Advances in Contemplative Social Research

The book is about a new paradigm in social sciences, contemplative inquiry. It concerns theory, methods of research,and practical applications. Deep contemplation of a situation could be an epistemological choice for social scientists. It is a fundamentally different approach to research, whereby the investigator is researching not only the object, but also the situation of research and herself/himself in it. Contemplating is a dual way of approaching the truth. It does not mean that the researcher is mentally divided; on the contrary she/he wants to be complete and achieve the unity of being as a researcher-human being and as an element of the situation (psychosocial and historical). Contemplating enables researchers to see how the mind works and create images and reports from the field: What is available for the mind and what is silent or repressed because of the dominating rhetoric of description and rhetoric of feeling? Contemplation is not only analysis, it is also an ethical choice of stopping here and now to see the situation clearly and reporting it together with all th reservations that could result from the mindfully observed interaction of mind, self, and situation at one historical moment.

KRZYSZTOF T. KONECKI is chief of the Department of Sociology of Organization and Management at the University of Lodz, editor-in-chief of Qualitative Sociology Review, and president of the Polish Sociological Association. He served as a member of the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Asociation (ESA) and as the chair and vice-chair of the Qualitative Methods Network of ESA. He is a member of the Board of Qualitative Methods Research Network of the European Sociological Association and member of the board of the European Society for Study of Symbolic Interaction. He has published extensively on qualitative methods and grounded theory methodology and has done studies on symbolic interactions. His research interests include the sociology of organization and management, human and nonhuman animal interactions, qualitative methodology of social research, visual grounded theory, contemplative inquiry, and hatha yoga and contemporary forms of spirituality.