Positionality of Place: Rethinking Positionality in Human Resource Development Research

Abstract: Positionality statements have become increasingly popular in research articles. While positionality statements prompt the researcher to reflect on their situatedness within various cultural contexts, the same is not often done for the research site. This poster session introduces the concept of Positionality of Place: statements to describe the situatedness and intersectional aspects of the research site. We contend that this will bring appropriate attention to the complex, entangled position of research as part of local, regional, and global systems.
The idea of positionality of place came out of conversations during and following a session (Kuchinke et al., 2023) at AHRD’s 30th Annual International Research Conference in the Americas. One author’s work with posthumanist theories, specifically the work of Barad (2007), resonated with the other author’s work with indigeneity. The word indigenous is inextricably connected to the idea of place.
Particularly in Western social science, researchers tend to separate research sites and participants from their location, creating a fractured perspective. This is not surprising given the hyper individualism found in the West, in particular in the United States, as demonstrated in studies of cultural dimensions such as Hofstede et al. (2010) and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (2020) as well as the GLOBE studies (House et al., 2004) of culture and leadership. While some studies describe the research site, they often fall short in describing local context, instead treating the organization as a freestanding entity with little connection to its surroundings. Social science researchers are often trained to use detached, clinical language, but they are also trained to include relevant information about the site and participants when presenting findings. What we argue for is a more intentional approach to thinking and writing about locality in research. Just as researchers often include positionality statements about how their identities interact with and inform their research design and analysis, we believe research should also include statements that describe the intersectional character of a research site, i.e., Positionality of Place.
Posthumanist concepts offer lenses to consider the more-than-human elements that impact research (Li, 2023). Interesting new perspectives on human resource development (HRD) research can be revealed through the recognition that, just as humans impact things, things impact humans. Barad (2007) discussed the entanglement of human and non-human/more-than-human elements as intra-actions: a term that rejects the idea that humans are wholly separate from their environments as they are a part of that environment. Positionality of Place statements offer a way to rethink research through intra-activity.
In this poster session, the authors will introduce the concept of Positionality of Place and offer recommendations for including it in HRD research. Recommendations include incorporating an ecological perspective into research (Bateson, 1972; Nicolaides et al., In Press; Pendleton-Jullian & Brown, 2018a), asking research participants place-based questions, and utilizing thick description to describe the research site (Geertz 1973; Stake, 2010; Freeman, 2014). Rather than writing a positionality statement that isolates the researcher, Positionality of Place urges the researcher to think about their relationship to the research methods, participants, site, and the surrounding community. Through the concept of intra-action, Positionality of Place is a tool to complexify how HRD researchers think about their relationship within their research rather than thinking of themselves as apart from the research. New questions and new conclusions can be explored through recognizing that they, the researcher, are an integral part of the research and that the location of the research impacts research outcomes.