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In a current textbook on Social > Work Research the authors are very clear that anything not quantifiable, > following scientific method, is subjective, or a matter of intuitions, and so > unprofessional. It seems that in our push for professionalization in > composition, rhetoric, and English we have impaled ourselves on the horns of > an old dualistic, Cartesian dilemma. On the one hand, as professionals, > we have this ideal of objective, value-neutral advice about how to improve the > effectiveness and efficiency of the student's argument; on the other we > *know* and profess that writing ain't neutral, and neither is language--we're > always positioned and positioning. > > Maybe we need to cultivate an alternative to professionalism. For the record, there is lots of ethnographic and other qualitative (a.k.a., "subjective") research going on in social work and being taught in social work research methods courses--so this particular textbook may be a dinosaur. (Though there assuredly seem to be more non-extinct dinosaurs per capital in Academia than in most cultures.) Cf., Fran Davis' article in the feminist issue of INKSHED (1988?), which proposes an alternate structure for introducing a research report--one that is based on an alternative to the Cartesian conception of objectivity.