Critical Paradigms: some problems of implementation

This article considers a growing movement in educational research which accepts the phenomenological arguments for collaborative approaches but wishes to press co‐operation further into a form of social and political critique. Drawing on a collaborative case study of school governors, the author shows how his decision to gather evidence which would lead to a similar critique was essentially political in character. The field of research into governorship was marked by intractable social conflict, in which local governor‐LEA disputes were directly fuelled by a national re‐alignment of governors' powers. Research methods, relationships and reports were necessarily conditioned by this political scenario, and researchers were unable to divorce deliberations on such matters from reflections on their own political stance. Their attempts to sustain research collaboration in this case were limited by disagreements among the participants. Because of this, it is claimed that the insights of phenomenological and critical paradigms may be difficult to reconcile in practice, perhaps providing an indication of theoretical paradoxes within this methodology.