How Researchers Understand, Construct, and Bound Context

Abstract

This chapter addresses the question of how actors (including researchers) understand, experience, and engage with context. It illuminates the process and elaborates on the challenges researchers face in understanding and bounding context in their work. It suggests liminality as a metaphor for how researchers can understand and bound context, as something to be studied in dynamic, multidirectional relationships of context and action. It illustrates this through reflections during a study of the integration of care in complex interdependent work settings, and proposes that the researcher’s role is that of boundary constructor, articulating and exploring the transitioning boundaries of the center and the periphery, and how they are continually and recursively reconstituted through a liminal space.