Research Frontiers and Border-Crossings: Methodology and the Knowledge Industry

Abstract

This chapter closes this volume by contextualising the preceding conversations about methodological choice and epistemology within the constraints and pres-sures researchers face as knowledge workers rather than as scholars. These con-straints can and do affect methodological choice and therefore methodological provenance and evolution. The chapter borrows the metaphor of the ‘knowledge frontier’ to both locate researchers in social work and education at a crossroads between servicing stakeholders and the academy, and to present the research exer-cise as an eternal frontier. To illustrate, a case study is presented inviting the reader to consider the social scientific approaches available, under what circum-stances one approach might be brought to bear over another, and the range of in-formation or data that might be collected and for whom, questioning the relation-ship between social complexity as a contemporary phenomenological condition for social science research, knowledge production and transdisciplinarity.