A meta-Analysis of Teaching and Learning

3.2Archer’s Social Realism

The methodological approach adopted for the purposes of this research is based on Archer’s Social Realism (1995,1996,1998). According to Archer (1995), examination of both structure and agency is central to any study of the social world. The theoretical tendency in sociology in both the structural and cultural domains has been to conflate or elide the ‘parts’ and the ‘people’. Archer argues against what she calls the ‘Fallacy of Conflation’ (1996:xv): both the conflation of structure and agency and of culture and agency. Her theory, she claims, is one which is ‘capable of linking “structure and agency” or “culture and agency”, rather than sinking the difference between the “parts” (organisational or ideational) and the “people” who hold the positions or ideas within them’ (1996:xiv).

For Archer, culture, structure and agency are viewed as ontologically separate categories, each with distinct properties and powers. In order to identify the interplay of categories, each has to be analysed separately. This insistence on separability involves an understanding that structure, culture and agency are ‘temporally distinguishable (1996:66), a concept that implies that historicity needs. to be taken into account in any analysis.

4Research design and methods

As already noted, the data for the research on which this report is based consisted of i) Self Evaluation Portfolios prepared by the five research-intensive universities not affected by mergers ii) analyses of data produced by the HEQC for audit purposes and iii) the Report of the Audit Panel for each institution.

A case study approach was adopted with each of the five institutions constituting a single case. The following template, based on the ontological and epistemological assumptions outlined above, was developed to guide the analysis of data for each case:

INSTITUTION
EMPIRICAL (Transitive)	Institutional Account
ACTUAL (Transitive)	Events Meetings, Workshops, Teaching Events etc etc.
REAL (Intransitive)	1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.	1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.	1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
	 Discourses	 Mechanisms	 Mechanisms
		1. 2. 3. 4. 5.	1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
	CULTURE	STRUCTURE	AGENCY

For each institution, the template describes the three layers of ontology (the empirical, the actual and the real) acknowledged by social and critical realists. Following Archer, (1995, 1996, 1998), culture, structure and agency are located separately at the level of the real although in reality they co-exist. Specific structures and corporate agents and individual actors are then listed. Emergent mechanisms associated with each of the domains of culture, structure and agency are then listed. For the domain of culture, mechanisms are identified as discourses defined (Kress, 1989:7) as:

... systematically organised sets of statements which give expression to the meanings and values of an institution. Beyond that, they define, describe and delimit what it is possible to say and not possible to say (and by extension – what it is possible to do or not to do) with respect to the area of concern of that institution, whether marginally or centrally.

The level of the actual allows for the identification of events at the institution which have emerged as a result of mechanisms exercised (or not exercised) at the level of the real. The level of the empirical then allows for the institutional account of itself.

For the purposes of the analysis, the term ‘structure’ was loosely defined as an entity such as a committee, a faculty, a working group and so on. A policy or plan emerging from a structure was then identified as a mechanism even though both committee and policy would ultimately constitute structures since a mechanism such as a policy ultimately becomes part of the institutional structure.

Two templates were completed for each institution – one providing an overall institutional level analysis and another focusing more specifically on teaching and learning.

The data which formed the basis of the analysis necessarily privileged some domains rather than others. An audit portfolio, for example, might contain many different ‘voices’ in the sense that various sections have been written by individual authors and have been brought together into a whole which is more or less coherent. Anyone reading the portfolio without ‘insider’ information is unlikely to be able to identify the individual voices with the result that the ‘institutional voice’ predominates. In these circumstances, it is difficult to identify individual actors and to associate those actors with mechanisms. The analysis only allowed for this association in rare cases.

Another problem in the use of the template relates to the distinction between agency and structure. A committee or a centre can be understood as a group of collective agents. However, it can also be understood as a structure. For the purpose of the analysis, the domain of structure was privileged and agency was only used to categorise powerful individuals (for example, the Vice Chancellor, Deans etc) or groups of individual such as a Senior Management Committee. There is no doubt that engagement with more data (including, for example, transcripts of interviews by the audit panel) in more depth would allow agency to be identified more thoroughly. As this report aims to show, however, analysis at the broad level which both time and data permitted provided illuminating and useful insights into teaching and learning at the five universities studied.

The research began by reading the data provided by the HEQC for each institutional case and by using the reading to complete two successive drafts of the templates. The templates were then used to build a study of each case by asking the following questions each one:

In the domain of CULTURE:

• 
  How does the institution construct itself? (i.e. What does it tell us about how it understands itself?)
  
• 
  How are academic staff members constructed?
  
• 
  What does the institution tell us about the need to assure and promote quality?
  
• 
  How is the student constructed? (i.e. Who does the institution understand the student to be?)
  
• 
  How is students’ learning constructed? (i.e. How does the institution understand students to learn?)
  
• 
  How does the institution understand teaching?
  

In the domain of STRUCTURE:

• 
  What structures has the institution established in order to assure and promote quality?
  
• 
  How do these structures relate to the construction of the institutional understandings of i) itself ii) teaching and learning and iii) of students in the domain of culture?
  

In the domain of AGENCY:

• 
  Who are the key agents related to teaching and learning?
  
• 
  How do these agents relate to the construction of institutional understandings i) itself ii) of teaching and learning and iii) of students in the domain of culture.
  

Answering these questions lead to the construction of each institutional case.

Once the five cases had been constructed, a secondary ‘cross-case’ analysis was performed to identify underlying features of the five universities.