delivered 2014 to Liverpool Planners

1. Study Skills :
Network methods
Nicola Headlam
21st Nov 2014

2. “Social research is the art
of getting elites
to tell you things that
they don’t want to tell you :
Everything else is just public relations*”

3. Today 11-1
i. Introduction
ii. Words
iii. Pictures
iv. SNA
v. Questions about Research Design
and Data collection

4. Dr Nicola M Headlam
@networknicola
nicolah@liv.ac.uk

5. Almost all empirical research into
governance is designed with the goal
of culling information about three
factors:
(1) the individuals who wield the
greatest influence over political
decisions;
(2) the nature of the organisational
resources these persons use to wield
influence;
and (3) the particular activities or
policies that were carried out over a
specific period of time.
(Gissendanner 2003)

6. researching the ongoing process of
institutional emergence is dirty
work…to unearth the real rules that
shape local political behaviour
(informal as well as formal, invisible
as well as visible) We need to talk to
the local government actors
themselves. We need to ask them
‘How are things done around here?’
‘why do you do x but not y?’ obtaining
information about rules-in-use
requires spending time at the site
and learning how to answer non-
threatening context-specific
questions about rule configurations”
(Lowndes, Pratchett et al. 2006)

7. “by the time the
anthropologist has got his
tent up the reality he went
out to explore has
changed” (Lash, 1995)

8. Social and political scientists have traditionally
conceived elites as those individuals ;
so placed within the structure that by their
decisions they modify the milieu of many other
men (Mill 1953, 112).
There are those who dispute the usefulness of the
term ‘elite’ arguing that
if the shift from urban managerialism to urban
entrepreneurialism is anything to
go by then elites can also include
local celebrities and business
barons from the private sector (Peck 1995 and
Harvey 1989)’ Rice, 2010 pp 71

9. Researching institutions of
governance and interviewing elite
personnel has long been a difficult
issue for social researchers. Even
before the emergence of relatively
fragmented and non-locally
accountable institutional structures,
research that sought to uncover
elites and identify influences over
decision making processes came up
against a series of barriers in terms
of access and accessibility. (Raco
1999 pp 274)

10. the issue of power was always and ever a consideration. Given the
situatedness of the hybrid elite actors within the blurred academic,
industrial and political fields, an interrogation of the relations of power
connecting the researcher, researched and the research findings
became a significant point of consideration.
Invariably, any attempt to map the researched–researcher relationship
inevitably centres on the question of power and in particular its
exploitative potential. This is because with elite interviewees the
relationship is inevitably asymmetrical regardless of the research
strategies deployed. The researcher is dependant on the cooperation of
a relatively small number of people with specialized knowledge,
[Desmond, 2008pp 265]

11. Co-producing research entails tussling with
the dialectic between unity and difference,
sovereignty and independence, the self
and the other. Co-producing research holds
the potential for creative coalitions but
also the possibility of the clash of
civilisations. Co-production is therefore in
inherehently political process which
requires continual negotiation” (Orr and
Bennett, 2010 pp 202)

25. Other key terms : Structural hole

27. Map 1

28. Map 2
IN
INF
BROREP
other

29. Map 3

31. +44 (0)151 795 2485
heseltine@liverpool.ac.uk
Twitter: @livuniheseltine
www.liv.ac.uk/heseltine-institute