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Supervisors' conceptions of research and theimplications for supervisor developmentDianne Bills aa University of South Australiab Professional Development, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes,SA 5095, Australia E-mail:

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To cite this article: Dianne Bills (2004): Supervisors' conceptions of research and the implications forsupervisor development, International Journal for Academic Development, 9:1, 85-97

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International Journal for Academic DevelopmentVol. 9, No. 1, May 2004, pp. 85–97

ISSN 1360–144X (print)/ISSN 1470–1324 (online)/04/010085–13© 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI 10.1080/1360144042000296099

Supervisors’ Conceptions of Research and the Implications for Supervisor Development

Dianne Bills

*

University of South Australia

Taylor and Francis LtdRIJA100097.sgm10.1080/1360144042000296099International Journal for Academic Development0000-0000 (print)/0000-0000 (online)Original Article2004Taylor & Francis Ltd91000000May 2004DianneBillsProfessional DevelopmentUniversity of South AustraliaMawson LakesSA 5095Australiadianne.bills@unisa.edu.au

Teaching reform in higher education has frequently been informed by investigations into conceptions oflearning held by students and by teachers. Such work has been extended into research education, with thestudy of experienced researchers’ conceptions of research providing a basis for enquiry into the way researchis experienced by the various participants in research education. This paper reports research designed toinvestigate research supervisors’ conceptions of research as they were produced in focus group conversations.Using techniques of membership categorisation analysis, discourses are identified that privileged university-based research and researchers over other forms of research and other ways of knowing, in particular over theinterests of professional/practitioner researchers and over the legitimacy of research conducted in workplacesoutside the university. It is argued that such discourses have the potential to be problematic for professionaland industry-based practitioner researchers as they seek to construct authoritative researcher identities.Further interrogation of the categorisation work that sustains these discourses offers the opportunity to maketheir assumptions explicit, which has implications for supervisors’ reflective practice and professionaldevelopment.

Introduction

Strategies for teaching reform in undergraduate programs in higher education have drawnheavily on research into the different conceptions of teaching and learning held by students andteachers (Entwistle, 1995; Marton & Booth, 1997; Ramsden, 1992). One of the assumptionsunderpinning that work is that understanding students’ perceptions of the processes ofeffective learning and teaching will enable teachers to develop more responsive teaching prac-tices, with improved learning outcomes for students. The research described in this paperextends this assumption into postgraduate research education, building on research conductedby Brew (2001a) into the different ways research is conceptualised by experienced researchers.

*

Professional Development (Research Supervision), University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, SA 5095,Australia. Email: dianne.bills@unisa.edu.au

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In that research, Brew argued that understanding different conceptions of research may helpeducators appreciate the difficulties students experience if their conceptions of research differfrom those of their supervisors and peers. Some of the findings from the research reported heresuggest that it may be researchers’, and more specifically supervisors’, conceptions of research,as much as those held by students, which can create difficulties for research students. As I willshow below, the dilemma is not so much that there is the potential for a “clash” of conceptions,but that there is the possibility of more subtle and often debilitating effects of power andauthority relations operating when conceptions and their underlying assumptions go unac-knowledged and unchallenged.

The Study

This paper reports the way supervisors described their conceptions of research in four separatesemi-structured focus group conversations. These group conversations were part of a largerproject that included focus groups with research students, established to inform a collabora-tive, cross-disciplinary investigation of students’ and supervisors’ conceptions of research.Within the team of researchers there was a common interest in the variations that might befound in and between supervisors’ and students’ conceptions of research and the implicationssuch differences might have for students’ learning experiences. Participants in all groups wereasked a common core of questions;

what is research

,

what is good research

and

what qualities makea good researcher

, with other questions arising in context such as

what makes a good researchstudent

and

why do research?

Some of the co-researchers used the data gathered to inform theconstruction of a survey instrument. Others analysed transcripts of the group conversationsfrom a phenomenographic point of view, generating categories to represent the differentconceptions of research evident in the data taken as a whole. Taking an ethnomethodologicalperspective, my interest was in the way particular conceptions of research were “talked intobeing” (Heritage, 1984, p. 237) as a practical and situated accomplishment of the groupinteraction. This meant analysing the interpretative work conducted by the speakersthemselves as they made “recognizable sense” of their conversation for each other (Garfinkel,1967, p. 3). The task, using analytic methods of membership categorisation analysis (Sacks,1995), was to identify the descriptive categories assembled by the supervisors as they describedwhat constituted their conceptions of research. Providing a sufficient warrant for the wayspeakers’ categories are heard requires a level of fine grained analysis that makes it difficult tosummarise analytic findings (Atkinson, 1990). For this reason, the analysis for this paper hasbeen confined to the transcripts of supervisor groups, and within those groups, to talk thatoccurred around the question of “what is research?”, although for comparative purposes somestudents’ comments are provided towards the end of this discussion.

The findings presented here do not constitute broad statements about how researchersconceptualise research. Nor do they point to significant variations in the different ways super-visors conceptualise research. Instead, they show how the intensive interrogation of specificinstances in which supervisors describe their conceptions of research enables the identificationof discourses that both signal and perpetuate aspects of a culture in action (Baker, 2000).Academic discourses of research come under scrutiny as a result, for it is possible to show howthe discourses oriented to by supervisors in each of the four groups privileged university-basedresearch and researchers over non-university research and researchers. I show how students

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can be positioned by this privileging in ways that may influence the ease with which theyconstruct authoritative researcher identities and I argue that the assumptions underlying thesediscourses can be exposed in the interests of motivating supervisors’ reflective practice andinforming supervisor professional development.

Conceptions Heard as Discursive and Situated Representations

In this study, the methods used to access and describe individuals’ conceptions of research aredifferent from those employed in phenomenographic research, but the research does sharewith “developmental phenomenography” the desire to improve student learning (Bowden,2000; Prosser, 2000). It does so by taking a critical stance towards the way people’s descrip-tions of a concept may be heard. When people describe their concept of a phenomenon, thereare at least two ways of hearing such descriptions. One is to hear it as a reasonably “faithful”expression of a person’s understanding, or way of experiencing, the world (Marton, 1994,p. 4426). Phenomenographers who hear descriptions of conceptions in this manner acknowl-edge that this inserts a level between the experience itself, and the “experience-as-described”,and call it a “second-order approach” (Ashworth & Lucas, 2000). Another way of hearingsuch descriptions is to hear them as

discursive

representations, which might be called a third-order approach since it adds a level of representation to the description. This means thatinstead of hearing a description as the “truth” of a person’s awareness or understanding, it isheard as what has come to count as the truth. This is a perspective that regards discourses asboth social and historical productions. They are social productions in the way they constructsocial worlds, social relations and social identities (Fairclough, 1992; Chouliaraki &Fairclough, 1999). As Volosinov (1929/1986) describes it, the expression of experience takesplace entirely in “social territory”, with individuals borrowing from “the social stock of avail-able signs”, or discourses, to express their experiences in particular ways. Discourses thereforehave the capacity to mark speakers as members of social (which includes institutional) andcultural networks (Gee, 1996). Discourses can also be regarded as historical productions inthe sense conveyed by Foucault (1976, 1980) who argued that discourses produce “truthclaims” by making it possible to talk of certain things, and not others, at certain times and incertain places. Locating discourses is therefore a way of foregrounding relations of power,knowledge and authority around who can know and who can say, as well as what can be said.

Ethnomethodology makes the further claim that descriptions of a concept constitute situatedversions of the “truth” produced locally and intersubjectively in talk. From an ethnomethod-ological perspective, conversations and other everyday activities are accomplished through thesustained and methodical interpretive work undertaken by the people engaged in them(Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1995). To conduct a conversation, speakers act in compliance withtheir “background expectancies” (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 2) and “inference-rich knowledge”(Sacks, 1995, p. 40) to make what they are doing mutually intelligible. They “collude” witheach other by relying on tacit social and cultural knowledge (McDermott & Tylbor, 1986).One of the prime tools available in language for such collusion is category-ascription. Speakersuse categories to make their descriptions recognisable without the need for further explicitdescriptive details, made possible because of the social and cultural knowledge stored incategories. Choosing a category is a way of formulating knowledge. For example, choosing todescribe someone as a “university person” makes relevant a particular set of expectations with

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regard to that person that would not be relevant if the person was described by means ofanother category. The fact that calling up a category is always an act of selection meanscategories are capable of revealing the “moral weave” of ordinary discourse (Jayyusi, 1991).Analysing categories is thus a way of locating discourses in text and talk (Baker, 2000).

The other important characteristic of categories is that they are typically formulated intwo-set, or paired, classes (Sacks, 1995, p. 47). These pairs can be symmetric and standardrelational pairs, such as mother/father, or they may be asymmetric pairs such as white/non-whites. Sacks (1995) proposed that categorisations structured as asymmetric infer theexistence of unequal rights and obligations by constructing a “comparative lack” of power,knowledge and authority in one part of the pair (Sacks, 1995). Analysing category-ascriptionin conversation is therefore a way of identifying unequal relations and revealing the moral andcultural assumptions tied to discourses in use (Baker, 2000).

In the analysis that follows I show how, in the conversations amongst supervisors,descriptions of research were routinely formulated around the dichotomous categories ofuniversity/non-university research and researchers. I show how this opposition became the“umbrella” categorisation (Jayyusi, 1984) for the construction of university research as“proper” and non-university research as “not research”. As a consequence, in these conver-sations university-based research and researchers were privileged over other forms ofresearch and other ways of knowing, and in particular over the interests of practitionerresearchers and the legitimacy of research conducted in workplaces outside the university.

What Counts as Research? “Big R, or University Research”

The first transcript for analysis is an extended sequence of talk that occurred near the begin-ning of a group’s discussion.

1

The belief that conversation is social action, even when it is afacilitated conversation in a focus group, means the interviewer is not exempt from the analy-sis. As a participant in the discussion, the interviewer formulates knowledge and understand-ing as much as any other member, although from a different position within the group. Thequestions posed by the interviewer are therefore important and have a bearing on the discus-sion. In this group the interviewer had described a scenario in which the supervisors were “ata party” where the people were “anything else but university people” and they were asked toimagine how they would describe their work as a researcher. This scenario positioned thesupervisors as academics in the academic/lay binary and assigned them a voice; they were tospeak as “university people”. This contrast is not uncommon in university contexts, arisingfor example when documents require a “lay” title in plain English, or when academic studentdevelopment programs make explicit the distinctive features of academic discourse incomparison with “ordinary” language. What is significant is not that this categorisation wasintroduced, or that it was so readily built on by the participants, but that it became the meansof constructing a particular version of what should count as research.

Transcript 1 – Group 1

1 Anna If I was at a party, if I really wanted to break it right down2 I would say that research is about asking questions3 or having a question, a question occurring to you

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4 and in a somewhat systematic way finding information about it5 I mean, so in that sense, if we’ve got a question6 I mean I might hunt around in my head for some answers and that could be7 internal research, I guess, if you like, but in research with a capital R8 it’s the same process I’ve got a question and I’m going to9 more systematically than just looking around in my own head

10 I’m going to look around me with some kind of structure to my search to find infor-mation

11 that might not necessarily answer the question but it would add information12 and maybe would make the question clearer.13 I don’t know that I’d say that at a party though ’cos I’d probably ( )14 ((laughter and over talk)) but you know, those enquiries and questions15 and more information gathering would be the sorts of things

16 I And that notion of being systematically structured, is that crucial?

17 John I think, yeah, I mean whether it’s qualitatively based or certain quantitative18 it’s very much more systematic with quantitative19 but for qualitative it’s probably a bit different20 but you still have to have some clear kind of process.

21 Anna Yeah, like with the coffee thing, your system would be maybe that22 you go into those supermarkets that stock coffee23 so you wouldn’t be unsystematic and go to every shop that didn’t have coffee would

you24 I mean, so even in just cutting it down to I’m going to go to supermarkets25 to my mind that’s part of the process of having a systematic approach.

The first version of research was constructed through the contrast made by Anna between“internal research” (line 7), which she described as “just looking around in my own head” (line9) and “research with a capital R” (line 7), which was described as “a somewhat moresystematic way of finding information” (line 4). John’s complication of that description withthe quantitative/qualitative categorisation (in lines 17–20) shows how categorisations which arenot inherently asymmetric, can be made so by the features attributed to each part of the pair.John first defines quantitative research assertively as “very much more systematic” (line 18) butthen hedges in his description of qualitative as “

probably

a bit different” (line 19) but “you stillhave to have

some

clear kind of process” (line 20). The quality of being systematic is assignedmore strongly to quantitative research than qualitative research. The quantitative/qualitativedistinction was made by several of the researchers in the different groups, and used to under-score the proposition that research must be rigorous, and the judgement was made in somegroups that qualitative research was not necessarily rigorous and in many instances was“sloppy”. Space prevents tracing in detail the uses made of these categories throughout thedifferent conversations, but they are worth noting here because they are a neat example of whatJayyusi (1984) meant by categories being “ascriptive” as well as descriptive, and therefore capa-ble of doing moral work in a conversation. In a cumulative way, the university/non-universitycategory device was built up in a similar manner and used by the different groups to legitimateuniversity research and researchers over professional and practitioner research and researchers.

In the next part of the conversation, particular qualities were assigned to university researchto differentiate it from other research.

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Transcript 2 – Group 1

26 Mike But if we can continue on the coffee example27 what would differentiate small r research from maybe big R or university research

to me28 is that the result of the university research would be we learn something new29 that we didn’t know before.30 Um and the only way that can be judged is by a methodical approach31 comparison with the past, but also testing as to whether we’ve moved knowledge

further.32 So finding out that drawing a table of the costs of coffee across Adelaide33 might be interesting but if we found out that there was a correlation between34 the cost of coffee and socio-economic variables from the census,35 which then correlated with the elevation of the landform or something strange like

that36 that would be something new.37 We drink more coffee if we’re higher or something like that. So that distinctive

38 I He’s a geographer – we can tell. ((laughter))

39 Mike I’m sorry.

40 Anna Isn’t that true. Well, coffee grows in high altitudes ((laughter))

41 I No it’s a good example, you know.

Here, Anna’s “internal research” is re-formulated by Mike as “small r research”, whichenables him to contrast it with “capital R research” or “big R research or universityresearch”. In the expression “

maybe

big R

or

university research”, “or” can signify either asubstitution (that is, an alternative way of saying something) or an opposition (Jayyusi,1984). It is used on this occasion as a substitution, for Mike goes on to describe the quali-ties of university research as being methodical, being situated within a tradition of researchand being successful at moving that knowledge further. The effect is that Mike hassucceeded in hijacking Anna’s capital R research and re-formulating it as universityresearch. In contrast to university research, small r research is described as “finding out”something that “might be interesting”, but that is not new or methodical and so on. In thenext part of the conversation, and again through categorisation ascription, a form ofresearch that is not “big R” or university research becomes not just small r research, but“not research”.

Transcript 3 – Group 1

42 Mike And because often you hear high school kids saying43 I’m doing some research for my assignment and you ask44 oh what sort of research is that?45 And it turns out to be fact collecting or fact finding.

46 Anna That’s what they do call it in schools now.47 Yeah they call it research.

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48 Mike Yeah, they do. And I’d say well that’s not research49 well I don’t say that to them, but I try and lead them on to say well50 what did you learn from collecting those facts and comparing them51 and often that’s the end of the process52 is the collecting the facts and writing a small report.

In this sequence, high school kids’ research becomes the vehicle for categorising “factcollecting or fact finding” as “not research”. The extent of “collusion” is demonstrated byAnna pre-empting Mike’s comment that this is

not

research (line 48) by saying it is

called

research in schools now. What has been accomplished by this progressive categorisation ofresearch as either university or “other” is that fact finding and report writing becamedescribable not only as (not) university research, but as not research at all. What counts asresearch is something that comes later in the process, after the fact finding and report writ-ing, and something that is to be found only in university research. In this conversation, thisdescription does certain moral work in that it becomes not just a description of what countsas research, but a description of the kind of research that counts, which in this case isuniversity research.

Which Research Counts?

Baker (1997) suggested that when similar category-bound descriptions of a phenomenonappear in the conversations of different groups, the categories and their related discourses canbe taken as a display of common cultural knowledge. Finding the same category-bounddescriptions of research in the accounts of different supervisors suggests that such descriptionsarise from a store of common knowledge being drawn on in these conversations. Withoutengaging in the detailed sequential analysis of the production of category ascriptions in theother groups, it is possible to show the way the same discourses permeated the talk thatoccurred, sustained through similar categorisation work.

In group 2, for example, Rob contrasted research conducted by the professions withacademic research.

Transcript 4 – Group 2

1 Rob I mean, coming from the business area, and quite a lot of the students2 not mine particularly, in my area, but other business students in general3 come from out of work and quite a lot of them are part time4 and their assumption is, they use research in the general meaning5 of finding something out, I mean, research is used as a very broad term6 and it means just to find out some facts and figures7 to be able to produce a report on a particular topic against a timeline8 and against a budget and, in other words, satisfying or expediency is their world and

they9 assume that academic research is really, really the same

10 and unless that’s, one way or the other they have to discuss that11 and realise there is a difference then there’s the danger that they’re producing12 a statistical collection of facts and figures and then assuming that,13 if you like there’s no great difference between, you know,14 consultancy and research-and academic research.

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15 I think a lot of our students, even towards the end16 would have difficulty defining the difference between the two.

The lexical items used by Rob in his description bear a notable similarity to those used ingroup 1. Rob has argued that “finding something out”, “collecting facts and figures” and“producing a report” is what counts as research for business students who come from a worldwhere timelines, budgets and expediency comprise the backbone of their work. According toRob, students assumed there was no difference between consultancy and academic research,and it took them a long time to discover and define the difference. Notably, Rob did notvolunteer an explanation of that difference here, but in response to the interviewer asking if hecould define that difference himself, he replied in the following manner.

Transcript 5 – Group 2

19 Rob Yes yes. The way I start off is by saying that20 it’s finding an explanation for a phenomena21 and supporting that explanation with evidence22 producing an argument why your understanding23 your explanation of a phenomena is a sound one24 and producing the evidence to support your contention25 if you like

Later still, Rob distinguished between research and doing a project on the basis of theopportunities provided by research “to reflect and … start with a good conceptual under-standing”. Rob is arguing that it is the intellectual work of explaining, arguing and concep-tualising that makes research different. This construction of research was reflected inseveral of the other focus groups where academic research was described as a process oftheorising, of thinking differently, of developing “deep” insights into a phenomenon. Inanother group, a supervisor described students who came from “a PhD background” ashaving “one idea of the way in which research should be undertaken” while those who had“come from government” had “no idea really about how to do

proper

research” (my empha-sis). They were described as being unable to “understand conceptually …what the problemwas”. Such categorisations are quite circular in their effect and supportive of academic self-reproduction. Researchers from outside the university don’t do proper research becausethey are outside particular intellectual traditions with their accepted ways of theorising andconceptualising and in turn, they are outside those traditions because they are outsideuniversities.

Finally, in the fourth group, professionals and practitioners were constructed as problem-atic in ways that continued to perpetuate the theory/practice divide.

Transcript 6 – Group 4

1 Helen …What we’re facing is that in our school2 the nature of research education is different3 because predominantly people do not go honours degree, research degree4 right? They get their first degree, they go out and work and overwhelmingly5 the body of our research students are mid career professionals6 or even early career professionals who have work experience

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7 who come back to advance their understanding of what they’re doing8 to build, to wrap a research framework around that which is again why the9 ((names a Professional Doctorate))

10 emerged but we won’t go off into that.11 Sorry am I talking about the subjects you want me to talk about?

12 I No that’s alright. Yes, that’s fine.13 And Matthew, your students are more like, come straight through the system?

14 Matthew No my students are all mature ((talk over)) so we’ve got some of the problems15 and we’ve looked also at the degrees that we offer16 and practitioners in industry are not interested in research degrees17 they’re more interested in professional degrees18 and at ((overseas university)) I was involved in the doctor of ((names degree))19 which was a course work degree and at the end there was a project20 so it was very practitioner oriented and there was no research component.

((Later in the conversation))

21 Helen My original honours degree in ((names discipline))22 gave me fundamental ways of looking at research23 as distinct from considered opinion, reflection, discussion, reports, okay?

This is detailed and complex categorisation work that recognises the relevance of researchdegrees as problematic for “mid career or even early career professionals” and that simulta-neously constructs professionals as the problem because they are not “interested in researchdegrees”. On the one hand, professionals “come back to advance their understanding of whatthey’re doing” through research, but on the other hand they are more interested in profes-sional degrees than research degrees. The theory/practice binary is reproduced throughMatthew’s contrast of “practitioner oriented” project work with research. Furthermore, thepractitioner part of the pair is not only constituted as a problem but as a mutually recognis-able problem (“we’ve got some of the problems”). Thomson (2001) drew attention to thesecontradictions when she described the professional doctorate as “ambiguous practice”, withsuch contradictions likely to be actually experienced as tensions rather than neat oppositions.The categorisation work that sustains the theory/practice divide in these conversationsconstructs research students who come from industry, business, the government and from theprofessions as lacking in the knowledge, skills and interests required of “proper” researchers,which prompts us to consider the effects of such discourses on the processes of academic andresearcher identity formation.

As Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) argue, discourses are only able to exert power to theextent that they are integrated into actual social practices. The utterances of two students inseparate groups gives a glimpse of the way in which discourses that position students inunequal relations of power can be integrated into action in ways that perpetuate the “lack”underlying their student identities. One student gave the following description as the reasonfor undertaking a research degree.

I’ve come out of twenty-five years in the workforce and the reason I came into academia at the endof that experience was because I had burning questions in my mind that I wanted to ask.

In another group, a student gave this as a reason for undertaking academic research.

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I’ve got a problem in the workplace I was trying to resolve, so rather than come at it from an ad hocmanagement position without really understanding the issues, I decided to use the rigor of theacademic research project … to address the problem.

These utterances are mirror images of the discourses circulating in the supervisors’ conversa-tions. What they suggest is that for practitioners, burning questions and problems raised inthe workplace are best resolved in academia because those outside universities cannot “reallyunderstand” the issues. Practitioners are represented as acting in “ad hoc” rather thanrigorous ways. It is not hard to imagine the difficulties inherent in making research relevantfor the workplace if becoming a researcher involves students continually inserting themselvesinto such contested and unequal relations.

Implications for Supervisor Development

The discourses revealed in these conversations run counter to discourses emerging in the newknowledge economy, in particular those discourses which describe the demise of the univer-sity as the exclusive site of knowledge production (Delanty, 2001). They are also at odds withdiscourses surrounding the collaborative partnerships formed between universities, profes-sions and industries through the development of new professional research degrees (Brennan,Kenway, Thomson, & Zipin, 2002; Maxwell, Shanahan, & Green, 2001). From a pedagogicalpoint of view, the persistence of these discourses underscores the extent to which mid-careerresearch students are positioned in discourses that limit the legitimacy of their practical andprofessional ways of knowing and make it difficult for them to develop authoritativeresearcher identities with relevance for the workplace. The findings of this study suggest therewould be benefits for these students if supervisors were challenged to more rigorously andopenly interrogate the values and assumptions underpinning their conceptions of researchand to recognise the discursive effects of power and authority produced by such formulationsof knowledge.

Building on these insights, this research has broader implications for professional devel-opment with supervisors. Delamont, Atkinson and Parry (2000) have shown how thedoctoral experience for

all

students is a process of socialisation into discipline-specific formsof knowledge and ways of knowing that are to a large extent indeterminate and that consti-tute discourses of academic research (Brew, 2001b; Comber, 1999). Comber (1999)describes the process of becoming a researcher as a matter of learning to “work” thediscourses of academic research. The insights gained from this study suggest that supervi-sors also need to “work the discourses” of research if they are to effectively challenge theversions of “truth” claimed and naturalised in academic discourses. The analytic methodsused in this research show how categories are interpretive resources for both speakers andanalysts; they allow speakers to share inferences and they allow analysts to hear the assump-tions informing those inferences. They provide, for both speakers and analysts, a way ofhearing discourses in action. As Sacks (1995, p. 28) observed though, it is not possible to“sit and watch people as they are talking, and write down categories of what they’re doingas they’re doing it”. Collusion happens in the interactional dynamics of talk as meaning isshaped in and by the moment. In workshops, conversations will involve rich and ongoingcategorisation work that will shape the occasion yet tantalisingly elude efforts to specifydiscursive effects in the making.

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One possibility for resolving this dilemma is to perform conscious categorisation work withsupervisors by asking them to describe categories in common use. In this research, supervisorscommandeered other categories readily recognisable as common descriptive devices in thediscourses of research. For example, they described distinctions between quantitative andqualitative research, pure and applied research, international and non-international studentsand autonomous and dependent students and their descriptions performed considerablemoral work. Such categories can be located in both texts and talk and asking supervisors todescribe what constitutes these categories

for them

, opens for inspection the cultural knowl-edge stored in the categories. As binaries, relational pairs oversimplify a complex world, butthis research has shown how such devices are routinely constructed in language in ways thatinfer “lack” and perpetuate relations of power and authority. Analysing their descriptionsallows supervisors to hear the moral and political dimensions of the versions made availableand to anticipate the possible effects of such discourses on social relations and identities.

Explicit categorisation work can persuade supervisors to maintain a critical disposition inrelation to their own practice. Recommended models of supervisor development frequentlyhighlight the need for reflective practice in programs of adult professional development(Clegg, 2000; Pearson & Cryer, 2001; Pearson & Brew, 2002; Sutcliffe, 1999), informed bySchon’s well known concept of the reflective practitioner. At the heart of reflective practice isthe notion that professional knowledge “is in our action” (Schon, 1991, p. 49) andethnomethodology, in claiming the “seen but unnoticed” character of our actions (Garfinkel,1967, p. 2), suggests that “knowing” our own actions is no straightforward task. This researchhas contributed an explication of membership categorisation analysis, and a rationale for itsuse as a method whereby supervisors can engage in a critical and reflective knowing of theirown practice.

Note

1. In the transcripts, names are pseudonyms and “I” refers to the interviewer, who was not the author ofthis paper and not the same person in each group.

Note on Contributor

Dianne Bills PhD is a Lecturer in Professional Development (Research Supervision) in theFlexible Learning Centre at the University of South Australia. She facilitates professionaldevelopment for research supervisors and conducts institutional research into the experi-ences of research degree students and supervisors at the University of South Australia.She has a particular interest in the conduct of practitioner research and the experiences ofpractitioner researchers.

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