The Story So Far

Becker (1970) has commented on the "hierarchy of credibility regarding those to whom we tend to listen". This has general relevance to our research on schooling and school systems and specifically to our desire to listen to the teacher's voice.

In any system of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the highest group have the right to define the way things really are. In any organization, no matter what the rest of the organization chart shows, the arrows indicate the flow of information point up, thus demonstrating (at least formally) that those at the top have access to a more complete picture of what is going on than anyone else. Members of lower groups will have incomplete information and their view of reality will be partial and distorted in consequence. Therefore, from the point of view of a well socialized participant in the system, any tale told by those at the top intrinsically deserves to be regarded as the most credible account obtainable of the organizations' workings. (p. 126)

He provides a particular reason why accounts "from below" may be unwelcome:

officials usually have to lie. That is a gross way of putting it, but not inaccurate. Officials must lie because things are seldom as they ought to be. For a great variety of reasons, well-known to sociologists, institutions are refractory. They do not perform as society would like them to. Hospitals do not cure people; prisons do not rehabilitate prisoners; schools do not educate students. Since they are supposed to, officials develop ways both of denying the failure of the institution to perform as it should and explaining those failures which cannot be hidden. An account of an institution's operation from the point of view of subordinates therefore casts doubt on the official line and may possibly expose it as a lie. (p. 128)

For these reasons the academy normally accepts the "hierarchy of credibility": "we join officials and the man in the street in an unthinking acceptance of the hierarchy of credibility. We do not realize that there are sides to be taken and that we are taking one of them". Hence Becker argues that for the academic researcher:

The hierarchy of credibility is a feature of society whose existence we cannot deny, even if we disagree with its injunction to believe the man at the top. When we acquire sufficient sympathy with subordinates to see things from their perspective, we know that we are flying in the face of what "everyone knows". The knowledge gives us pause and cause us to share, however briefly, the doubt of our colleagues. (p. 129)

Research work, then, is seldom disinterested and prime interests at work are the powerful, Becker's "man at the top", and the academy itself. Acknowledgement of these interests becomes crucial when we conduct studies of teachers' stories; for the data generated and accounts rendered can easily be misused and abused by both powerful interest groups and by the academy. Middleton (1992) notes that "in schools people are constantly regulated and classified" but this surveillance extends to teachers themselves. (p. 20) Plainly studies of teachers' stories can be implicated in this process unless we are deeply watchful about who "owns" the data and who controls the accounts. If Becker is right that "officials lie" it is also plain that they might appropriate and misuse data about teachers' lives. Likewise, those in the academy might take information on teachers' lives and use it entirely for their own purposes.

Yet Becker reminds us that the terrain of research involves not only differentiated voices but stratified voices. It is important to remember that the politicians and bureaucrats who control schools are part of a stratified system where "those at the top have a more complete picture of what is going on than anyone else." It would be unfortunate if in studying teachers' stories, we ignored these contextual parameters which so substantially impinge upon and constantly restrict the teacher's life. It is, therefore, I think a crucial part of our ethical position as researchers that we do not "valorize the subjectivity of the powerless" in the name of telling "their story". This would be to merely record constrained consciousness - a profoundly conservative posture and one, as Denzin has noted, which no doubt explains the popularity of such work during the recent conservative political renaissance. In my view teachers' stories should, where possible, provide not only a "narrative of action", but also a history or genealogy of context. I say this in full knowledge that this opens up substantial dangers of changing the relationship between "story giver" and "research taker" and of tilting the balance of the relationship further towards the academy.