until his retirement as chair of the University of Freiburg in 1928, where he died in 1938. Husserl trained in mathematics, and his initial focus was on the logic of arithmetic, attempting to understand the role of human cognition for logical statements taken as a priori, objective, and absolute, such as 2 + 2 = 4 or the fact that the sum of angles in any triangle equals 180. Husserl’s main project, however, can be understood in two connected ways: the radical critique of empiricism as an appropriate method to address deeper dimension of human beings and the articulation of a phenomenology as a philosophy and scientific method to replace an approach to psychology that increasingly modeled itself after the natural sciences. Like Rene Descartes at the beginning of modernity in the early 17th century, Husserl’s goal was to articulate an unshakable ground of knowledge, a basis for absolute certainty (see Küng, 1980, for a historical account). Descartes’s solution was the pronouncement of the famous cogito in his replies to the objections to the second meditation on the Nature of the human mind and how it is better known than the body (Descartes, 2017), proclaiming the dualistic separation of the knower and what is known and knowable, and the possibility of objective knowledge independent of the observer. This formed the foundation of British empiricism and positivism as a scientific method with the emphasis on skeptical questioning, experimental design, and hypothesis testing to establish truth claims, and the meteoric rise and success of the natural sciences, including astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and, in the 19th century, sociology. Husserl turned to the focus from the externally observable and mathematically expressible to the subjectivity of the observer, the role individual consciousness, and the nature of meaning. Husserl’s attack against psychologism in his Logical investigation (Husserl, 2001) addressed the claim that deeper aspects and qualities of human reality can be reduced to what is quantifiable and measurable in mathematical terms, establishing his reputation as a leading philosopher and founder of the phenomenological movement in Europe and beyond. This critique is often summarized in reviews of the differences between qualitative and quantitative methods in general (for example, Smith, 1983), but deserves closer reading because the detailed nature of the critique and the implications for research in HRD. In his last publication, The crisis of European science and transcendental phenomenology, Husserl (1976) makes a passionate case for the need to attend to questions of meaning considering the catastrophic suffering of the first world war, the defeat of the democratic values and triumph of militarism and nationalism across the European continent, and the use of technology in support of destruction, materialism, and degeneration of humanistic values. Central to the crisis of modern psychology, said Husserl, is the degree to which the sciences have abandoned those questions that are essential to address the deeper concerns of humankind and human beings. “Sole focus on scientific facts produces the image of human beings as scientific facts…In these times of social crises, science does not offer any answers [to the crises facing humanity]” (Husserl, 1976, p. 4, translation mine). Husserl explains that his critique is not directed at the use of science for the development of modern technology per se but at the dominance of scientific thinking in modern society that silences and makes invisible questions of how technology can serve larger goals. Here, he foreshadows present-day ethical questions concerning the purdent uses of modern technological advances, such as nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, climate change, and social inequalities (see also Heidegger’s 1954/1977 essay Questions Concerning Technology).
Husserl’s psychologism critique, as Detmer (2013) summarizes, is directed against the assumptions of the possibility of an independency of the observer from the observed, a practice that produces, at best, superficial knowledge but fails to capture the essential qualities of being human. The methods of the natural sciences are not capable of differentiating between is and ought, they posit the existence of a priori constructs to guide the investigation, they fall prey to circular reasoning, and they suffer from the fallacy of obscurum per obscurious, the attempt to explain complex human behaviors with models of even greater complexity. These concerns are far from academic and go to the heart of the critique of research in HRD as lacking relevance for practice (see, for example, Torraco & Lundgren, 2020; Kuchinke, 2020), with most quantitative research projects failing to show even the beginning of an awareness of the delimitations inherent in their methodological choice. Researchers adopting a quantitative approach to research are well advised to address Husserl’s concerns and produce cogent arguments for their selection and articulate not only the limitations of a given design but the delimitations inherent in their methodological choice. Likewise, qualitative researchers and, those adopting phenomenology as a basic orientation need to be aware of what this orientation cannot produce. As (Van Manen, 1990), pp. 21–24) explains, “phenomenological human science…offers a different tool-kit…[It] is not a science of empirical facts and scientific generalizations…, [It] does not problem solve (sic)…[Its] questions can never be closed”. This presents a stark contrast and much needed complement to the dominant orientation in HRD research, much of which is portrayed as functionalist and focused on providing solutions to critical and urgent organizational questions. Turning the focus to the nature of lived experience in a reflective, open-ended, narrative and even poetic manner requires clear-sighted understanding of what can and cannot be achieved when trying to address issues of practice as they occur in organizational life through phenomenology.
Intuition, Phenomenological Reduction, and the Transcendental Ego
Husserl’s works address three areas: the role of intuition and a priori understandings of elemental qualities of human experience, the process of phenomenological reduction, and the approximation of a universal or transcendental understanding of personhood. As first introduced in Logical Investigations and later developed in Ideas (Husserl, 2001 and 2002 respectively), these three elements provide central alternative to positivism and its methods.
Our consciousness is not “a transparent glass through which it views the world” (Jacobs, 2022, pp 265–266). Instead, we approach an object of interest with purpose and intentions, not as uninvolved observers. Rather than being autonomous decision makers selecting areas of investigation, we carry an intention or interest when we pay attention to and move towards investigating aspects of the external world. We are called and drawn to specific areas of interest, and this establishes a reciprocal bond between researcher and the focus of the investigation right from the start. Our intuition responds to pre-given understandings that we carry in us by virtue of being human. Rather needing to establish operational definitions of, for example, the quality of leadership, we carry a holistic and a priori understanding and can recognize or at least intuit good from poor leaders, even when this understanding might be vague and difficult to articulate.
The process of reduction allows the researcher to move beyond stereotypical, common-sense understandings that we carry with us in everyday life. Here, the similarity to the Socratic method might illustrate this element of Husserl’s method. Socrates would regularly question his conversation partners about specific elements of a topic, such as virtue or the good life. Without fail, Socrates’ partners would provide an everyday explanation or definition, only to be stumped by his questions, arriving in the end at the insight that a clear definition of an important term is elusive. The admission of not-knowing, then, provides the starting point of deeper investigation and examination. Similar with Husserl’s phenomenological reduction: everyday understandings, while of pragmatic value, are often based on superficial understanding without awareness into the deeper qualities of our experience. The process of bracketing, then, strips away layers of common-sense notions with the goal of deeper insight. Here, again, the contrast with positivism is striking. The analysis of a focus group interview on leadership, for example, will be based on the transcripts of participants’ words, searching for frequency of key terms, common themes, and areas of agreement. In phenomenological research, on the other hand, the responses given by the participants will be viewed only as first layer of understanding and used as a springboard for a deeper reflection.
The aim of phenomenological reduction as formulated by Husserl is to lay open universal characteristics of human experience common to the members of our species. The phenomenological method seeks to uncover essential elements of lived experience, expressed in Husserl’s famous dictum to the things themselves. It is not an objective, fixed, and static definition of essentials as suggested by Plato’s cave allegory when ideal forms are said to exist that are all but inaccessible to human beings. Rather, “objects are disclosed … as meaningful only in the context of the intentionality of conscious, lived experience” (Detmer, 2013, p. 151). Such disclosure responds to the intuition or dim awareness of deeper layers of lived experience, but is always tentative, unfinished, and evolving. It is not unlike the image used in Buddhist teaching of the wisdom talks as the finger pointing to the moon, not being the moon itself. Despite this searching nature of the process, however, Husserl believed in a universal set of human qualities that lie underneath the level of everyday, common sense thinking and speaking. In later articulations, for example by French philosophers Gabriel Marcel and Michel Henry, phenomenology becomes as broad as life itself, and this is foreshadowed by Heidegger’s notion of Being, discussed in the next section. For Husserl, phenomenological research is a way to tap the deeper meanings of what it means to live as a human being, that is to approximate the things themselves as they reveal themselves to each of us through intentionality and a priori understandings. While lived experience is a subjective quality and despite its tremendous variety and variability among humankind, there is the assumption of a common core of what it means to be human.
Finally, uncovering and revealing deeper layers of meaning of lived experience is a subjective, individual endeavor where one is reminded of the principle of asking ‘why’ five times common to process guides in quality management. Such research, then, does not rely on agreement among a group of individuals, nor can meaningful insight be achieved by averaging across different themes or counting occurrences to develop rank orders or other forms of quantitative representation of information gleaned through interviews. Descriptive phenomenology applied in empirical research, as, for example, Van Manen (2018) outlines, addresses the difficult task of carefully delineating the boundary between researcher and research partner and offers, perhaps even requires self-disclosure and reflexivity on part of the author of the research report to stay true to the philosophical grounds of phenomenology.
Heidegger and Hermeneutic Phenomenology
The volume of secondary literature with restatements, commentary, and simplifications speaks to the generativity and impact of Heidegger’s work, who, along with Husserl established phenomenology and laid the foundation for much of 20th century philosophy. While Heidegger’s initial support for the German National Socialist movement in the early 1930s and his later rather tepid disavowal cast a shadow on his personal reputation and, by implication, his academic work, his tremendous impact on philosophy in the early 20th century and in many directions since is without doubt. When Husserl’s work, centered on a critique of positivistic philosophy and approximating essential dimensions of human life through the role of consciousness, intuition, and reduction, presents conceptual difficulties for North American scholars trained in the social science tradition, Heidegger’s thinking requires even greater patience with thorny philosophical concepts. Heidegger initially studied Catholic theology, switched to philosophy after encountering Husserl’s writing, and became his assistant at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 1919. While acknowledging the influence of Husserl’s way of seeing the world through phenomenology on the development of his own approach, he “remained widely skeptical of the philosophical depth of his master’s doctrine” (Renaudie, 2021, p. 23). Husserl’s call to the things themselves becomes, for Heidegger, a singular to the thing itself, the focus on Being as the ultimate, underlying dimension (Elliott, 2005). Being is not defined nor is it definable since no external viewpoint exists. It is an absolute and all encompasses everything, like, perhaps a black hole that swallows up everything there is, or the original big bang from which everything, including ourselves and our thoughts, concepts, and frameworks, originates. The one quality that can be attributed to Being is that it exists, but no other qualifier is possible. Given Heidegger’s theological background, commentators such as Sugrue (2021) have observed the proximity of the concept of Being to the ultimate in spiritual traditions, for example, the concept of the Godhead in medieval German mysticism (Weeks, 1993) or the concept of nonduality in Eastern philosophy (Loy, 1988).
Heidegger faults Husserl for the “abstract study of the structures of intentional consciousness [instead of returning] to the concrete description of human existence” (Renaudie, 2021, p. 26), but adopts phenomenological principles to focus on Being as the ultimate reality. Leaning on Husserl’s framework, we carry an intuitive awareness of Being, there is an attraction to or interest in Being, and our everyday lives provide opportunity to experience a taste of, though never fully comprehending, the wonder of Being. Phenomenological research, then, becomes a hermeneutic practice, the existential interpretation and analysis of being-in-the-world (Dreyfus, 1991; Krell, 2011). Being is not immediately accessible and often concealed yet underlies all existence and is experienced through reflection on lived experience, be it verbal or non-verbal. As human beings, Heidegger claims, we are in our core and fundamentally concerned with and interested in our very own being and thus connected to the ultimate Being. Our existence makes up the essence of who we are and connects us to the greater notion of Being. This connection, however, is not direct but often dim and tentative. For Heidegger, it is not a freeing or liberating experience in the way that decades later humanistic psychologists describe the process or state of self-realization. Peeling away layers of concealment and beginning to glimpse aspects of the Being that we are, can create anxiety and puts us face-to-face with our temporality and finitude. To live in an authentic manner, that is to live congruent with an awareness Being, means to confront the essential elements of being-in-the-world, our external and personal constraints and limitations, our finality and temporality, but also the possibility of choice and potential for freedom and action. We have an inarticulate awareness of our Being but also experience anxiety when we open to it.
These notions are far from esoteric or disconnected from the concerns of human resource development. From its beginning, HRD has proclaimed a dual focus on performance and on learning (Werner & DeSimone, 2012), with both domains reaching deep into central concerns of personhood and existence. Examples include the focus on transformational learning, leadership qualities, meaning of work, and spirituality in the workplace. While the prevailing functionalist orientation of the field (Sambrook, 2000) has often resulted in a positivistic and—due to its methodological assumptions and behavioristic orientation—surface-level treatment, phenomenology has the theoretical and conceptual power for a deeper and more comprehensive exploration of essential qualities and conditions of work and life.
Phenomenology after Heidegger
While Heidegger’s work is aimed at understanding the conditions and constitution of our being, his themes are later elaborated by existentialist philosophy and theology, articulating moral and ethical demands on what it means to live in an authentic manner instead of acting in bad faith. Phenomenological research in this manner addresses existential issues confronting human beings, with the researcher’s role as a guide to further his/her own understanding of the conditions of being and those of others. For Heidegger, the search for understanding of Being, or at least the process of coming closer to it, has realist undertones; the hermeneutic process has the potential to lead to firm ground and definitive insight into Being. Later formulations of hermeneutic, for example John Caputo’s recent publication (2018), removes this possibility, leading to interpretation as a never-ending and never-finished process, very much in line with post-modern understandings of reality and the process of research. Phenomenological research in this vein, then, is open-ended, subject to and even requiring multiple interpretations; it is temporary and tentative with respect to its findings and insights, leaving us with questions and unexplained or unexplainable territory rather than proclaiming certainty and finality.
The post-Heideggerian developments in Phenomenology are beyond the scope of this paper, but it bears pointing to the tremendous interest and reception of the movement in the wider academic communities, leading to vibrant and passionate involvement by scholars who refined, developed further, and moved beyond the original articulation. These include the formulation of existentialism and existential phenomenology, feminist philosophy, the notions of embodiment of knowledge and perception, and the grounding of knowledge and understanding in affectivity. Post-modern and post-structuralist philosophers and social theorists typically take phenomenology, including its critique of positivism and its philosophical precepts, as a point of departure. De Santis et al. (2021), for example, provide an extensive coverage with individual chapters on some 20 major figures in phenomenology as well as discussions on its intersection with 20th century analytic philosophy, major social theories, and lines of research such as medicine and the cognitive sciences. Contemporary North American philosophers have started to bridge the chasm between analytic and continental philosophy, building on commonalities between the two large frameworks and returning, in a sense, to their shared origins in pragmatism (see Baghramian & Marchetti, 2021).
Phenomenology as an Applied Research Method
Phenomenology has, from its start, been understood as empirical in the sense that it is explicitly focused on capturing aspects of human existence as they are experienced and as they present themselves in life as it is lived. In the context of bourgeoning appreciation and interest in qualitative inquiry in the early 1970s (Schwandt, 2000), techniques for phenomenological research leaning on the philosophies of the founders began to be published and included in graduate level methods courses. As Vagle and Hofsess (2016. p. 335) observes, “formulations of phenomenological research approaches tend to stay with Husserl or …some combination of Heideggerian, Gadamerian, and Merleau-Pontian…philosophies.” While the larger theoretical works that took lived experience as the starting point for extensive theoretical and conceptual scholarship, for example Hannah Arendt’s (1973) study of the rise of totalitarianism in Germany or Simone the Beauvoir’s (2011) development of feminist theories, empirical phenomenological research evolved following the precepts and formats of North American social science research protocols, including sampling, individual and group interviewing, thematic analyses and triangulation, informant checks, and statements of implications for practice (Dowling, 2007). Phenomenological research in this context has become subject to the institutional protocols of a five-chapter dissertation, the publishing norms in scholarly journals, and format requirements for academic conferences, increasing its visibility in the applied fields of study but also creating expectations and norms for writing and presentation.
The growing interest in the applied fields has led to active theoretical discussions and explorations of phenomenology as a promising new qualitative research method. In management, for example, an early paper by Sanders (1982, p. 353), starts with “[t]here is a new star on the research horizon”, and continues to delineate generic elements of the method, including intentional analysis, epoche, and eidetic reduction. Conklin’s (2007) article under the journal rubric nontraditional research and titled Method or madness: Phenomenology as knowledge creator positions Husserl’s approach in the context of other traditions, such as symbolic interactionism, grounded theory, and ethnography. Gill (2014), finally, offers an exploration of different “varieties of phenomenological methodologies” (p. 118), and provides a comparison of five approaches following either Husserlian descriptive or Heideggarian interpretive primary orientations.
In health professional education (HPE) research, there is strong interest in broadening the traditional ontological and epistemological foundations of medical research to capture the experiences of practitioners and patients more fully. Publications include theoretical as well as empirical contributions. Dowling (2007), for example, reviews the similarities and differences in phenomenological approaches from Husserl to van Manen. Rietmeijer and Veen (2022) use a written dialog form between a medical practitioner conducting HPE research and an interdisciplinary philosopher to link phenomenology and medical education research in a way that is “both true to its philosophical roots and yields research findings that contribute to the quality of medical education” (p. 114). An example is a paper by Bjorkækmo and colleagues (Bjorkækmo et al., 2018) using three anecdotes of encounters among health care professionals to “develop phenomenological insight about temporal, embodies, and relational qualities…of interaction in professional practice” (p. 18). A third example, referenced earlier, is Van Nistelrooij and Visse’s (2019) exploration of the dynamics of professional responsibility to provide care in a nursing environment. In the HPE context, phenomenological research contributes to innovation by filling “methodological gaps” identified in a large-scale analysis of methods employed in HPE research (Han et al., 2022, para 1).
An unpublished review of the publications in the leading HRD journals, Human Resource Development Quarterly, Human Resource Development Review, Human Resource Development International, and European Journal for Training and Development, conducted by Tahir in 2017 and, for the subsequent years, by myself, leads to two observations. First, compared to the related fields of management and HPE, theoretical discussions on phenomenology as a method or a philosophy have been absent in recent years; the one exception is a 2003 article by Gibson and Hanes. Insightful as this paper is, there is plenty of room for updates incorporating recent theoretical and conceptual developments. Second, compared to degree of grounding of empirical data in philosophy of phenomenology in publications in related fields such as HPE, HRD researchers tend to neglect an integration of philosophy and method. A typical example is the study of U.S. army veterans as leaders that directs two sentences in the methods section on phenomenology: “a phenomenological study explores and describes the meaning for several individuals of their lived experience….Phenomenology is essentially the study of past experiences as lived through individuals” (Kirchner, 2018, p. 71). No other reference to or application of phenomenology occurs in the paper. Without questioning the contribution of the paper to an important issue in the field-- it underwent peer review and was accepted in the leading empirical journal in the field—the observation stands that there is little that distinguishes this paper from a generic qualitative study. A detailed review of HRD publication is beyond the scope of this paper, and other phenomenological HRD publications could be cited with slightly more detail on phenomenology. The tendency in HRD research, however, is to treat phenomenology as a method only and to do so in a superficial manner without taking advantage of the richness of a deeper phenomenological analysis that could inform and deepen the research reports. In this sense, HRD research exemplifies what Dowling (2007, p. 2007) terms “curious example[s]”, namely research reports that are phenomenological in name only but fail to reflect the tenets of approach they purport to have followed.
Conclusion
Phenomenology has the theoretical and conceptual power to disrupt what education scholar David Jardine (1990) has called “Descartes’ nightmare”, offering the opportunity to return from the illusion of “clarity and distinctiveness as paradigms of knowledge [to an] inquiry of life as it is actually lived” (p. 211). Descartes’ project at the beginning of modernity was aimed at freeing us from the confines of tradition, religious dogma, and authority and to attain scientific knowledge of univocal clarity and unambiguous certainty. The resulting philosophy of empiricism and associated positivistic modes of research proved themselves in the natural and biological sciences but produced in the human sciences, what Alfred North Whitehead (in Fox, 2000, p. 24) termed the “celibacy of the intellect”. The results are images of human beings as bodiless, sexless…empty, shallow products [that hide] the deep ambiguities [and] deep difficulties in living our lives. …understood as problems to be fixed, things to be ‘cleared up’ through the diligent pursuit of research which takes as its first gesture a fundamental severance with its object of inquiry so that it can heed only its own desire for clarity and distinctiveness which then demands clarity and distinctiveness from that object. (Jardine, 1990, p. 215, emphases in the original)
While Jardine addresses educational research with children, his description applies equally well to human resource development. HRD is a field whose “dance with capital” (Fenwick, 2011, p. 84) and desire to establish itself in the for-profit organizational landscape in North America and beyond have led to the near universal embrace of functionalist understandings of the role of research and adoption of positivistic research paradigms common to the related fields of organizational psychology and business management. Methods sections in publications tend to focus on the technical procedures but provide hardly ever a justification for the adopted paradigm or its underlying philosophical assumptions. Hiding the fact that all research rests on philosophical assumptions and beliefs, extant academic discourse in HRD has normalized Western positivistic frameworks (Ali et al., 2022) and obscures the richness of and, indeed, the need for phenomenological research to address fundamental questions of living and being in the context of work and working. While phenomenological research has some degree of presence in HRD publications, it has become a popular choice for qualitative research in related fields, such as adult education, applied psychology, and medical education. The focus on lived experience should be seen as having salience in practice-focused and professional fields as van Manen points out in his recent Phenomenology of Practice (2014). This includes HRD and the recent strong interest in personal dimensions of individuals, such as meaning, purpose, commitment, and even spirituality.
The promise of phenomenological research and its popularity are accompanied by the concern that the difficult philosophical grounds have become lost or diluted in research reports. This, then, lets scholars raise the questions whether what is presented as phenomenological research still reflects its philosophical basis and how the rich and deep tradition can be brought to the fore to “move the needle on qualitative approaches to studying HRD” (Grenier et al., 2022).
This article sought to articulate the philosophical foundations of classical phenomenology to allow HRD researchers to make educated decisions when considering this paradigm and when reviewing phenomenological research. Clarity of choice is an important aspect of scholarly work. All research paradigms rest on philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality, about singular ways of approaching such reality, and what questions are worth asking. Adopting a particular paradigm means stepping into a particular intellectual history, continuing specific methodological traditions, and serving as advocates and custodians of philosophical thought related to research and methods.
I conclude with four recommendations for phenomenological research in HRD.
First, phenomenology rests on a profound critique of positivism and its implications for practice, such a functionalism, managerialism, and performativity. Husserl’s attack on psychologism, the mis-application of the natural science method to investigations of human beings, sets the stage for all subsequent developments in this tradition. Given the ingrained nature of positivism in our field, researchers have the opportunity to claim the radical alternative that the tradition provides and should not use phenomenology to positivistic ends. As Van Manen (1990, p. 23) observes, “phenomenology does not problem solve [sic]…. [It does not provide] effective procedures, winning strategies…. Phenomenological questions are meaning questions”.
Second, phenomenology presents a unique approach in the family of qualitative methodologies that should not be conflated with other approaches. As Freeman (2021) explains, faulty assumptions about phenomenology are common in applied research and threaten its distinctiveness. Among them are the belief that the analysis of lived experience can be treated instrumentally as means to an end, that all first-person accounts of experience qualify as phenomenological studies, that trivial occurrences can be counted as phenomena, and that phenomenology is the only paradigm oriented towards meaning and understanding.
Third, given the dynamic nature of the tradition and its plurality of understandings and directions, researchers need to situate themselves theoretically in phenomenology. This means the need to be aware of the different facets and historical formulations of the movement. It also means to be specific about their definition and approach. Successful phenomenological studies “have in common that they first define either what they see as phenomenology, or whose phenomenology they are using, rather than treating it as an out-of-the box method” (Rietmeijer & Veen, 2022, Introduction Mario, para. 2). This includes a careful reading of the many methods texts, such as Van Manen (1990), Moustakas (1994), and Smith et al. (2009), and, perhaps more importantly, the need to understand their philosophical roots. As Gill (2014) observes, the five popular methodological approaches are substantively based on Husserl’s or Heidegger’s foundations, Sanders, Giorgi, and van Manen on the former, Benner and Smith on the latter. These texts, however, present the tip of the proverbial iceberg, with a wealth of material available by going beyond summaries and returning to the original scholarship.
Fourth, researchers have a treasure trove of scholarship written in the phenomenological theoretical tradition at their disposal that can enrich the analysis and interpretation of empirical studies. Two of many examples are Gert Biesta’s (2022) extensive reference to Marion when describing the role of personal responsibility in the context of education and training and Hannah Arendt’s (1988) explication of three forms of work, labor, creative works, and political action. It bears repeating that phenomenology is a descriptive science of life as it is lived in many contexts, including work and working. It provides an analytical framework that allows an investigation of empirical situations in contrast, or perhaps as a complement, to the positivistic tradition; it has much to offer to our field and deserves more elaborate attention than it presently receives.
Phenomenology is a dynamic and living tradition that continues to evolve. The original scholarship of the founders continues to exert their influence in theory and practice and is at the core of most empirical phenomenological studies. Theorizing phenomenology, however, is an ongoing effort with the potential to drive further understanding and engaging in research. In this vein, efforts to deterritorialize philosophy (for example, Davis, 2022), to decenter the subject (for example, Pohl & Helbrecht, 2022), and to critically examine the role of reflexivity in phenomenology (for example Vagle & Hofsess, 2016) are but a few relevant areas of scholarship that need to find their way into HRD research and practice in order to ensure its continued scholarly and applied relevance and currency.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
