The backstage of an academic project

In 2011 I wrote about why I made my master, where I told all the backstage of the job. Recently, in 2022, I wrote prolegomena that describe the journey until the thesis. To those who suppose it is just academic work, I invite you to witness the personal transformation a thesis can cause. It happened to me. ??????

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PROLEGOMENA

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I inaugurate this research with a self-reflection, in the form of memorials, to participate my examiners and future readers in the motivations, interests, justifications and epistemic questions I came across while carrying out the research project.

Since my first contact with academic activity, I was already intuitive that science is neither neutral, timeless, nor universal.

When I did my master's thesis precisely ten years ago, I mentioned Feyerabend (2003), who said that the observation of the facts of everyday life is more based on opinions than on things. Therefore, subjectivity is inexorable when doing science. Understanding the researcher's trajectory helps to understand his work.

Almost a decade after the Master's experience, my subjectivist instinct has expanded and is now reinforced by the speech of Versiani (2005), who defends a dialogical subjectivity, explained in autobiographical narratives, as a way of recognising motivations, anxieties and choices of the paths that permeate the investigative activity of the researcher.

From the research just ended, I would include, in this experience of subjectivity, the mediation of things, yes of objects, as an integral part of the interactions that trigger the findings and elaborations that now recognise non-human agency as a way to understand reality.

I don't think the work I propose here has an autobiographical pretension. Still, I could succeed in making use of the life story and the controversies that generated some of the choices made, including the one to carry out this thesis.

Therefore, it follows the narrative of a story, my story, with socio-material and performative refinements, now incorporated into the worldview that I came to contemplate.

Working father, Catholic and pragmatic. Teacher, Protestant, Parnassian mother. I am the eldest of five siblings expected to follow in their father's footsteps. From his utilitarian perspective, he planned to make me an employee at one of the automobile companies in ABC Paulista. However, the maternal influence, which defended an encyclopedist culture, was striking.

Student life would prevail over the search for a professional occupation, which should only occur after completing the studies. Social life would be in the Protestant church, filled with classical music. I am a certified classical guitarist.

At the same time, I was often asked to get involved in the routine of a small sawmill that my father kept in the back of the house, as a hobby and as an income supplement.

I grew up in duality, an environment I considered ambiguous, conflicting and heterogeneous. It coexisted with the material and the immaterial, with the sacred and the profane, with popular and erudite culture, with the proletarian and the so-called bourgeois. I imagined that I had to make choices, but little by little, I realised that none of these influences would be uplifted.

As a child, I had a predilection for mathematics, but by the time I was ten years old, I didn't spend a day without reading the political sections of the newspaper “O Estado de S?o Paulo”.

I considered pursuing a bachelor's degree in political or social science as a teenager. But my father always reminded me, “this doesn't make money, my son!”.

I attended a public and technical school, carrying on with heterogeneity: I did not receive classical or humanist training, as it was inaccessible, nor did I receive an industrial apprenticeship course in mechanical training, as the grease was not for me. Instead, I found a hybrid: “data processing” without knowing precisely what that meant. I learned the languages of computing and the logic of information systems, but the experience was short-lived.

When choosing a higher education course, I elevated heterogeneity to potency: I took refuge in another hybrid that would satisfy personal desires and, supposedly, appeases paternal spirits: I went to study the legal sciences.

It went wrong, and it worked in that order.

My parents were terrified. They associated the profession with “dishonesty”. I would be introduced to crime, dealings, to crises. They unconsciously wanted to protect me from the zones of controversy that pervade the daily life of a legal practitioner. However, coming of age, they no longer had much control over my decisions, so they decided to support me with extreme suspicion. This catapulted me to the pursuit of excellence. I desired to prove that I had made the right choice.

In 1991, I entered the law degree course at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie and chose a demanding path but considered promising: a public career, more specifically in the magistracy. The internships at the State Attorney's Office, the Public Ministry of Labor and the School of Magistracy of the S?o Paulo Court of Justice endorsed my project. He performed well wherever he went. After completing my bachelor's degree, I signed up for public examinations and got some approvals in the early stages of the contests.

But life reminded me that my destiny was more heterogeneous.

My father had become an entrepreneur, and after the first business failure, he opened a new business, a small metallurgical company. He thought he should help me in my early career (and I, him). However, I was a young tendering lawyer, and he was a small machining entrepreneur.

My vulnerability, inexperience and economic dependence made me abandon my dream of being a magistracy and become a “do it all” in the family's small metal-mechanical company.

I didn't do it because of my request and tried to understand how to turn adversity into opportunity. I chose business administration as my focus for new knowledge. I wanted to make the family business grow. The plan was for me to prepare the company for sale and then take ownership of the results to resume my life in the law. I became a partner with my father.

And this time, the plan went right and wrong in that order.

After a few years, the company prospered and was sold in a very successful operation. However, that experience consecrated me for good in heterogeneity.

The lawyer, who never stopped working in law to make his father's business work, ended up in business school. So I became a Master in Business Administration, one of the areas of knowledge that perhaps best expressed my heterogeneous profile.

And here, there is an inflexion point. But first, remembering that I embraced my mother's profession of faith is worth remembering. And it was in the Presbyterian church that, at the age of 24, having been invited to teach theology classes in what Protestant culture calls “Bible Sunday school,” I discovered that I enjoyed teaching.

I returned to my professional trajectory and then put together some essential pieces: the then young protestant, locksmith's assistant, classical violinist, systems programmer, theology scholar, lawyer, quasi-judge, entrepreneur, manager of a small metallurgical company, master in the administration of companies, he decided he would be a teacher. But what subjects are you a teacher in?

It took much work to fit in. I felt as if I had walked an ambiguous, almost dysfunctional trajectory. I didn't see virtues in my experience.

But being hired by Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie shortly after completing my master's degree, I proposed teaching anything: business strategy, people management, business law, and entrepreneurship.

Despite the strangeness of the eclectic posture, which is not common in university culture, I realised that, in my teaching activities, I "varnished" the bookish deductive process of formally constituted disciplines, with some of my skills, audibly in the crossfire of organisational experience.

After all: I managed clients, employees, suppliers, banks, partners, technological obsolescence, cash flow and various laws and regulations that insisted on appropriating the value we painfully generated daily.

Years later, I was recommended by a friend to teach law school at an ABC school. There, I also accepted the flirtation of becoming an “all-rounder”.

I started teaching civil law, procedural law, labour law, business law, constitutional law, and administrative law, not to mention the introductory subjects.

The effort to master so many disciplines was Herculean. Still, it was pleasant to glimpse them in a heterogeneous construction process by which the facts, to which the norm is subsumed, would not come scholastically departmentalised.

I believed in the integrated view of phenomena for their better understanding, and I wanted to convey this notion to students. So I mixed everything I could and, without realising it, was housed there, once again, an unconscious notion of “hybridism”, of “association”, of the construction of my career and my own identity, amid conflicts or controversies.

I decided to launch one more intellectual challenge: achieve the Doctor in Business Administration title.

Initially, I chose the contractual theme as an index for my research, as the phenomenon is legal and economic, moves between different paradigms and has an elasticity of applicability that explains the interpersonal relationships of marriage, passing through the vertical limits of the theory of the firm, even reaching the relational stigma that has been part of Psychology & Law studies.

My unconscious was again leading me to a heterogeneous proposition without realising it.

But please remember the contradiction: I persisted in making plans despite everything I went through. It was as if I hadn't yet fully absorbed the notion of the social dynamic that permeated existence, which had already manifested itself in my experience.

New demands were presented to me at the beginning of the doctoral program. In a conversation with my advisor, Professor Dr Walter Bataglia, I accepted to participate in his research group, which is already underway, implying that my thesis would be developed in the pharmaceutical R&D (research and development) sector.

I went through many experiences, but nothing brought me back to this sector. However, I faced the new challenge relatively naturally, perhaps because of the heterogeneity already incorporated.

From a theoretical point of view, the first discussions came under the approach of the New Institutional Economics, whose framework was suitable for addressing the outsourcing processes of clinical research activities, which gave rise to the segments of the so-called CROs (Contract Research Organizations) of the pharmaceutical sector.

The concern was to understand the process of change that gave rise to the CROs and, after that, how the regulatory environment was changing, with significant reflections on the competitive position of this segment in Brazil.

Also, during the PhD program, I was introduced to Professor Harry Sminia, an expert in process approaches from Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, Scotland.

I realised that my theme was no longer the contract and that a deeper understanding of the regulatory dynamics of a complex sector with conflicting interests would require new approaches.

Under the influence of Professor Walter Bataglia, reinforced by the co-supervision of Professor Harry Sminia, I gradually got to know the different approaches to processes and their onto-epistemological implications.

I then came in contact with a fascinating article written by “House Silvers”. According to Cerretto and Domenico (2016), change can be understood according to a substantive view, whose process leads an entity from one state to another without changing its essence, which translates punctual or episodic phenomenon. However, in an ontologically procedural approach, the reality is explained by the continuous flow of relations that precede institutions.

Realising that empirical studies conducted under process-based ontologies would be underrepresented in organisational studies (LANGLEY; TSOUKAS, 2016), the next step was to realise the existence of research opportunities under the Actor Theory approach Network (ANT), developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law, which is based on a flow ontology, but with very peculiar assumptions and postulates.

The authors of ANT attracted my attention for three reasons: (a) an innovative view on the concept of society and the heterogeneity of their perspective on life resulting from it; (b) its approach to a new interaction between objectivity and subjectivity; (c) and by the idea of translation or translation as an explanatory process for the constitution of reality from the notion of controversies.

First, when Latour (1994) says that we are hybrids, urged within scientific institutions, little engineers, little philosophers, transported by wires or networks amidst confused stories, it seemed confluent with my own story. , whose constitution and trajectory took place through a process of “translation”, “mediation”, and “purification” of elements hitherto considered, by myself, dissociated. So the problem wouldn't be with me, but with the used glasses.

Second, the possibility of an association between humans and non-humans sounded like music to my ears (LATOUR, 1994; CALLON, 1986).

What seems strange to the sociologist of modernity shouldn't be to the jurist. Legal professionals always deal with the process of personification and de-personification of facts and objects.

We transform objects into people and vice versa, and we do it without constraints.

The subject-object dyad is marked by the attribution (or not) of rights and obligations to entities. If a set of assets can securitise rights and obligations, those assets become persons. If its attribution is removed, it becomes an object. A partnership contract, a legal act, becomes a person in the form of a partnership. A heritage complex is personified in the foundation. An unborn child's personality is conditioned to an uncertain future, while an animal is a moving thing, although it manifests its will. Everything, after all, is a convention, but with the force of agency to generate interactions and feed the flow of change.

Likewise, the "almost objects", such as laws and contracts, count countless results from manifestations of collective wills that detach themselves from their makers to assume their voices and raise relevant controversies, even against the interests that gave them cause.

The list goes on: what about living microorganisms capable of changing the course of human history, like what we have witnessed most contemporarily?

There is no way to deny the strength of the agency of these non-humans, whether they are alive, objects or quasi-objects.

Thirdly, translation, which represents the core of ANT's approach, translates exactly the transformation processes of the realities being pr through the confrontation of controversies or conflicts of interest underlying the positions of people, of things, hybrids and their associations.

I would venture to say that the actor-network theory may present itself as one of the promising approaches for understanding dynamic, complex and constantly evolving realities such as the one we intend to unveil in the processes involving the clinical research segment inserted in R&D activities (research and development) pharmaceutical.

I foresaw, in this approach, the possibility defended by ANT, of understanding, in a flow ontology, the process of change through interactions qualified by controversies (LATOUR, 2007), very present and intensified by the clashes waged by institutional actors in which they aggregated around the interests represented by patients, participants in clinical research, the scientific community, research sponsors and regulatory authorities in the Brazilian segment of clinical research.

But ANT may also lead us to recognise that eventually, even other actants (terminology adopted by ANT to designate actors), represented by microorganisms, genetics, biotechnology, laws, contracts and court decisions, are also protagonists of this dynamic.

Such recognition may make us sensitive to the perception of resignations about the very concept of health, disease, pharmacological intervention, the economic sector and the state regulation involved, which would even affect the understanding of clinical research as we know it in the current days.

This path has already been taken by Latour (1993) in his pursuits of the agency of microorganisms in the development of the food pasteurisation process, and this leads us to think that the actual dynamics to be faced will depend on the recognition of the association of hybrids, by which if it is accepted that the norm, the bacteria, the DNA of patients, the court decisions and the genetic sequencing software, are exerting relevant movements for the analytical understanding of a reality that is only possible to see in flux.

But the reflections throughout the research also produced concerns, which gave rise to the opportunity to formulate this thesis.

The big question to be faced is whether the notion of translation or translation, presented by ANT, raised by the controversies amid the association of actants, human and non-human, is sufficiently understood and if it can be operationalised from the use of a performative mentality, built from John Austin, which has no tradition in ANT, but which has been presented in total consonance with this approach, especially from the work of Michel Callon (1998, 2007).

Referring the reader to the introduction, in which the problematisation, objectives and postulates of the research will be opportunely presented and justified, I want to reinforce here the intention of highlighting the backstage of the enterprise, which developed and gradually gained socio-material and performative contours, whose report the experience legitimised a movement of interiorisation and naturalisation of heterogeneity, an explicit feature of my entire life trajectory.

Having so far only relieved myself of the externalisation and organisation of some dispersed ideas that enabled me to self-justify the effort to construct this work.