Paper short abstract:

We suggest a methodological distinction for qualitative research that integrates analytical spatialization and a pragmatism of concurrencies, as performed by mapping situations and coding textual sequencies. Starting from the dis/continuities of GT and SA, we propose methodological 'self'-awareness

Paper long abstract:

All methods make and happen in worlds, which are not necessarily the same. Pragmatism is relationalism, and thus a proto-methodology of social science. Its metholologies are outstandingly sensitive about identities, meaning, and practice in their relations. We contribute another focus and (meta-)methodological distinction to the discussion concerning the methodological dis/continuities between Grounded Theory and Situational Analysis, which do share a relational epistemology, even though their imaginations and (self-)interpretation may differ.

We suggest, in reference to Henri Bergson, to distinguish relationality in terms of: spatiality, temporality, linearity, and concurrency. This scheme goes beyond the distinction of a sequentialist textuality with Grounded Theory coding and multiperspectivism of mappings. Like sequentialized texts exhibit qualities of durée in practices of reading and a fragile linearity that can easily be scrambled, maps are works of concurrent relations, but in their spatialization still carves its differences from absent thirds. Bringing such 'différance' into play means to leave the grounds of writing and whatever a strict sense of methodology would dictate. We claim that this distinction deepens our understanding of each 'theory/method package', its operational level concerning practices, discourses, or phenomenological foundations of analytical perception and intelligibility themselves - sharpening epistemological and critical reflection and Meadian 'self'-awareness concerning constructive acts performed by research.