ABSTRACT

Research methodology is drawn into the ambit of the agendas constructed by power elites as soon as it is limited to the puzzle-solving techniques deployed to bring about answers to elite defined problems. As a methodological principle it identifies the fields of conflict where freedoms and equalities are out of joint in a given ‘social reality’. Since all research methodologies that focus upon the world of affairs of people are the work of an applied politics, they align either with the practices that tame or with those that release the powers of activism in the pursuit of a desired vision of the ‘good society’. The multitude “necessarily thought of as a disorganized, differential, and powerful multiplicity” is dangerous precisely in its power of suspending organisation, that is, in particular, elite organisation. A fundamental course of action for the expression of relational powers is working together as ‘collaborators’ or ‘co-operators’.