Constructivist Approach In Research

The paradigm of my inquiry is primarily qualitative. As a researcher I listened to informants at all levels both in the academia and the business sector in an attempt to build a picture based on their perception of the fundraising reality. For this I employed the constructivist approach in the sense used by Lincoln and Guba (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) by assembling a puzzle from the pieces presented by the subjects as understood by me as a researcher. 'Constructivism departs from the basic tenet that reality is socially constructed' (Robson 2002:27) and not ‘out there’ waiting to be ‘discovered’. The methodological assumption is that of an emerging research design where the categories are not pre-defined but rather identified during the research

Moreover, the researcher becomes the main data collection instrument (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) because it constructs the researched reality through the very interaction with what is researched. Lincoln and Guba write that “every act of observation influences what is seen” (1985:39). This approach places the researcher at the place of the research where it needs to be present to be able to understand first hand and draw its own conclusions. “The knower and the known are inseparable” (Lincoln and Guba1985:37). Researcher reflexivity is very important because it shapes the research findings from the research design stage all the way to data analysis and

The first one is related to the organizational cultures I was studying. At the onset of my field research I expected to be able to understand the cultures of the universities I studied without any difficulties. I am a graduate of a Romanian university, albeit 15 years prior to the study, I speak the language and was able to get all the linguistic subtleties and references of the data collected through interviews. Although I had been out of the country for more than 10 years I was constantly in touch with colleagues from Romanian universities. Moreover, I am a professional university administrator with an interest in organisational management and to a large extent understand how universities work. Despite (or potentially because) all these considerations I struggled to understand why processes that apparently were quite straightforward seemed to have a different outcome than I was expecting (such as the request for publicly available information) or why seemingly simple management decisions (such as the decision to invite corporations to take part in the Career Fair) took unexpected turns. At some point during field work I started to realize that the organizational culture was different from what I expected it to be, that while in principle I knew the meaning of university processes and procedures the reality seemed to be somewhat different, that the