Understanding Research (18 page)

The mini self-evaluation exercise intimates what the pitfalls are when first confronting this particular element. Even if everyday use of the term or its prevalence as a self-contained homonymous chapter in dissertations appears to be nine-tenths of the law, it would be safe to say that there are certain things that readers, and examiners, are not looking for. In other words a literature review is

• not a set of book reviews where each author or book is handled in turn, treated equally and without reflection on where their work fits or does not fit your project, or vice versa; your ideas, central claims, vocabulary, and citations, following the order of author accordingly;
  
• not an overly reverential presentation of ideas, thinkers, or debates to the detriment of the other side of the story;
  
• not an over-dependence on one or several texts, certain sorts of philosophical exegeses excepted;
  
• not an unbalanced critique based on a
  strawman argument
  that misrepresents complex ideas for self-serving reasons;
  
• not an array of books or articles randomly picked without due consideration;
  
• not a list of publications dotted through the main text, as an after-thought, an exercise in name-dropping, or in lieu of argument. This tendency is often signalled by repeatedly bracketed big names/big ideas as opposed to a concerted engagement with them in substantive or thematic ways;
  
• not an over-reliance on large quotes or secondary sources – particularly common with the Big Names whose work has produced a substantial secondary literature in its own right; for example, Bourdieu, Foucault, Arendt, Machiavelli, Spivak, Popper, Kuhn, Adorno, de Beauvoir, Butler, inter alia;
  
• not a free-floating chapter or section that bears little relation to your stated aims and objectives, research question, theoretical framework, or methodology.
  

Where the theoretical and methodological literature intersect, and where they need to be treated separately, is often a major headache during the writing-up phase, particularly when word-restrictions are an issue or when the theory and the method sections start to go in different directions; not uncommon along the spectrum of absolute beginners to experienced researchers!

For this reason we need to bear in mind that references to your literature review encompass a process (searching and getting control of literatures) as well as a product (writing this up in a coherent way). Below are some practical rules of thumb.

With some sense of what literature reviews are not (supposed to end up as), let’s take a closer look at what we should strive for when searching the literature and writing literature reviews; as process and product.

First, some general rules of thumb for getting on with things:

1. No matter where you’re setting out on your research in geographical or disciplinary terms, one of your very first tasks is to access, and then get a grasp of the literature/s. Locate and collate, read and digest, then synthesize and critique it (in positive and negative terms) from the point of view of your topic, your research question. This is a two-way street as the more you read, the more focused and well-defined your research question will become (see
   Chapter 3
   ).
   
2. Remembering that in terms of writing up or presenting the mass of books and articles you’ve read, the UK system puts more emphasis on having this part done and dusted quite early on. In continental Europe this is also the case as a rule. However, it is also expected to be significantly reworked later on.
   
3. Sometimes this means it emerges in another form: interwoven into chapters or sections dealing with historical background, case-study description, the theory/ theoretical framework, and as noticed previously, in the presentation of your
   method. Whichever form and location the review takes in the final analysis, it is not advisable to introduce new ideas, thinkers, or themes towards the end of the project.
   
4. If you treat getting this overview of the literature/s as an integral part of your research as a verb (doing) and a noun (naming) you will be less inclined to see it as such a bugbear. At the end of the day you are expected to show the interconnection between your own thinking and research in a dialogue with extant research. In short, your study is not happening in a vacuum.
   
5. By the same token, neither is it entirely derivative. The trick is finding the balance between (wild) claims at originality and (overly) anxious attempts to be onside with everything you have read or been told to read. Hopefully the outcome will be that reading inspires you, rather than sends you into a slough of despondency (see M. Davies 2007: Introduction).
   
6. A crucial aspect of designing a research project entails getting a sense of what is out there, what has been done, and whether your idea and proposed method/s to get data, however defined, is viable. The literature search side helps you check that you’re not setting out to reinvent the wheel, gives you a sense of the lie of the land; sometimes referred to as knowing the ‘field’ or ‘fields’.
   
7. The point here is for you to broaden your horizons, have your assumptions challenged, allow you to put some of your more ambitious plans (or not so grandiose ones) better into perspective. The data-gathering that follows will be the better for this broader knowledge. In this respect we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
   7
   
8. At the very least you indicate that you’ve read and understood the main texts from the relevant classes you have taken (this is why courses have literature lists; they’re there to pave the way). This is why a strong emphasis is put on getting this part done early on, in both senses of the term: searching, gathering a pool of literature and then committing yourself in written form. The view here is that without this aspect well under your belt your research project will come unstuck, make no sense to others, and you could end up revealing your ignorance, not getting finished on time, or submitting a piece of work you are not happy with at all.
   
9. Even if you are a late-starter with this aspect of the project, or find that later on in the research you discover a key item – book, article, blog/s, online archive – that causes you to reconsider some of your basic ideas or working assumptions, this need not mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A revision of the initial literature review and editing will allow for these later discoveries to be integrated into earlier reading.
   
10. When writing up the final report, particularly when putting your research in these larger literature-based contexts, try to avoid over-citation to other people’s work. It is your voice and input that counts by this point in that readers are not there to read paragraph after paragraph, page after page of potted summaries of other literature. The ‘lit review’ section needs to be in proportion to your own work and words. This is why it is useful to consider the final presentation of this part of your research as the moment you put your project in a larger context, not just in terms of those whose work you choose to use, or need to acknowledge, but also those approaches you do not engage with, in full or in part. Examiners in Ph.D.
    defences may well ask you to explain why you do not engage with such and such school of thought, or thinker.
    

These rules of thumb need some breaking-down; first in terms of the process and second with respect to the product side of the coin.

For literature searches, and their emergence as your literature review, that are not based on the systematic approach covered above, we need to break things down to the process and the production side of things.